Neil deGrasse Tyson

If this book accomplishes anything, it will make you long for the day when scientists become politicians, or at least that politicians become scientifically literate. Yes, I’m aware that adopting a rational, scientific approach to problems will not eliminate political controversy, but the debate around these heated political issues stands in need of a desperate infusion of more objective, rigorous thinking. Or do we still want a reality TV star who couldn't pass a middle-school science show more quiz framing the agenda?

This idea that scientists are politically naive—as if our current politicians are having sophisticated debates on policy issues—is laughable. Of course, there’s nothing special about a scientist. They’re only human like the rest of us. But there is something special about science itself, which is the best method humanity has yet devised to discover truths about how the world works and our place within it. Might we then want to draw some inspiration from it when debating key political, economic, and social issues?

This book will show you what that alternate, saner reality might look like. By adopting a “cosmic perspective”—by viewing Earth from afar and without the artificial borders and boundaries we tend to impose on everyone and everything—we can gain some clarity surrounding issues relating to religion, race, gender, tribalism, polarization, and equality. The idea of aliens visiting Earth and noting how trivially divisive we are is a recurrent theme throughout the book.

I’ve always admired Tyson’s perspective on these topics. In a particularly entertaining chapter, he shows us how easy it is to be racist by cherry-picking traits in white people that more closely resemble, compared to black people, the traits of chimpanzees. Of course, this is all absurd, but that’s exactly the point; there is so much individual variation among a plethora of traits that it never makes sense to judge any single individual by group averages. The only thing that this will ever accomplish is the suppression of intelligence and potential.

Here’s how Tyson puts it:

“When I imagine what I’m capable of, I don’t reference the professions of ancestors reported to me in a genealogy kit. Instead, I look to all humans who have ever lived. We are one family. We are one race. The human race. Although I rather think we’re all just next of kin.”

A few paragraphs later, Tyson continues:

“Do we recognize, highlight, and embrace diversity? Or do we aspire not to notice it at all? Imagine if race, gender expression, and ethnicity were as irrelevant to our judgment of people as whether they wear glasses, what brand of toothpaste they use, or whether they prefer waffles over pancakes.”

This perspective, the cosmic perspective, is that to which we should all aspire. Of course there will always be disagreements—would we want it any other way in a functioning democracy—but the degree to which we can frame our opinions based on facts and reason rather than emotion and bias is the degree to which we can build a better, more peaceful, more tolerant, and more equal society.

The ultimate message of the book is this: Regardless of race, gender, religion, or socioeconomic status, when viewed from a cosmic perspective, we’re all essentially indistinguishable, part of a single race—the human race. Additionally, we’ve all been endowed with reason to discover this fact, and to cast aside the anti-intellectual bigotry that seeks to keep us divided. show less

This is a very fun read for all you science nerds... not only being clear and humorous but wide-ranging and careful to build up a number of those necessary building blocks of knowledge but doing it precisely in order to slam you with the good stuff later.

Like how you'd DIE IN A BLACK HOLE... :)

To belabor the obvious by the title. :)

Seriously, this book gives us a ton of great ways to die and not just by black hole. I really appreciated that. :)

I'd characterize this book as an easy to show more intermediate stage science book that's very far from being dull and it has a minimum of equations. I'm sure everyone has heard of thermodynamics and E=MC squared and Drake's equation, after all, but what really thrilled me about this was the truly wide array of subjects and Tyson's conversational tone.

You can tell he is still a very, very good science teacher. :)

I can almost hear him say, "Let's throw out the crap, folks, let's dive right into the good stuff." And he does, ranging from the Big Bang to the Heat Death, kinds of possible life on planets, the building blocks we need to understand science, including a great "stick" analogy for understanding the universe without computers, and he even gets into a bit of politics and religion because let's face it: it's a hot discussion item. But thankfully, it's only there as an afterthought.

I wanted science and I got science, exploring the planets, the sun, even quasars, and especially Black Holes. That's the yummy stuff, after all.

10/10 Black Holes agree! Nom nom nom nom nom.

