Thursday, April 5, 2018

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

At least it isn't called Astrophysics for Dummies. 

Neil deGrasse Tyson's Astrophysics for People in a Hurry might be a best seller, it might have racked up thousands of high-star reviews on Amazon, it might be a slim little hundredish pages, but, people, it's still astrophysics. Dark matter, quarks, general relativity. I tried. I am a regular at the planetarium, I find space and time and space and the space-time continuum fascinating (if above my head) and I really thought this quick little book would make it all a little clearer for me. Instead, I fought sleep or boredom or both every time I picked it up. Regularly deciphering the likes of "To invoke an unstable condition as the natural state of a physical system violates scientific credo." is simply asking too much of me. The text is dense, the terminology is dense, and at the end of the day, perhaps there's a reason I'm not a physicist.

Final verdict: spend an hour at your local planetarium.

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