Unmasking Europa: The Search for Life on Jupiter's Ocean Moon [Hardcover]

This was a very frustrating book to read. It has one very good narrative and one very bad.

The first narrative is an elegant and convincing set of arguments for the author's view that Europa has a shell of thin ice riding on a liquid water ocean. For example Greenberg's explanation of tidal forces and the orbital mechanics of the Jovian moons is clear, eloquent and a beautiful piece of science writing.

Unfortunately this book has second narrative that is distracting and frustrating.
Greenberg commits half of his time complaining of being marginalized by his peers, and having to fight to prove his ideas about Europa. However, when he discusses the competing ideas he is so condescending and dismissive that he comes across as a tedious self-righteous whiner.

The book is full of sarcastic use of quotes, idiotic statements like "He is now a Jesuit brother, so he is reasonably credible", and references to other scientists on the team as the "Galileo Regime", the "thick-ice clique", riding on the "thick-ice bandwagon", and adhering to the "party line".

When talking about himself though he points out with satisfaction that his students honored "their thesis advisor" by naming a fracture after him and has the gall to compare himself to Galileo (although he quickly denies that this is what he is doing).

Chapter 14 (Thick vs. Thin), what should have been the climax of the book and the summary of Greenberg's arguments for a thin-ice crust, is completely unreadable and I had to skip most of it or just give up on the book.

I am sure that most lay people (the stated target audience for this book) including me are eager to root for the thin-ice model of Europa, because it makes the possibility of life existing there a lot more likely. Regrettably, Greenberg, by virtue of bad writing and very poor editing does his best to turn everyone away, and I suggest that you should find another book about Europa.

I had just finished the book "Titan Unveiled: Saturn's Mysterious Moon Explored" and really really appreciated its content, quality, and the author's style. So I went for another book about a gas-giant moon - and ended up with Unmasking Europa.

Clearly, the author is carrying around some huge emotional baggage and it comes out literally on every single page. The science is buried in the defensive attitude.
I could not complete this short book - it was too saturated with the author's dissatisfaction with other scientists and the space community. Disappointed.

Unmasking Europa: The Search for Life on Jupiter's Ocean Moon by Richard Greenberg is the exploration of one of the more interesting planetary bodies of our solar system ... Europa, a moon of Jupiter, as well as one of the more interesting episodes in the politics of science.

Europa is the sixth moon of Jupiter, and is almost the size of our Moon. But get this: Europa has a thin Oxygen atmosphere, and is covered with water. This makes it a very likely place for life to evolve.

Being so far from the sun, and having a very thin atmosphere (and some other considerations) means that Europa does not receive enough solar energy to be wrmed like the earth is. But, being so close to massive Jupiter, tidal energy does in fact heat the planet up, and the thermodynamics of this tide-powered planet are complex and fascinating. In short, Europa's ocean is probably often liquid but usually covered with ice, but the ice breaks up, water comes flying out, all sorts of complex interesting things happen depending on conditions.

Greenberg's book represents a detailed chronicle of the exploration of Europa by Voyager and Galileo, and provides convincing evidence that his particular model (the semi-liquid, as opposed to the it's always frozen, model) of Eruopa's surface structure is probably right.

The book is well written, in fact, I found it riveting.

Greenberg, however, did not come to the conclusions he came to, or carry out the research he did with NASA without significant cost. He makes the point in Unmasking... that "Big Science" is a very flawed enterprise, and he provides quite a bit of discussion of conflict surrounding the research program.

Frankly, I think this could have been two books: One just on Europa, which would have been quite interesting, and one on the politics of big science. But this is how the author chose to do it, and he was the guy in the trenches...

I also have the sense that the writing of this book may have been a necessary cathartic experience for Geenberg. This sense, assuming that this is not just something I was imagining, makes the book a little more interesting. There are points where you can smell the politics. Also, I've noticed that many non-scientist readers of science books enjoy the personal side of the story, so I suspect this book will be widely enjoyed.

To give you a flavor, here is an excerpt from the publisher's overview of the book:

"The book also provides unique insights into how "big science" gets done today, and it is not always a pretty picture. From his perspective as a Professor of Planetary Sciences at the University of Arizona, and a quarter-century-long membership on the Imaging Team for the Galileo space mission, Greenberg describes how personal agendas (including his own) and political maneuvering (in which he received an education by fire) determined a lot about the funding, staffing, and even the direction of research about Europa.

While he is satisfied that his team's work is now, finally, receiving fair consideration and even respect, Greenberg comes away from his decades-long experience feeling that something is fundamentally wrong with the scientific enterprise as a whole because it routinely punishes innovation, risk-taking thought, and a willingness to simply let the evidence lead where it may. In today's scientific culture, with its careerist pressures and peer-reviewed propriety, Greenberg believes, astute scientists (and sadly many of our youngest and brightest scientists) quickly realize that the most rewarding research strategy is to stay within the mainstream--a tendency that by its very nature is at odds with the ideals of scientific investigation and thought."

This review also appears in my blog:
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