I've finished the book, and I predict that it will soon become a must-have on the talk show circuit. Phil, gird your loins, and lay in a supply of puns and pithy bon mots, I think you're going to get your chance at Colbert. But, back to the OT.
Page 36, DFTS; it says a million Earths would be needed to fill the Sun's volume, which is a good swag since the Sun is a bit more than a hundred times the diameter. However, down the page, it says 300 Earths would fit inside Jupiter. That's true, but Jupiter has eleven times the diameter of the Earth, so more than four times that many would also fit. The
mass of Jupiter is about 300 times the mass of the Earth, maybe that figure slipped in there somehow.
Page 73, DFTS; it says "Using laws of physics established by the astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler in the seventeenth century, astronomers could determine the masses of the stars in binaries, ..." Determine masses? Shouldn't that be the laws of Newton?
Quibbles
Page 145, DFTS; in a footnote, it says "tidal force" is a misnomer, because it is "not a force, but a
change in force." I'm not clear what distinction is being made there.
Page 205, DFTS; describes the red giant Sun swollen to 100 times its present radius. It mentions that the gravity at the surface will be less than 1 percent of
Earth gravity.
Quote:
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the Sun's luminosity increases by 2,400 times. Any square inch of Sun will be blasting out 2,400 times as much radiation as it did before the Sun swelled up. This light has momentum that it can transfer to a particle on the surface, giving it an upward kick.
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The square inches are measured at the current radius, I guess, before and after. By the time it gets to the surface of the red giant, the radiation per square inch will be 1/10,000 of that, right? But, wouldn't luminosity be related to the surface?