Merlin's Tour of the Universe - Neil deGrasse Tyson ***

This book is something of a reboot. It was Neil deGrasse Tyson's first title, dating back to 1997, but was reissued 'fully revised and updated for the 21st century' in 2024. It's mostly a cut and paste book from the Q&A section in a magazine, despite which (or perhaps because of which) it's one of Tyson's better books.

The idea is that the questions are answered by Merlin who is 'a visitor from the Andromeda galaxy who is as old as Earth and who has observed all major scientific events of Earth history.' Although some of the questions are from children (and the illustrations look like they were drawn by one) it's intended to appeal to all ages. The book is split into 13 sections, mostly with astronomical topics (such as Earth, Moon, Planets, Black Holes and Quasars), though with a couple of more physics-based sections including Gravity and Light and Telescopes.

The questions themselves vary from entertaining thought experiments such as 'What would happen if the Earth suddenly stopped rotating?' to straightforward astronomical queries like 'Why is Mars red?' Bearing in mind this was originally a short column, most answers are less than a page long and don't provide any depth. They are lightweight and easily digested. Unfortunately, they are sometimes either incomplete or even wrong. In the examples I give above (selected randomly) - very few of the implications of the Earth stopping are covered, and while the 'why is Mars red' question reasonably puts it down to iron, Tyson then spoils things by saying 'it's the same reason mammal blood is red' - unfortunately it's not. It's down to the structure of ring of an atoms in haemoglobin called porphyrin.

In other writing, Tyson's biggest faults tend to be a weak grasp of history of science and some impressive jingoism (I'm thinking particularly of his Space Chronicles where he says, of instance 'In the fifties, sixties, seventies, part of the eighties, every plane that landed in your city was made in America' - pure fiction.) Here, there is relatively little opportunity for either failing (though it does seem unlikely that Newton was at Woolsthorpe in 1710), which is why things seem to work reasonably well.

It's rather tedious to read this book end to end, but at risk of awarding faint praise, it would work well as a toilet companion, taking in a brief article or two at a time.

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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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