Astrophysics for People in a Hurry: Essays on the Universe and Our Place Within It

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That being said, I could still (mostly) follow along even in the areas where I knew little to nothing about. Carl Sagan – the man who made many people fall in love with science in the 1980s – had a habit of saying that astrophysics is the science of humility – in addition to science itself being a character-building endeavor. Tomēr dizaina ziņā 4,5 zvaigznes, jo bildes bija ļoti kvalitatīvas un skaistas, bet to izvietojumi dažviet bija neērti un ievietotas teikumu vidū. There’s one thing that scientists agree upon: we know that we don’t know. There’s only so much that science had discovered about the universe, our planets, the stars, and how life emerged. We know that the laws of physics have an effect on all these things, but we don’t know which effect that is. The chapter on Invisible Light was one of the most fascinating. The discovery of invisible light, that is, light with wavelengths longer than red in our rainbow such as infra-red and radio waves and the discovery of those wavelengths shorter than violet in our rainbow such as ultra-violet, x-rays and those nasty gamma rays. Importantly, he describes what we do with these invisible light rays, particularly with regards to astronomy, how we detect various rays of invisible light to study different features of our universe.

And that’s where things get even more interesting: during this time, humanity – basically “stardust brought to life” – has discovered numerous physical laws and has devised hundreds of theories to explain their origin and meaning. We know that there is a lot of dark matter that is yet to be discovered, as only one-sixth of the mass in the universe is made of galaxies and gas clouds. Scientists still don’t know how to detect the rest of the mass, as we don’t even have the devices to recognize new matter.Another good pop science that’s similar in tone is Astrophysics For People In A Hurry by long-time Stephen Hawking admirer, Neil Degrasse Tyson. It’s a lot of fun to read and potentially even less complicated than An Briefer History Of Time. Still, the two books actually complement one another quite nicely."

Don't even think you can sit down and read this baby in a night. It is definitely a read-a-chapter/think-for-a-bit kind of book. I read a chapter after each fiction book I was reading, and then I would talk about it with my genius son who somehow understands all this stuff. I homeschooled the kid. How does he know so much more than I do? I think he might have been cheating on me!! He was out learning shit on the side! Little bastard! So to all people criticizing NDT and people like him, I say this: keep in mind that the guy is a graduate from the prestigious Bronx High School of Science, then went and got a BA in physics from Harvard and a PhD in astrophysics from Columbia, before being with the American Museum of Natural History (NYC) and serving as their Director of the Hayden Planetarium. He knows what he's talking about. If a huge genetic gap separated us from our closest relative in the animal kingdom, we could justifiably celebrate our brilliance. We might be entitled to walk around thinking we’re distant and distinct from our fellow creatures. But no such gap exists. Instead, we are one with the rest of nature, fitting neither above nor below, but within.” Now imagine a world in which everyone, but especially people with power and influence, holds an expanded view of our place in the cosmos. With that perspective, our problems would shrink—or never arise at all—and we could celebrate our earthly differences while shunning the behavior of our predecessors who slaughtered each other because of them. We are part of this universe; we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts, is that the universe is in us."While explaining Einstein’s prediction of gravitational waves and the importance of their first ever detection in 2015 , Tyson beautifully summarizes this full circle. In other words, homo sapiens has been around for no more than, say, 300,000 years, which means only about 0.006% of the time the Earth is around. All in all, this is a book I can heartily recommend to anyone, regardless of how much or how little they know about physics." — Popular Science Even so, none of it should be boring to anyone: exceptionally well written, full of Tyson’s recognizable wit and even more recognizable analogies, “Astrophysics for People in a Hurry” is both an accessible and illuminating work.