The Big Splash: A Scientific Discovery That Revolutionizes the Way We
View the Origin of Life, the Water We Drink, the Death of the Dinosaurs,
the Creation of the Oceans, the Nature of the Cosmos, and the Very Future
of the Earth Itself by Dr Louis A Frank with Patrick Huyghe, Birch Lane
Press*, pp 255, $21.95 hbk.
Louis Frank, a space physicist at the University of Iowa, believes that
20 comets, each the size of a house, are plummeting into the Earth’s atmosphere
every minute, and that over the course of Earth history the water from these
snowballs, up to 13 meters in diameter, has gradually filled the oceans.
Most of Frank’s peers did not believe him when he first proposed this theory
four years ago and do not believe him now. With the help of Patrick Huyghe,
a science writer, Frank has written a highly readable, rather bitter, and
entertaining account of his side of the controversy.
Huyghe has done a good job of allowing the spirit of the man to come
through; as anyone who has interviewed him can attest, the voice is echt
Frank. It is the voice of a man who is weary of having his brilliance scorned,
but who carries on out of noblesse oblige. ‘I had, of course, been tempted
not to publish these results,’ he writes. ‘ .. I did not need the aggravation
.. On the other hand, I thought of all the scientists from Copernicus to
Einstein who had come forward with seemingly outlandish but revolutionary
Even in childhood, it seems, Frank was ostracised: by teachers who banished
him ‘because I depressed the students by my performance,’ and by the poor
depressed students themselves. Now, ostracised again by his fellow scientists,
Frank adopts the familiar tone of the beleagured maverick, praising those
who agree with him, questioning the motives and the gumption of those who
He spends a lot of this book trying to show why the various claims that
small comets cannot exist are wrong. To this layman, much of what he says
on that score sounds convincing. Frank explains, for instance, why we should
not expect to see his comets without making a serious effort (20 comets
a minute, visible for only a couple of seconds each, is not so many when
they are spread over the whole face of the Earth); or why seismometers left
on the moon by the Apollo astronauts, would not register the impact of a
small comet (a fluffy snowball will not generate much of a moonquake).
The evidence that the small comets do exist, however, is not overwhelming.
Frank often sounds as if he has one in his laboratory, lapsing into the
indicative: ‘My small comets .. are snowy on the inside and surrounded
by a protective crust’, when the subjunctive would be more appropriate.
And he tailors his comets carefully. Although they have a dark, tar-like
crust, for example, like Halley’s Comet, unlike Halley they are not very
dusty (or else we certainly would have seen them burning up in the atmosphere).
What Frank has really got, though, are not tar-and-snow comets but ‘observations
made at the limits of present day technology’.
The original and still the most important observations are individual
dark pixels on satellite images of Earth’s upper atmosphere, made at ultraviolet
wavelengths. Frank says those dark spots are clouds of water vapour that
absorb ultraviolet generated by the breakup of small comets. The book also
includes what purport to be photographs of the comets streaking by Earth
– tiny streaks, barely visible. They are unlikely to convince you.
Most people have been sceptical, and they have let Frank know rather
forcefully. Science is a savage little game, he writes. After reading his
stimulating but irritating book, I suspect some of the savagery has been
provoked. But the evidence he presents, while not enough to convince, and
surely not enough to ‘revolutionise the way we view .. the nature of the
cosmos’, does seem to merit a more serious effort at confirmation or refutation.
It is only rational to await more conclusive proof before anointing Frank
the next Copernicus. On the other hand, it seems only fair to keep an open
mind, for such proof may yet come – in which case Frank, in spite of being
tiresome at times, will have made a discovery of the first water.
*600 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10022.
Robert Kunzig is a senior editor at Discover magazine.