Skip to main content

To Infinity and Beyond - Neil deGrasse Tyson and Lindsey Nyx Walker ***

This is a strange mixed bag of a book that starts with three parts that take sensible steps from leaving Earth, through 'touring the Sun's backyard' to 'into outer space', but then makes an odd leap in the final section 'to infinity and beyond' to explore the extremely hypothetical field of time travel - great fun as a topic, but hardly much to do with the rest of the book.

Overall, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Lindsey Nyx Walker (something of a name overload) give us the print equivalent of a TV science show (perhaps not entirely surprisingly given Tyson has done a number of these and Walker is a TV producer and podcast writer). It's mostly presented at the superficial level of such shows (with a certain amount of Brian-Cox-on-a-mountain-style flowery prose), which kind of misses the point of a popular science book that you can go beyond the superficial. Occasionally we do get some more detail, but it's often not presented in a particularly approachable way.

There is, without doubt, plenty of high level interesting material in here, presented in a light and accessible fashion. We get some interesting asides - for example, about what was necessary to get the Mars Ingenuity helicopter to work in Mars' thin atmosphere, and a takedown of the impact of the dust storm in the movie The Martian. It's unusually non-linear, jumping around from topic to topic - which can be entertaining. For example, at one point the authors take us from Buys Ballot demonstrating the Doppler effect with musicians on a train to supernovae in 3 pages. But sometimes the approach seems to lack all structural integrity, jumping around for the sake of it, with no clear direction for the reader to follow. Even so, the approach is not too distressing until the authors attempt to take on time travel.  This is a heavy duty area to delve into the science without good structure, and the reader is left baffled as we bounce around, never getting the chance to grasp what’s being shown. 

The weakest part of the book is something Tyson has a track record of getting wrong - science history. We are told, for example, that the Moon was considered a flat disc for thousands of years until the seventeenth century. That’s plain wrong. Since Ancient Greek times, including in Aristotle's model that held sway until that seventeenth century, the Moon was considered a sphere. Particularly strange was the omission of Richard Feynman from a discussion of the cause of the Challenger disaster. And we're told the scientific method of testing a hypothesis by experiment didn't take hold until the 17th century, which is a wild over-simplification. There are also times when what's close to science fiction is presented in something of an uncritical fashion, whether it's in the time travel section or a piece on space elevators that only touched the surface of the problems such technology would face, telling us 'operational space elevators are current on the drawing board in multiple countries. Whoever builds the first... will launch a whole new era of mass transit and space exploration'. Frankly, that's fantasy.

One last moan: I know this book primarily has a US audience in mind, but even so, I find a science book that only uses units such as miles and degrees Fahrenheit somewhat painful.

The book is nicely illustrated, and entertaining in its bouncy fashion. But it could have been so much better.

Hardback:   

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...
Post a Comment
Read more

Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact: Keith Cooper ****

There's something appealing (for a reader like me) about a book that brings together science fiction and science fact. I had assumed that the 'Amazing Worlds' part of the title suggested a general overview of the interaction between the two, but Keith Cooper is being literal. This is an examination of exoplanets (planets that orbit a different star to the Sun) as pictured in science fiction and in our best current science, bearing in mind this is a field that is still in the early phases of development. It becomes obvious early on that Cooper, who is a science journalist in his day job, knows his stuff on the fiction side as well as the current science. Of course he brings in the well-known TV and movie tropes (we get a huge amount on Star Trek ), not to mention the likes of Dune, but his coverage of written science fiction goes into much wider picture. He also has consulted some well-known contemporary SF writers such as Alastair Reynolds and Paul McAuley, not just scient...
Post a Comment
Read more