Friday, January 25, 2019

Origins - Neil deGrasse Tyson and Donald Goldsmith


   2004; 295 pages (plus a 24-page glossary).  New Author? : Yes.  Full Title: Origins – Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution.  Laurels: The PBS show “Nova” made it into a 4-part miniseries.  Genre : Non-Fiction; Science; Cosmology.  Overall Rating : 9½*/10.

    Hey, I’ve got an idea.  Let’s make an apple pie from scratch.  Sounds like fun, eh?

    Except that one of the more famous quotes by the astrophysicist Carl Sagan is: “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”

    That makes our project rather challenging.  And even if we somehow manage to invent a universe (I think it has something to do with a Big Bang), we’re still quite a few steps away from taking that pie out of the oven, plopping a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top of it, and enjoying a fabulous dessert.  There are things like galaxies and planets and apple trees to also invent.

    Fortunately, I’ve just read a book by Neil deGrasse Tyson where he explains all those steps.  So get out the dessert plates and a couple of forks while I make that pie.  But please be patient and don’t get out the ice cream just yet, as it’s going to take a bit more time than if we’d just run down to the grocery store and bought a frozen or freshly-baked pie.

    Like about 14 billion years.

What’s To Like...
    Origins is divided into five “parts”, each one containing 2-6 chapters.  There are seventeen numbered chapters, plus a Preface, Overture, and Coda.  I loved the structure the authors used for these parts, as each one gets progressively smaller (and younger) by any number of magnitudes.  The Parts are:

Part 1: The Origin of the Universe (chapters 1-6)
Part 2: The Origin of Galaxies and Cosmic Structure (chapters 7-8)
Part 3: The Origin of Stars (chapters 9-10)
Part 4: The Origin of Planets (chapters 11-13)
Part 5: The Origin of Life (chapters 14-17)

    Each chapter addressed a specific topic relevant to whatever Part it was included under.  Some of my favorites (yours will be different) were:

Chapter 01: The first moments of the Big Bang.
Chapter 02: Anti-Matter – We’ve seen it and produced it.
Chapters 04-&-05: Dark Matter and Dark Energy.
Chapter 06: Multiverses!
Chapter 10: The  Elements.
Chapter 13: Exoplanets.
Chapter 17: The Best Way to Search for Life in the rest of the Galaxy.

    I liked the writing style.  The authors did a good job of taking the incredibly complex subject of Astrophysics and making it (relatively) easy to understand.  The emphasis on each section is  WHEN the main subject in each part came into being; HOW each creation process might have occurred; and WHAT scientific and astrophysical observations and tests support those first two questions.  When “proofs” exist for anything, they are pointed out, but the calculations for them aren’t detailed.  I found this to be a positive, since it made things easier to grasp and much less tedious.

    Einstein’s trademark equation, E=mc2 shows up, and I was surprised in how many different situations it was applicable.  There are 40 great color photographs included, with lots of galaxies and planets to drool over.  The 24-page glossary at the back of the book is a handy reference. 

    In addition to the chapter subjects mentioned above, the book is chock full of fascinating trivia and other astrophysical phenomena.  Some of these that resonated with me were:
    How to determine the age of a star.  (Hint: it involves Lithium)  (pgs. 156-157)
    The Copernican principle.  (pg. 230)
    The Oort Cloud and the Kuiper Belt  (pgs. 197-198)
    The Fermi Paradox  (pg 288)
    The universe will keep on expanding forever.  (chapter 5)
    Quasars!  (pg. 134)
    100 billion galaxies exist, and those are just the ones we can see (pg. 27)
    Each of those galaxies average a billion stars.
    The distance to the nearest star (not counting our own Sun) is 500,000 times greater than the distance from the Sun to Mercury, and 5,000 times greater than the distance from the Sun to Pluto.  (pg. 208)

 Kewlest New Word ...
Hypnagogic (adj.) : relating to the state immediately before falling asleep.
Others : Quotidian (n.); Protists (n., plural); Proscenium (n.); Agglutinative (adj.).

Excerpts...
    The beginnings of planet building pose a remarkably intractable problem, to the point that one of the world’s experts on the subject, Scott Tremaine of Princeton University, has elucidated (partly in jest) Tremaine’s laws of planet formation.  The first of these laws states that “all theoretical predictions about the properties of exosolar planets are wrong,” and the second that “the most secure prediction about planet formation is that it can’t happen.”  Tremaine’s humor underscores the ineluctable fact that planets do exist, despite our inability to explain this astronomical enigma.  (pg. 184)

    To the average person, relativity, particle physics, and eleven-dimensional string theory make no sense.  Add to this list black holes, wormholes, and the big bang.  Actually, these concepts don’t make much sense to scientists either, until we have explored the universe for a long time with all senses that are technologically available.  What eventually emerges is a newer and higher level of “uncommon sense” that enables scientists to think creatively and pass judgment in the unfamiliar underworld of the atom or in the mind-bending domain of higher dimensional space.  (pg. 294)

 If you board an aircraft built according to science – with principles that have survived numerous attempts to prove them wrong – you have a far better chance of reaching your destination than you do in an aircraft constructed by the rules of Vedic astrology.  (pg. 19 )
    There’s not much to quibble about in Origins.  Like other books I’ve read about advanced science topics such as Quantum Mechanics, Astrophysics, etc.), this one made my brain tired after about 30 pages or 30 minutes, whichever came first.  So it took me more than a week to plow through it.  The authors do a commendable job of simplifying the subject material as much as possible, but trying to grasp the whys and wherefores of things like black holes, anti-matter, and dark energy is going to be challenging, no matter how far it is dumbed down.

    I have no idea who Donald Goldsmith is; there isn’t even a Wikipedia page for him.  I’m curious as to how he and Neil deGrasse Tyson divvied up the writing responsibilities, as the text flowed smoothly throughout the book.  Some bits of the text imply that the two got along swimmingly.

    9½ Stars.  I’ve been meaning to read something by Neil deGrasse Tyson for quite some time, and Origins was a delightful introduction to his literary efforts.  Santa Claus brought me this book and two others by him, so 2019 might be the year I really get into him.

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