Probe Books

In the third story of the series, Tom must protect an alien space probe recovered from Io, one of Jupiter's moons, from theft while seeking to communicate with the artificial intelligence within. The story sets up the later works in the series as the probe helps Tom develop a hyperdrive and thus launch space exploration well beyond the moons of Jupiter.

There are a lot of detailed figures and facts in some of the essays. They're easily skimmed. But read this book if the subject matters to you and particularly if you're planning to take a cruise through the Three Gorges or have already taken it. While on the cruise, one is told only of the glory and power of the dam, which is to say, given the party line, but one should know the lie behind the line and the potential tragedy that awaits, the tragedy of the River Dragon coming again.

I appreciated his step-by-step approach to clarify a process that can be challenging to understand. I also benefited from his detailed descriptions of how this kind of examination is supposed to be done. Fortunately, too, Dr. Ingermanson has a unique sense of humor which leavens a book that could otherwise be too dry to appreciate: the start is a laugh-out-loud point. But overall, the book is serious and well done, but readable and relatively easy to follow. However, there are parts that should be read slowly (or more than once) because the reasoning is not intuitively easy to grasp.

He builds his reasoning on a firm foundation, continuing to what I found to be an unavoidable conclusion. In addition, he makes sure that he's explained each topic/chapter before continuing. He discusses the other books on the subject courteously: when he disagrees with other authors' analytical methods, he never doubts their motives, but always gives them the benefit of the doubt. And when he disagrees with their conclusions, he does so courteously.

He pretty well debunks the code, and I appreciate his doing so. I find it hard to believe that God would bury information in His Word in this way. It would give the Bible a seek-and-find-puzzle aspect that would be beneath It. It's worth the effort to go to his website to find more information about this topic. He also lists other sites which are likely to be useful, too.

I looked forward to reading this book because I was interested in seeing a well-reasoned refutation of the bible code nonsense. It was not to be. Much better information is available for free on the net. I do not recommend this book at all.

First, the annoyingly casual writing style really put me off. But I can overlook that in a book if the content is useful.

Unfortunately, most of the book has nothing at all to do with a critique of the original bible code method. Instead, Ingermanson goes on and on about his entropy method of looking at the ELS phenomenon. This is irrelevant because the original bible code paper concerned statistical properties of related word pairs, and does not imply any necessity for individual ELSes to occur more frequently than expected. Therefore, if one looks at some pro-code sites, one will see Ingermanson's book dismissed as irrelevant, which it mostly is.

Of course, these same sites either ignore the really powerful critiques, or indulge in personal attacks against the critics. But Ingermanson's argument is so lightweight, the zealots aren't even worried about him.

Eventually, he does get around to discussing the famous rabbis experiment. He incorrectly accepts the math of the original code paper as valid - apparently he hasn't studied some of the papers, freely available on the net, which point out how the original paper didn't even present a proper statistical experiment. It is disappointing and surprising that Ingermanson wastes so much time on entropy and then totally drops the ball when it comes to analyzing the original paper.

Of course, Ingermanson decides the bible code doesn't exist, because of his irrelevant entropy argument. His response to the rabbis experiment is to state that the data must have been tuned. He should have simply analyzed the original paper and explained how the statistics were flawed. This would have been much more useful in debunking the bible codes. Stating that the original data must have been tuned because of an irrelevant entropy calculation is very weak and only plays into the hands of the zealots.

My advice to readers who seek the truth? Don't bother with this book. The whole codes business is debunked very successfully on the net, for free!

On a non-scientific note, Ingermanson ignores one of the central issues for the Torah, which is why are we even paying attention any more to this violent, primitive book which advocates mass murder? Why does he revere this book? He doesn't explain.

Conclusion: this book is an ineffective rebuttal of the codes from someone who has some science degrees but who is also religious. Perhaps this explains why he does not really tackle the problem head-on?

It's about faith that is playing a big part of this book... However, it reveals some interesting bits and pieces of info that can't be found on major media...

The book is arranged chronologically and begins with the Ranger program, which was intended to send probes crashing into our own moon. This may be a program readers under 30 or so will have very little knowledge of (this reviewer is slightly older than that and still had little working knowledge of it). This portion of the book is most effective in its descriptions of the personalities involved (again, most of whom most people have never heard of) and the long, tedious, error-prone process by which these things got off the ground and to their eventual destination. The descriptions of the various problems that caused the first Rangers to fail is enlightening and shows how difficult spaceflight was (and is) even when the mission is fairly simple. Also of particular interest is the effects of failure on programs and personnel; recent events regarding the shuttle fleet show that constant vigilance on quality and safety issues are a recurring, probably an intrinsic, problem within NASA and really any organization.

I would have liked more discussion on the followup Surveyor missions, but from that point focus shifts outwards to the outer planets, and Mars and Venus. The Voyager program is where the book hits its stride, describing the inception of the program and the tradeoffs that had to be made within congressional budget constraints. Also fascinating is the explanation of how these things are navigated through space a billion miles away, a tedious job that most people don't think about. It is sure to increase our respect for the accomplishment of flying a small, barely-powered spacecraft to within a few thousands of miles away from a moon from over a billion miles away. It was truly an extraordinary accomplishment.

The later missions, Casini and Galileo, are probably more familiar to most readers so the novelty somewhat wears off at this point. There is still a good deal of useful information, much of which did not make it into the general news media so it is worth reading for this reason.

The great strength of the book is its descriptions of the spacecraft systems themselves and the personalities that built and flew them. The instruments, how they worked (or didn't), and the myriad of small things that had to go exactly right for the mission to succeed makes this book an excellent read for the technologically interested. Just as remarkable are the systems that didn't work and the ways the engineers and flight controllers worked around them. Less effective, though necessary of course, are the scientific examinations of the moons themselves and what was learned about them. However, this is a minor quibble and Kluger handles these issues effectively, providing enough detail for context but not getting bogged down in planetary detail. All in all, definitely a worthwhile read if you are at all interested in this aspect of NASA's history of unmanned spaceflight.

In feel, I think it comes closest to "The Terminal Man," by Crichton. A number of different sciences and technologies get to play their parts, most (but not all) showing that the author knows what he is talking about. Weakest is the non-technical, office-political axis of the story. The reader may feel this dimension lacks the same first-hand contact the others do, for its author.

Regardless, it's a good book with some neat ideas and a few good twists, set in the Very Near Future (an era that is, IMHO, underused in fiction). If like Crichton, or books like, "Oath of Fealty," you'll probably enjoy this one.