Or, "How the Cosmos Intends to Dismember You Slowly in Itty-Bitty Pieces."
For readers who are wholly unfamiliar, Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Death by Black Hole serves as an excellent initiation into the universe and its mechanical mysteries. And those who know the difference between a proton and a photon will speed through the first half of the book, gleaning up-to-date tidbits or, if nothing else, clever explanations of dense chunks of astrophysical penumbra. Tyson uses metaphor and analogy masterfully enough, for example, to make an introduction to spectrographic analysis more interesting than, say, shopping for carpet or reading the tax code. In practice, spectroscopy probably isn’t more exciting than buying carpet, but Tyson offers a tour of the cosmos with a brevity and entertaining lucidity that (at the very least) engages the reader.
As a title, Death by Black Hole is no less dramatic than Richard Dawkins’ recent The God Delusion, but from the first page, the layman will find no little thrill in this brief but thorough volume: it was written by a scientist whose chosen subject does not exceed the limits of his expertise. Tyson tries to infuse humor into what is otherwise a lonely and bone-dry science aisle at Banes and Noble. More often than not though, his shtick is just that, and after driving through a few of Tyson’s one-liners, the reader begins to anticipate the drummer – snare and cymbal at the ready – waiting for the sentence to end. And because Death by Black Hole is a collection of essays, the jokes tend to reappear in different chapters. Tyson notes more than once, for example, that if the sun were yellow, snow would also be yellow – “whether or not it fell near fire hydrants.”
Get it?
Such goofs are short-lived and, fortunately, far outshined by the analogies and anecdotes he uses to rather simply illustrate exceptionally complex phenomena. In fact, Death by Black Hole should probably serve for some time to come as the layman’s primer to the universe. Tyson has an unparalleled ability elucidate relationships between, say, the almost abstractly infinitesimal neutron, the almost abstractly vast red giant star, and the seemingly abstract gamma ray. Amazingly, Death by Black Hole hasn’t a single picture to illustrate his points. Just think: even Stephen Hawking has to use pictures.
In an NPR interview, Tyson admitted that he chose the material to include in the volume based on his articles that readers most often search for on the Web, and yet he manages to fuse disparate elements, so that the book reads like a work with a clear purpose. His purpose may be difficult to name though, other than, perhaps, that the universe’s chaotic nooks and far-flung crannies leave the author with an appropriately magnificent sense of awe. And he’s going to share that awe, because he can do so better than anyone else.
Tyson notes with no little derision those popular volumes written by scientists to build intellectual bridges from which devout readers might comfortably (or sometimes uncomfortably) leap with faith into the mechanisms of science. In fact, his annoyance is clear and suitable – and timely, what with the small library of the subgenre that has emerged since the cultural spasm that was the Intelligent Design movement. Tyson decries books like The God Particle and The Physics of Immortality as the offspring of brilliant men with a bank account to fill and an agent who knows a hook when he sees one. He also anticipates the other side of the ring, works like The God Delusion, that exploit the reading public’s thirst for an intelligent discussion about the rift between the sciences and the humanities with patronizing arguments.
Thus, Death by Black Hole’s concluding section – which weighs in at 455 pages less than The God Delusion – gives a cogent account of the relationship between religion and the sciences: namely, that such a relationship does not exist, nor should it, necessarily. He posits that the purpose of physics (along with the rest of the sciences) is to describe phenomena in the natural world. The transitory, the ineffable, the immutably abstract – these all belong to faith, in all its myriad forms. The scientific method was not designed to deliver ethics to mankind, and when called upon to do so, its track record isn’t pretty, historically.
Tyson doesn’t pretend to have no personal opinion about the matter. Rather, he abstains from preaching, except to his fellow scientists who feel compelled to do so. Which isn’t to suggest that he wholly ignores the fault on the other side of the aisle, either. But instead of outright chastisement, he illustrates via a creation story – a furious, chaotic moment (if it can be so called) composed of electromagnetic and nuclear forces that imploded into existence 10-35 seconds after the Big Bang, give or take a few million-trillion-trillion-trillionths of a second.
Death by Black Hole maneuvers as graciously and confidently through these touchy subjects as it does denser topics. Though it is anchored in physical phenomena, Tyson deftly details his complex cosmology with a wealth of historical fact and, sometimes seemingly random, minutia. For example, in a filled bathtub an unopened can of Pepsi will sink, while an unopened can of Diet Pepsi will float. Such a triviality won’t dissuade a capital-B Believer from clinging to the unyielding conviction that the Earth is just a few millennia old, but it is, at the very least, disarming. Especially since the Bible hasn’t an opinion on the relative buoyancy of soft drinks.
Primarily, Tyson wants to serve as an interlocutor between the scientific community and a curious public – a public in dire need of someone to fill the unenviable position since Carl Sagan’s death. Considering that only one in seven Americans aged 18 to 24 can find Iraq on a map, any attempt to encourage an interest in the location of the Andromeda galaxy’s black hole poses quite a challenge, no matter how deadly it may be. If the challenge can be met, Neil deGrasse Tyson might be the man to do it, sullied fire hydrants or no.
Between the Covers is a biweekly book review and publishing analysis.