I totally recommend this for both laymen and the intelligently curious and for anyone else who just likes a bit of the good (science) life. It really, really helps that Tyson's a great writer and clear as glass. The light passes right through it without slowing down at all! Can you believe it? show less

A book for the modern person, apparently. Someone too busy, distracted, spiritually concussed, or algorithmically mauled to sit still long enough and ask the old questions properly.

Where did we come from?

What is all this?

Why does anything exist instead of nothing?

And why, after learning the universe is roughly 13.8 billion years old, expanding, indifferent, violent, beautiful, and mostly made of things we cannot even properly see, do I still get upset about ex-girlfriends?

That’s the trick show more of this book.

It compresses the cosmos without making it feel cheap. Tyson takes dark matter, dark energy, the Big Bang, atoms, galaxies, gravity, light, and our tiny little ape-brained placed inside the whole cathedral of it, and delivers everything with enough clarity that you don’t need a PhD, but enough weight that you still feel the floor drop out beneath you.

It is not a deep technical dive. It is a doorway labeled curiosity.

A reminder that we are not the centre. Not even close. Not the point, not the crown, not the grand final answer. We are temporary arrangements of cosmic debris walking around with opinions, debts, passwords, childhood wounds, and the astonishing arrogance to think the universe should explain itself on our schedule.

This is a sharp, accessible, beautifully paced book for anyone who wants to feel intellectually awake again without being buried alive in equations.

Read it when your problems feel enormous.

Then look up. They still matter.

Just not in the way you thought. show less

There are two ways to read Neil deGrasse Tyson’s latest book, To Infinity and Beyond: A Journey of Cosmic Discovery. The first is as an interesting assortment of facts and trivia concerning everything you may have wanted to know about the earth’s atmosphere, space travel, the solar system, and what lies beyond our tiny corner of the universe, including distant galaxies, trillions of planets, black holes, and the possibility of multiple universes.

Along the way, you’ll learn show more counterintuitive scientific facts, where and how Hollywood gets its physics wrong, and what would actually happen to you if you fell into a tunnel through the center of the earth from one side to the other. You’ll also learn that Apollo 11 was not launched directly into space, but flew around the earth a few times before heading to the moon; that the sun is white, not yellow; and why, as you ascend closer to the sun in our atmosphere, the temperature drops instead of rising.

As always, Tyson (and Walker) present this information with humor and wit, using clever analogies to facilitate comprehension. Unlike other popular science writers, Tyson understands that we’re not physicists, nor do we want to be. We understand that there are sophisticated equations underlying all of these topics, but the average person doesn’t want—or need—to know what they are. The concepts are fascinating on their own, and are better learned from someone skilled enough to teach them without all the technicalities. I don’t need to know the math to personally guide a rocket into space, but I do want to know the overall, general physics of how it’s done.

In this respect, this book is an absolute treasure.

The second, probably more important way to read this book is as a lesson in humility; reality is, simply put, not as it seems to us feeble-minded apes. While we tend to idolize ancient thinkers (sometimes for good reasons), we need to remind ourselves that we wouldn’t know anything useful about nature without the institutions of modern science, the technologies that extend our senses, and the experiments and equations that tell us reality is a lot more bizarre than any single individual could ever hope to learn on their own. This, I believe, is one of the core themes in all of Tyson’s books, and shines through particularly well in this one.

A single human, after all, stranded and isolated at birth on an island, has no more chance of discovering the deep laws of the cosmos than a chimpanzee. Collectively we are brilliant, individually we are quite limited. From our perspective, earth is stationary and flat; Mercury actually reverses course through the sky; and there are only five planets in the entire universe (the five planets visible to the naked eye are Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn).

It is only through the collective endeavor of science that we now know the earth is only one among trillions of other planets, and that Mercury only appears to reverse course as it circles the sun with us. Science surprises us because we are biologically equipped only to survive—not to comprehend the cosmos at large.

Now, if ancient thinkers could get things so wrong about the natural world based on intuitions alone, do you suppose they got other things wrong too, regarding gods, religions, and even human nature? I think the answer is a rather obvious and indisputable “yes.” And this is probably the most important lesson in the entire book. As you venture further out into the cosmos—and inevitably discover all the things you were wrong about or didn’t know—ask yourself what other delusional beliefs you may unwittingly hold. show less