Now this is just too funny.

I was reading this press release on an article about to appear in Nature:

Quote

Mass extinction comes every 62 million years, UC physicists discover
- David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor
Thursday, March 10, 2005

With surprising and mysterious regularity, life on Earth has flourished and vanished in cycles of mass extinction every 62 million years, say two UC Berkeley scientists who discovered the pattern after a painstaking computer study of fossil records going back for more than 500 million years.

and it immediately reminded me of a book I read about 15 years ago... "Nemesis", about a rogue star in our (unbeknownst until now) binary system. I wondered if the authors of this study were aware of the data presented in that book.

Then, I keep reading, until I see this paragraph:

Quote

Muller has long been known as an unconventional and imaginative physicist on the Berkeley campus and at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. It was he, for example, who suggested more than 20 years ago that an undiscovered faraway dwarf star -- which he named "Nemesis" -- was orbiting the sun and might have steered a huge asteroid into the collision with Earth that drove the dinosaurs to extinction.

"I've given up on Nemesis," Muller said this week, "but then I thought there might be two stars somewhere out there, but I've given them both up now."

It's the same guy!

Small world, I guess. Nice to see he's updating and upgrading his work. Good science never stagnates.

Anthony

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him think.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/11/2005 05:59PM by Anthony.