“In science, there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting.”
-Ernest Rutherford
If “all the rest is stamp collecting,” I wonder what Rutherford would think of astrobiology. Lunine’s comprehensive text Astrobiology underlines many of the problems waiting at the intersection of biology, chemistry, and physics, and finds there is an awful lot of this “stamp collecting” that we do not understand.
Rutherford’s presumptuous comment aside, Lunine covers an amazing amount of material for such a short book, at the expense of some detail. He lays the groundwork for an interdisciplinary study that is supported by a strong foundation of physics, chemistry, and biology. Students approaching this “metadiscipline” for the first time will walk away with a striking impression of the integrated nature of scientific inquiry. Physics, chemistry, and biology do, in fact, relate to one another. It is impossible to study the origin and fundamental nature of life...