Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. By: Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Time spent reading: 4 hours 30 minutes.

I have previously heard and appreciated Dr. Tyson’s lecture. His wit, in-dept views and sense of humor drew me towards the book.

The book debuted at #1 on The New York Times Non-Fiction Best Seller list when it first appeared in May, 2017.

Short Summary

The Title of the book is self-explanatory, this is ‘Dr. Tyson’s’ attempt at helping common people who have limited, or no knowledge of Astrophysics understand the basic of the subject. The author tries to simplify complicated and complex scientific phenomenon in simple English.

My Review

The book begins with the words and I am paraphrasing here, to understand the complicated and important themes of the various theorems only a basic knowledge idea of mathematics, quantum physics and trigonometry is required. Here I was stumped on the first ball, having left trigonometry as optional in my matricular exams. I also successfully dodged math for the next 5 years of graduation and 2 years of post graduation studies. Still I decided to give it the old college try and to continue the cricket anomaly “took a swing at it”

I am glad I did, showing the true skill of a master at his work ‘Dr. Tyson’ through humor, hyperbole and modern examples successfully guides the reader through the complicated, awe-inspiring and breathtaking view of the Universe, our galaxy and galaxies far far away. His explanation of how the sphere is the perfect shape in the universe with stay with me forever. All etched in my memory will be his theory of relativity applied to space travel.

This is book about one of the sciences, so its is dominated by a lot of technical theorems and math, it might look intimidating at first but ‘Dr. Tyson’ does a phenomenal job in breaking down the jargon point by point and explain to the reader what the theory actually mean. The language is a bit complicated because of the scientific terms and you will sometime have to bring your reading down to a scroll to understand the matter. You will also find yourself turning the pages back and forth to get the hang of a few things. The flow of the book is excellent, I would hard find a part of the book, which is so filled with technical stuff, that I, as common mand would get bored or discouraged from reading it further. The excitement in the writing and the enthusiasm with which ‘Dr. Tyson’ presents the book will force you to keep reading and at the end you will be glad that you did.

The universe as we know it was created out of chaos, though the stars and the solar system is beautiful to look at its creation violent. His theory on why there is possibility of life on other planets blew my mind. Our Solar system is constantly bombarded with comets and debris that are huge in size. Sometime when a big enough meteoroid hits a planet it takes a part of the planet and launches it at tremendous force into space. Before earth developed its own atmosphere there is a possibility that it was all but a cast away from another planet, may be Mars. Earth is currently protected by impacts from large meteoroids because of the gravitational pull of Jupiter. Humor me this, suppose during the Asteroid crash that killed the dinosaurs, the impact caused so big that some part of earth was launched out of the Earths then atmosphere. That part of earth might still be travelling somewhere in space waiting to find a place close to a constant source of energy like our sun and waiting for new life to spring from the hidden crevasses of its former host.

This is a book I highly recommend. I really enjoyed reading it despite the handicap of not knowing trigonometry.