Alex Telander's Reviews > Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries

DEATH BY BLACK HOLE AND OTHER COSMIC QUANDARIES BY NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: An astrophysicist for the American Museum of Natural History, director of the world famous Hayden Planetarium, and columnist for Natural History magazine, Neil DeGrasse Tyson brings to the non-scientific world the ideal book for those fascinated with space, the cosmos, black holes, and all the questions and wonders therein. Death by Black Hole is the perfect book for the reader who wants answers to questions about the universe in a simple and clearly defined way so that even if they know next to nothing about science and it’s jargon, Tyson makes it easily understandable.

While I was hoping for something a little more in depth in the style of Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos or Lee Smolin’s The Trouble With Physics, Death by Black Hole nevertheless provides quick and simple answers to many questions everyday readers without a science background have about physics, the universe, space, and most matters dealing with the cosmos. The book is a selection of his columns in Natural History that are organized in a somewhat textbook fashion. Tyson starts with the idea of science and nature in its basic form, how humanity views Earth, the solar system, the universe. Along with this discussion, Tyson also gives minor history lessons on the development of different ideas in physics and astronomy, what people came up with what big ideas and how the progression led to the development of the big theories of our current time with string theory and relativity. Going on from here, Death by Black Hole address the crucial steps that led to the formation of the universe and its development over the many billions and billions of years, again explaining how it is that scientists know what they do and what instruments were used, as well as the history of who invented and used said instruments.

It is then that Tyson finally turns to the subject matter of the title of the book in the section “When the Universe Turns Bad: All the Ways the Cosmos Wants to Kill Us.” Here he addresses the complex and still relatively unknown subjects of chaos theory, dark matter (which constitutes over 90% of all matter in the universe, while we still know next to nothing about it), and finally black holes. Tyson takes the reader on a hypothetical journey with what would happen if one were to be sucked into a black hole and how as they approached the event horizon, they would become stretched until the elasticity point of their skin was surpassed and the body would be torn into thousands then millions of little pieces.

With many questions now answered, in the next section Tyson discusses how science is viewed by the media, Hollywood, and people around the world in general. The final section addresses the concept of science and religion, again taking the reader on a historic journey through the development of first religion, then science, and the struggle that has ensued for centuries. It is the perfect end to a book on science, as Tyson lectures the importance of supporting fact and reality in a time when there are many who believe more in faith, even when all the evidence is to the contrary.

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