Critical Assessment

“Perhaps no one has done more to educate the nonscientific community about the universe than Tyson. As director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, an author and a popular television personality, Tyson is, for many, the face of astrophysics—and for good reason. He is passionate about astrophysics and wants everyone else to be, too. This book, a compilation of 12 essays he wrote for Natural History magazine, is infectiously enthusiastic, humorous and, above all, accessible. Tyson is able to convey complicated concepts with clarity.

Deborah Mason, “Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. A Sprightly ” BookPage, June 1, 2017.

First Excerpt

“The cosmic perspective is more than about what you know. It’s also about having the wisdom and insight to apply that knowledge in assessing our place in the universe. And its attributes are clear:

“The cosmic perspective comes from the frontiers of science, yet it is not solely the provenance of the scientist. It belongs to everyone.

“The cosmic perspective is humble.

“The cosmic perspective is spiritual — even redemptive — but not religious.

“The cosmic perspective enables us to grasp, in the same thought, the large and the small.

“The cosmic perspective opens our minds to extraordinary ideas but does not leave them so open that our brains spill out, making us susceptible to believing anything we’re told.

“The cosmic perspective opens our eyes to the universe, not as a benevolent cradle designed to nurture life but as a cold, lonely, hazardous place, forcing us to reassess the value of all humans to one another.

“The cosmic perspective shows Earth to be a mote. But it’s a precious mote and, for the moment, it’s the only home we have.

“The cosmic perspective finds beauty in the images of planets, moons, stars, and nebulae, but also celebrates the laws of physics that shape them.

“The cosmic perspective enables us to see beyond our circumstances, allowing us to transcend the primal search for food, shelter, and sex.

“The cosmic perspective not only embraces our genetic kinship with all life on Earth but also values our chemical kinship with any yet-to-be discovered life in the universe, as well as our atomic kinship with the universe itself.”

Second Excerpt

“Yes, we’re clueless. But it’s not abject cluelessness. Dark energy is not adrift, with nary a theory to call home. It inhabits one of the safest homes we can imagine: Einstein’s equations of general relativity. Whatever dark energy turns out to be, we already know how to measure it and how to calculate its effects on the past, present, and future of the cosmos.

“As a consequence, anything not gravitationally bound to the neighborhood of our Milky Way galaxy will recede at ever-increasing speed, as part of the accelerating expansion of the fabric of space-time. Distant galaxies now visible in the night sky will ultimately disappear beyond an unreachable horizon, receding from us faster than the speed of light. A feat allowed, not because they’re moving through space at such speeds, but because the fabric of the universe itself carries them at such speeds. No law of physics prevents this.

“In a trillion or so years, anyone alive in our own galaxy may know nothing of other galaxies. Our observable universe will merely comprise a system of nearby, long-lived stars within the Milky Way. And beyond this starry night will lie an endless void — darkness the face of the deep.

“Dark energy, a fundamental property of the cosmos, will, in the end, undermine the ability of future generations to comprehend the universe they’ve been dealt. Unless contemporary astrophysicists across the galaxy keep remarkable records and bury an awesome, trillion-year time capsule, future scientists will know nothing of galaxies — the principal form of organization for matter in our cosmos — and will thus be denied access to key pages from the cosmic drama that is our universe.

“Behold my recurring nightmare: Are we, too, missing some basic pieces of the universe that once was? What part of the cosmic history book has been marked “access denied”? What remains absent from our theories and equations that ought to be there, leaving us groping for answers we may never find?”