Astrophysics for People in a Hurry – Neil deGrasse Tyson *****

When I reviewed James Binney’s Astrophysics: A Very Short Introduction earlier this year, I observed that the very word ‘astrophysics’ in a book’s title is liable to deter many readers from buying it. As a former astrophysicist myself, I’ve never really understood why it’s considered such a scary word, but that’s the way it is. So I was pleasantly surprised to learn, from Wikipedia, that this new book by Neil deGrasse Tyson ‘topped The New York Times non-fiction bestseller list for four weeks in the middle of 2017’.

Like James Binney, Tyson is a professional astrophysicist with a string of research papers to his name – but he’s also one of America’s top science popularisers, and that’s the hat he’s wearing in this book. While Binney addresses an already-physics-literate audience, Tyson sets his sights on a much wider readership. It’s actually very brave – and honest – of him to give physics such prominent billing; the book could easily have been given a more reader-friendly title such as ‘Secrets of the Universe’. But it would still have been astrophysics by stealth, because it’s only thanks to physics that we understand anything beyond our own planet. As Tyson puts it: ‘the universality of physical laws makes the cosmos a marvellously simple place’.

Although the book is new, its chapters (now suitably updated) originated over a period of many years as self-contained magazine articles. They cover a wide range of topics, from the big bang and dark matter, via the electromagnetic spectrum and the periodic table, to asteroids and exoplanets. The coverage isn’t comprehensive; some of the most obvious subjects, like stellar evolution and black holes, are barely touched on. That isn’t a problem, though. The book doesn’t set out to explain everything we know about the universe, but to show that what we do know about it, we know because of physics. That’s just as interesting, and much rarer at a popular science level.

Personally, I loved the book – and I would have loved it even more when I was 15 years old, and my knowledge of physics was largely aspirational rather than actual. In those days, the book would probably have been written by someone like Isaac Asimov – and that’s a fair comparison, because Tyson’s style is a lot like Asimov’s. It manages to be clever, engaging, witty and lucid all at the same time. I kept finding myself stopping to read bits again because they were so good. Here are three examples of the kind of thing I mean:

• On quarks: ‘The most familiar quarks are ... well, there are no familiar quarks. Each of their six subspecies has been assigned an abstract name that serves no philological, philosophical or pedagogical purpose, except to distinguish it from the others.’
• On dark energy: ‘When you estimate the amount of repulsive vacuum pressure that arises from the abbreviated lives of virtual particles, the result is more than 10¹²⁰ times larger than the experimentally determined value of the cosmological constant. This is a stupidly large factor, leading to the biggest mismatch between theory and observation in the history of science.’
• On the cosmic microwave background: ‘The molecule cyanogen gets excited by exposure to microwaves. If the microwaves are warmer ... they excite the molecule a little more. In the big bang model, the cyanogen in distant, younger galaxies gets bathed in a warmer cosmic background than the cyanogen in our own Milky Way galaxy. And that’s exactly what we observe (you can’t make this stuff up).’

Although the book’s aimed at beginners, I have to admit that rather spooky last point came as news to me. And it wasn’t the only thing I learned. I  never realised there was enough energy in a single cosmic ray particle to knock a golf ball across a putting green. I didn’t know thunderstorms could produce gamma rays. Or that, if we could see Jupiter’s magnetosphere, it would be several times bigger than a full Moon in the sky. 

All in all, this is a book I can heartily recommend to anyone, regardless of how much or how little they know about physics.

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Review by Andrew May