death by black hole and other cosmic quandaries

Magazine will be familiar with many of the 42 essays collected here, while newcomers will profit from Tyson's witty and entertaining description of being pulled apart atom by atom into a black hole, and other, closer-to-earth, and cheerier, topics.

In the last section the author gives his take on the hot subject of intelligent design. He tackles popular myths (is the sun yellow?) and takes movie directors-most notably James Cameron-to task for spectacular goofs. Two of Tyson’s other books are the playful and informative Death By Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries, which was a New York Times bestseller, and The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America’s Favorite Planet, chronicling his experience at the center of the controversy over Pluto’s planetary. What I like about it: - Tyson writes in a way that's easily accessible for anyone even without a science background. Tyson doesn't restrict his musings to astrophysics, but wanders into related fields like relativity and particle physics, which he explains just as clearly as he does Lagrangian points, where we someday may park interplanetary filling stations. Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries is a collection of essays Tyson wrote for Natural History, a magazine dedicated to - you guessed it - natural history (basically, science) between 1995-2005. Tyson takes readers on an exciting journey from Earth's hot springs, where extremophiles flourish in hellish conditions, to the frozen, desolate stretches of the Oort Cloud and the universe's farthest reaches, in both space and time. What would it feel like if your spaceship were to venture too close to the black hole lurking at the center of the Milky Way? According to astrophysicist Tyson, director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium, size does matter when it comes to black holes, although the chances of your surviving the encounter aren't good in any case.

Death by black hole and other cosmic quandaries