My next book is from the director of the wonderful new Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History, Neil DeGrasse Tyson. He has been writing columns for Natural History, and Death by Black Hole collects and links forty two of them.
Ever since Carl Sagan died, there has been a real lack of scientists who can explain science to the general public, and have "star power" to promote science. Not everyone in this world eagerly turns on "Science Friday" on NPR every Friday, for instance. Carl had a gift, sometimes derided by his fellow scientists, for making science interesting and fun for the layperson and impressionable young minds. (Mine, for instance).
In that void after Carl's death, a number of scientists have tried. The Late Stephen Gould wrote wonderfully about Evolution and matters biological, however he never had a TV presence. The physicist Brian Greene makes String Theory lucid, or at least as lucid as it is going to get for someone without degrees in mathematics and physics.
And then there's Tyson. He certainly works the media: I've seen him on the Daily Show, and he's been on Science Friday, amongst other places. He's managed to cause a firestorm, when he "demoted" Pluto in the Rose Center from a full fledged planet. He's a colorful, larger than life personality that is sometimes brash, and very much a New Yorker.
Turns out he can write fairly well, too. Death by Black Hole collects a bunch of his essays on matters astrophysical and astronomical, in bite sized chunks of a form I first encountered in the personage of Isaac Asimov.
Death by Black Hole contains the titular essay, as well as essays ranging from the journey of a photon in the sun from creation to its emission, to lagrange points, to the implausiblity of most movie aliens, to the dangers and stupidity of teaching intelligent design as science. His sense of humor can sometimes take getting used to, as well as his brashness. Still, although I don't think he approaches Sagan's (or Asimov's) olympian ability to elucidate strange and exotic concepts, he does a pretty good job. The essays are meant for an educated layperson, and I think are accessible to the general public.
My only quibble, and I think its his tendency to try and write to the general public, is that Tyson seems to not like to write in scientific notation. Seeing numbers like 0.0000000005 K or conflations of millions and billions was a bit irksome to me.
Still, I would definitely buy further collections of Tyson's essays as he gets them written and put together.
Posted by Jvstin at January 19, 2008 8:13 AM