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Re: Elements

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As for Ferris's credentials, I know they let him teach astronomy
at Berkeley, but does this make him an astronomer? After a quick
glance through Coming of Age, I can't find where he actually
explains the logic of element production in the early universe.
Does he?

dan
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See pp 270-282 where he does what I thought was a very
nice exposition of the nucleogenesis problem.
By the way, I thought that his character sketches were
incisive, accurate, and often very funny. I particularly enjoyed
his Gell-Mann quote (and I'm a Murray fan) "...I stood on the shoulders
of midgets."
Regards,
Jack

I just reread those pages and I still can't find the logic. There are
several unsubstantiated claims. On page 273, "by the time helium had
been synthesized, the primordial material . . . would have thinned
too much for further fusion reactions to take place." Then an
anecdote about Gamow's cartoon of Wigner dressed as a mountaineer
trying to jump across "mass five crevasse". Then, two pages later,
a credit to Opik and Salpeter for "working out the synthesis in
stars of atoms up through beryllium to carbon." That's it! No
explanation of how it works, or of why it works in stars but not
in the big bang, much less of why the early universe must have
expanded so fast. Nowhere does Ferris even point out that beryllium-8
is unstable. I'm not convinced that he understands it himself.
I much prefer Weinberg.

dan