The Big Splat, Or How Our Moon Came To Be

"It takes a certain amount of courage to step beyond one's day-to-day experiments and look at the big pictureaand the origin of the Moon is a 'big picture' question par excellence. Perhaps it makes sense that William Hartmann, one of the two scientists who unraveled the Moons biggest mystery, is not only a scientist but also a part-time artist and science fiction writer. It took someone with an artists eye and a fiction writers speculative temperament to see the big picture.

"This is a book about that big picture: the origin of the Moon, as interpreted by Hartmann and Alastair Cameron, the second patriarch of "The Big Splat," It is also about a doomed planet called Theia, and a familiar one called Earth that used to look vastly different from todays Earth. But, most of all, it is about a long lineage of intellectual voyagers who began exploring the Moon long before Neil Armstrong planted his boot into the lunar dust."
--From the Introduction

The first popular book to explain the dramatic theory behind the Moon's genesis

This lively science history relates one of the great recent breakthroughs in planetary astronomy-a successful theory of the birth of the Moon. Science journalist Dana Mackenzie traces the evolution of this theory, one little known outside the scientific community: a Mars-sized object collided with Earth some four billion years ago, and the remains of this colossal explosion-the Big Splat-came together to form the Moon. Beginning with notions of the Moon in ancient cosmologies, Mackenzie relates the fascinating history of lunar speculation, moving from Galileo and Kepler to George Darwin (son of Charles) and the Apollo astronauts, whose trips to the lunar surface helped solve one of the most enigmatic mysteries of the night sky: who hung the Moon?

Dana Mackenzie (Santa Cruz, CA) is a freelance science journalist. His articles have appeared in such magazines as Science, Discover, American Scientist, The Sciences, and New Scientist.