Listen free for 30 days

Listen with offer

Preview
  • The Big Splat

  • Or How Our Moon Came to Be
  • By: Dana Mackenzie
  • Narrated by: Kevin T. Collins
  • Length: 10 hrs and 30 mins
  • 3.8 out of 5 stars (6 ratings)

£0.00 for first 30 days

Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

The Big Splat

By: Dana Mackenzie
Narrated by: Kevin T. Collins
Try for £0.00

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £14.99

Buy Now for £14.99

Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.

Summary

It takes a certain amount of courage to step beyond one's day-to-day experiments and look at the big picture - and 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 Moon's biggest mystery, is not only a scientist but also a part-time artist and science fiction writer. It took someone with an artist's eye and a fiction writer's 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 today's 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.

©2003 Dana Mackenzie (P)2010 Audible, Inc.
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

Listeners also enjoyed...

Losing the Nobel Prize cover art
A Brief History of Black Holes cover art
All These Worlds Are Yours cover art
4th Rock from the Sun cover art
How to Speak Science cover art
Coming of Age in the Milky Way cover art
Mapping the Heavens cover art
Nature's Third Cycle cover art
Astronomy: Explore the Truth About Universe, Galaxies, Dark Matter and the History of Astronomy cover art
Dispatches from Planet 3 cover art
Astrophysics for People in a Hurry cover art
Why Does E=MC2 and Why Should We Care cover art
Welcome to the Universe cover art
The Story of Western Science cover art
Strange New Worlds cover art
Origins, Revised and Updated cover art

Critic reviews

"Mackenzie is a popular-science ace--magnetically readable, preternaturally clear, amazingly concise. Consider this the popular moon-science book of our times." (Booklist)
"Besides telling an interesting tale well and elucidating how science progresses, Mackenzie's book emphasizes the fact that impacts have been the primary creative and destructive process throughout the history of the Solar System." (Nature)

What listeners say about The Big Splat

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    3
  • 4 Stars
    1
  • 3 Stars
    1
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    1
Performance
  • 3.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    1
  • 4 Stars
    1
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    1
  • 1 Stars
    0
Story
  • 3.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    2
  • 4 Stars
    0
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    1

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Sort by:
Filter by:
  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Reflection Dummy, Reflection

On any given hot and Sunny sunday try to look on a surface that highly reflective.

That is all

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!