Neil deGrasse Tyson and Lindsey Nyx Walker
Subtitled “A Journey of Cosmic Discovery”
(National Geographic, Sep. 2023, 319pp, including 16pp acknowledgements, further reading, illustrations credits, and index.)
This is literally a heavier-than-usual book that is nevertheless a light-weight read (even if some of its subject matter isn’t light-weight itself). The coauthor is a senior producer and head writer at StarTalk, a podcast I see snippets of on Facebook but have never listened to regularly. The book is heavily illustrated, both with photographs and artist conceptions, and the subject matter is fairly basic, so that I could compare this on both counts to the Dawkins book I wrote up here last month.
On the other hand, the book features one of Tyson’s hobby horses, his attention to physics in movies and TV shoes. He’s gained the reputation of being a killjoy for pointing out how movies set in space repeatedly violate physics, which his detractors respond with “it’s just a movie!” (This is a key point in my as-yet-unpublished essay, concerning psychology and science fiction: it reveals something that audiences *prefer* shows to lie about the reality of the universe.)
Also by the way, this book is similar to an earlier Tyson book published by National Geographic, based on StarTalk, and written with a coauthor: Cosmic Queries, with James Trefil, from 2021. (Trefil is arguably a more prominent intellect, with a dozen or more solo books to his credit, than is Walker.)
This is a book I did *not* take notes on, since I read it on the sofa when I had a cold last month, so for today I will literally page through it one more time and compile the topics of each chapter. As I said, the topics are fairly basic, and break down into four big chapters.
The short introduction celebrates the James Webb Space Telescope.
Part 1: Leaving Earth. Starry nights, about early myths about flying, the troposphere and the weight of air, the barometer, early balloonists, Felix Baumgartner in 2012 reaching “the edge of space,” the current billionaire space race. From aircraft to rockets: rocket science, max q and the Challenger disaster, why baseballs curve, a helicopter on Mars. Aside on The Martian and its unrealistic dust storm. Aside about speed vs acceleration and what the Top Gun flyers should have been enthusiastic about. Newton, gravity, cannonballs, the Coriolis force. A list of spaceports around the world. What would happen if you were able to fall through the center of the Earth. Aside about the movie Ad Astra, and how the astronauts were depicted as floating weightlessly even though their ship was under constant acceleration. Rockets from Goddard; how “human computers” were women who did manual calculations, in the 1950s. How to attain orbit, and the types of orbits. How orbits can decay. How rockets work. The idea of space elevators, as in Clarke’s 1979 novel The Fountain of Paradise. How coming home from orbit entails friction, which we plan for by studying meteorites. And how from orbit we’re ready to launch into deep space.
Part 2: Touring the Sun’s Backyard. Humans have speculated about other worlds for millennia, but only since the 19th century have spectroscopy and other tools given us detailed knowledge of them. The sun, fusion, sunspots; solar flares; how the sun isn’t yellow, but white. The four rocky planets: Mercury and its retrograde motion. An aside about the mythical planet Vulcan. How Mercury is visited using gravity assisted slingshots. Aside about the “first science fiction story,” Kepler’s Somnium. Venus and its phases, its transits across the sun, how its climate is a lesson for Earth. How the moon was likely formed, and how its tides affect the Earth. Mars, and how its study led to Kepler’s laws of motion and the abandonment of the ancient notion that everything moved in perfect circles. How early observers imagined Martians and claimed to see canals. Ideas about terraforming Mars. Then the asteroid belt, with an aside about the nonsensical way The Empire Strikes Back depicted flight through an asteroid field. How to avoid a giant meteor heading for Earth. Then the gas giants. Jupiter with its red spot, and how it’s not really a failed star. Saturn and its rings. The moons of the outer planets. How Uranus was initially named George. Neptune. Pluto and Planet X, and how Pluto’s demotion from being a “planet” was a consequence of consistent classification of all the bodies that have been discovered in the solar system.
Part 3: Into Outer Space. Myths and stories have imagined what’s beyond the sky. Now we define the layers of the atmosphere: troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere, exosphere. Beyond the “Karman line” at 100 km above sea level is outer space. The higher up, the less atmospheric pressure, but there’s never complete nothingness. Light is both a wave and a particle, depending on which experiment you perform. The long-imaged aether was discredited. About the speed of light through different media, sound, whale songs. Gravity and the LaGrange points; the JWST is about L2. About shock waves, the Doppler effect, and how in Top Gun: Maverick Tom Cruise’s character ejects from his jet at Mach 10.5, and survives. The shock wave from an exploding star could have created our solar system. How stars die. How space explosions in sci-fi movies are nonsense, and how the Incredible Hulk somehow acquires additional mass. About the series of discoveries since the 1920s that demoted humanity from the center of creation: other galaxies, the expansion of the universe, prisms and spectra, spectral lines and how they enable measuring the speed of that expansion — and the elements the stars are made of. How Doppler and other techniques have enabled the discovery of thousands of exo-planets. Now the search for technosignatures. Traveling to the stars, and the idea of general starships. What would happen to Cpt Woody, in Mission to Mars, when he was jettisoned into space, compared to 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Part 4: To Infinity and Beyond. We’re left with a conception of a cosmos with a clear beginning but no end. Mythologies assumes beginnings. Einstein tweaked his equations match his intuition that the universe was constant and unchanging; later he changed his mind. The age of the earth grew from a few thousand years, based on the Bible, to millions (based on geology) then billions (based the discovery of radioactivity and the age of the sun) of years. How the two rival theories about the universe, big bang and steady state, were resolved, leading to an age for the universe of some 13.8by, with the big bang verified through detection of the cosmic background radiation in 1964. How since all space-time expands uniformly, there is no ‘edge,’ but there may be a lot beyond the limit of what we can see. Space and time define worldlines, bound together. These lead to observations of the past or future via gravitational waves. As for time travel, we can certainly head into the future. Hollywood’s visions of black holes include Interstellar. (With an aside about the “Tiffany problem” of assuming that name is modern when in fact it goes back centuries.) About Wells’ The Time Machine, and limits imposed by the speed of light. Aside about time travel and not taking into account the physical movement of the Earth and solar system. Thought experiments about spaceships near the speed of light. What hyperspace might look like. The idea of black holes. Aside about GPS. Speculation about ways to travel into the past, via wormholes (with discussion of the film Contact), warp drives, and tachyons, with an aside about the depiction of hyperdrive in Star Wars. Then speculation of causality and paradoxes, and quantum wormhole soups. Aside about Stephen Hawking’s party for time travelers, at which nobody showed up. Aside about The Terminator and the Hitler murder paradox. And speculation about the many worlds hypothesis, and free will. The journey continues.
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So, a perfectly decent book, but Tyson is more inspirational when speaking than he is in print, at least in most of his books. Granted, the coauthor here might well have done most of the writing. The best book of Tyson’s alone that I’ve read is Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization (reviewed here).
