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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:   

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
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