I read this book because I wanted to learn the basics about astrophysics. But as I quickly discovered, this is not astrophysics for dummies. Yes it’s a relatively quick read but Neil deGrasse Tyson seems to wrote it with the assumption of basic knowledge from the readers.
Nevertheless, the general feel about the subject can still be understood.
Firstly, we can assert without further hesitation that the universe had a beginning. The universe also continues to evolve, with every atom in our body is traceable to the Big Bang and to “the thermonuclear furnaces within high-mass stars that exploded more than five billion years ago.”
Moreover, while the Big Bang occurred 13.8 billion years ago, it took another 380,000 years before we can see any matter forming, and few more billion years to form a planet that we call home. Yes, time moves slowly in the universe, and in the grand scale of things our 70-100 years of life, by contrast, is ridiculously short.
Furthermore, there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on any beach, more stars than seconds have passed since Earth was formed 4.5 billion years ago. In fact, there are about 100 billion galaxies that we have discovered so far in the universe, one of which is our Milky Way galaxy that in turn contains approximately 100 billion more stars, with one of them is our Sun. We truly are nothing but a speck of dust in the face of the massive universe.
Meanwhile, as one star (our Sun) can have several planets orbiting it, other stars also have planets orbiting them and quite a lot of these planets are at a similar distance like the Earth to the Sun, not too close that it evaporates the water but not too far that it freezes the water. In other words, there are thousands of planets that have been found so far that are habitable and have the potential to support life just like on Earth.
I also find it particularly intriguing that Newton’s Law of Gravity also guides planets, asteroids, and comets in their orbit around the Sun and organised the orbit of the billion stars within our Milky Way Galaxy. This, as it turns out, is a common thing in the world of science: that everything from nature to space all follow certain laws of physics, while everything else, as Tyson remarks, is opinion.
The book also mentions so many fascinating facts such as different colour have different temperature, it also features the explanations of most of the elements in the periodic table, amusing speculations like the possibility that Earthlings might just be a descendant of Martians, and many, many space-science stuff that I find it challenging to digest.
Needless to say, I came here to find answers but come out with more questions. Questions like what’s in the space between galaxies? Who or what neatly organised the gravitational orbits of the planets and the stars? What is a supermassive black hole? What’s on the dark side of the moon? What’s that bright thing in the center of the Milky Way galaxy?
But I guess that’s what a stimulating book is supposed to do, and the amount of mysteries about the space that we still haven’t uncovered yet are intriguing to closely follow.
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All things are defined via their relations to other things. For example, the reason I believe myself to be a patient person is because I have experienced other people who had little of the stuff. Jeff Bezos isn’t rich because he has a trillion dollars; he is rich because he has a trillion dollars and the rest of us have far less. One hour is a long time when compared to a second, yet it is minuscule when compared to a year.Reading about the solar system within which we all reside has made me feel truly tiny. We are all generally aware that Earth is small in comparison to the sun and to other galaxies of stars, but the actual numbers are beyond staggering. Not only are there hundreds of billions of stars in a galaxy, and not only are there hundreds of billions of galaxies in a universe, but there are hundreds of billions of universes. Astronomers have concluded that “there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on any beach, more stars than seconds have passed since Earth was formed, [and] more stars than words and sounds ever uttered by all the humans who ever lived.” Compared to the celestial bodies above, we humans are infinitesimal.The field of astrophysics is interesting because it not only concerns itself with the biggest of entities, but also with the smallest, because in order to better understand the cosmos within which we reside, we must better understand it’s building blocks. For example, we know that “the element carbon can be found in more kinds of molecules than the sum of all other kinds of molecules combined.” Or we might be interested in knowing the chemical compounds that comprise a drop of water so that we might some day be able to find it (or create it) on another planet. Conversely to the unfathomable expanse of space, “there are more molecules of water in a cup of the stuff than there are cups of water in all the world’s oceans.” Compared to a molecule of water, we humans are gargantuan.So, for those of us to whom astronomy and astrophysics are interesting yet largely beyond basic comprehension, the take-away is simple: Life is about perspective.
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Fascinating and easy to follow with one caveat
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