Where the Universe Just Keeps On Getting Bigger

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A nice book about the universe and stuff in it. Well worth reading.

NdGT is a pretty good popularizer of astrophysics and sciences connected to it. His essays are light, generally, and have a very gentle learning curve. That makes sense; his whole persona is that of middle school science teacher with a dad-joke sense of humor, trying to reach bored kids with some profound knowledge. In writing as much as on a talk show, he tends to be jocular and upbeat, but his science still has weight to it. And once in a while, he turns out a pretty deep and affecting bit of prose that gives the whole thing more heft.

His essays are usually pretty straightforward--one on dark matter, another on dark energy, one on the reason big things tend to be round, one telling the history of the discovery of "light" above and below the visible spectrum, and so on. I found many of the essays to be largely filled with things I already knew pretty well, but invariably he adds something that is entirely new in my experience, so that I always found it rewarding and time well spent. Other essays were even more revelatory, adding a lot to my store of knowledge.

My point is that even though other science writers often lean more toward the "technical science for sciency readers" end of communication, and Tyson leans more toward the "make it accessible for a broad audience" end, it's still filled with good stuff worth reading. But he's capable of even more. In the final essay, he's talking about his wish for a future where all of us, especially global leaders, take a broader view of our place in the world, our responsibility to the rest of creation, and though it's about science, it's really about saving ourselves. The essay is a sobering effort, and starts with him recognizing the privilege that allows him to travel the world looking at celestial events:

When I pause and reflect on our expanding universe, with its galaxies hurtling away from one another, embedded within the ever-stretching, four-dimensional fabric of space and time, sometimes I forget that uncounted people walk this earth without food or shelter, and that children are disproportionately represented among them.

When I pore over the data that establish the mysterious presence of dark matter and dark energy throughout the universe, sometimes I forget that every day--every twenty-four-hour rotation of Earth--people kill and get killed in the name of someone else's conception of God, and that some people who do not kill in the name of God, kill in the name of needs or wants of political dogma...

His call for a broader way of seeing the world and our responsibilities toward it and its inhabitants, with us as stewards, isn't itself new, but placed in the context of not just earth but the full universe, with us a minute part, made up of elements forged in ancient stars, it's very affecting. He takes a big swing and I feel like he connected.

It's a little book, but I liked it, and I recommend it.

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Where Neil Schools Us on Some Stuff

Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries by Neil deGrasse Tyson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This has been my before-sleep short read for a few weeks. With forty-two short essays, many of them just 6 or 7 pages long, it's ideal for the sleepy brain. I liked it quite a bit. 4 stars.

These meditations on the big bang, on black holes, on the spaces between stars, and many other physics and astronomy questions are conversational little tidbits that don't break a lot of new ground (especially as I'm reading it 20 years after it was published), but I still found something in literally every essay that was new to me or made me think about something a new way. A scientifically literate reader will already know most of this, and I think I'm pretty well along on that scale, but there are still things he brings into each of his essays that inform me and amuse me and make the reading meaningful. The best fun in non-fiction like this is learning new things.

His voice comes through perfectly clear in the whole thing (which is a plus or minus, depending on the reader's take) and his tone is almost always light, joshing, and, IMO, pleasant. That's the right approach for this kind of popular science. It's not the deadly earnest, erudite tone of Richard Dawkins (who writes great books but is hardly tolerable in person--and has made himself disagreeable the same way JKR has). Nor is it the wide-ranging, surprising, and wandering musings of Stephen Jay Gould (who is greatly missed). Neil deGrasse Tyson is a very smart man in his own right, but he takes a different tack in media, including this book, and I think it's very successful. He wants to explain things to a broad audience in a way that entertains while it educates. He keeps the learning curve very gentle here, the cognitive demand relatively low, but that was his intention, and the way he makes it work may be his genius. In another's hands, this could be a much tougher and much less engaging read.

The only place the author gets a little sharp--deservedly so--and a little less charitable is when he's protecting science from fuzzy religious thought, like creation versus the big bang and similar topics. I think he's earned the right to be just as firm on the topic as he wants. And I don't think it detracts from his amiable, laughs-at-his-own-jokes tone that he gives us though almost every page.

If this fails to dazzle, it nevertheless amuses, and it's full of good science information. I learned a lot more than I would have guessed in these essays on familiar topics. Easy 4 star rating. If you're in the mood for non-fiction but want just bits here and there, just a chunk per day, this is a good choice to put on your bedstand. And if you're lucky like me, you'll find it at a little bookstore for a couple dollars. A steal.

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