Turn Right at Orion: Travels Through the Cosmos [Paperback]

Mitchell Begelman (Author)

Book Description

Series: Helix Book | Publication Date: October 2, 2001

Turn Right at Orion is the account of an epic astronomical journey, discovered sixty million years in Earth's future-the product of one man's amazing, revelatory, and occasionally perilous space odyssey. Astrophysicist Mitchell Begelman takes the reader to far distant shores, across a vast ocean of time, in a narrative style that zips along at just below light speed. We travel to the center of the Milky Way, witness the births and deaths of stars and of planets, and almost perish in the crushing forces at the perimeter of a black hole-and all the while Begelman explains in clear and vibrant prose how things work the way they do in the cosmos. Turn Right at Orion is a serious science book that reads like fiction.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The original Rocinante bore Don Quixote in his errant adventures across medieval Spain; its namesake carried John Steinbeck and his poodle across America. Rocinante's latest incarnation is a wondrous spacecraft that, in the understated words of its pilot, "is perhaps not quite so sturdy as I should have liked"--but that nevertheless has transported him across space to the center of the Milky Way.

Structured as something of a picaresque novel, Turn Right at Orion is a textbook in disguise. In its pages, the noted astrophysicist Mitchell Begelman guides readers across 60 million years of time and immense galactic distances, discussing the formation of the Milky Way as a great sooty disk full of graphite, hydrocarbons, and silicon-based minerals, "pollution from supernova explosions, lesser stellar explosions called novae, and the evaporating outer envelopes of giant stars." Along the way, Begelman's narrator offers lessons in the workings of gravity, motion, and time, explaining, for instance, why it is that the Earth does not cave in on itself (it resists gravitational collapse, he notes, because it is made of highly resilient materials), why light bends, and why planets and black holes form. The result is a charming, fluent introduction to basic space science, just right for the novice. --Gregory McNamee --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"A creative, informative, even entertaining work of scientific fiction." -- -Harvard Magazine

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (October 2, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0738205176
• ISBN-13: 978-0738205175
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 6.8 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,580,365 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More authors should write science books like this!, March 26, 2001

By 

Thomas A. Morrow (Oak Ridge, TN United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Turn Right at Orion: Travels Through the Cosmos (Hardcover)

This is a factual astronomy book written in the form of a science fiction story.

The narrator, a lone astronaut who meticulously describes his interstellar journey, begins by taking us to the giant black hole in our Milky Way's core. He then orbits the black hole in Cygnus X-1, two neutron stars in separate Crab nebulas, glides into accretion disks forming newborn planets around infant suns in the Orion Nebula, and then flies around the star Betelgeuse, a bloated, unstable, red supergiant.

His spacecraft then departs the Milky Way galaxy and enters the Large Magellanic Cloud where he's almost obliterated by a supernova. Finally, he flies to the Virgo cluster some 60 million light years from Earth where he goes into orbit around the colossal and ferocious black hole at the core of the radio galaxy M87.

This book's author, Mitchell Begelman, describes each cosmic panorama with such vivid, colorful immediacy, you feel like you're really there. I read this book over several nights at bedtime, and after falling asleep, I would instantly find myself dreaming about interstellar space flight.

What more could a book like this offer?

The name of the spacecraft in this story is "Rocinante," which is an inside joke because the author acknowledges borrowing it from the rock group Rush who in 1977 and 1978, wrote two musical scores about a lone astronaut who flew his spacecraft called Rocinante into the black hole Cygnus X-1, only to emerge from the collapsed stellar core as the most powerful god on Mount Olympus.

I wish more authors would write science books using vibrant, creative storytelling. Maybe Begelman could collaborate with a paleontologist to write a time travel chronicle that zips along 550 million years of natural history, from the Cambrian through the Pleistocene.