Death by Black Hole - Neil deGrasse Tyson

   2007; 362 pages.  Full Title: Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Science; Essays; Non-Fiction; Astrophysics.  Overall Rating : 9½*/10.

 

    Consider the following declarations.  The North Star is the brightest star in the nighttime sky.  The Sun is a yellow star.  What goes up must come down.  On a dark night you can see millions of stars with the unaided eye.  In space there is no gravity.  A compass points north.  Days get shorter in the winter and longer in the summer.  Total solar eclipses are rare.

    Every statement in the above paragraph is false.

    (from “Death by Black Hole”, pg. 293)

 

    Are you curious as to why the above statements are untrue?  Do you ask questions like: What would happen if you (or a star) fell into a black hole?  How can 100+ different elements get created from a single "Big Bang"?  What the heck is a supernova?  A quasar?  What’s the likelihood of a killer asteroid wiping us out like one did to the dinosaurs?  Can God and Science coexist?

 

    The answers to the above questions, why those first statements are all inaccurate, plus many more, can be found in Neil deGrasse Tyson’s book Death by Black Hole.

 

    And you don’t have to be an astrophysicist to understand what he’s saying.

 

What’s To Like...

    Death by Black Hole is a series of 42 essays, plus a Prologue, by the eminent author/astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.  He divides them up into seven sections, and 362 pages, meaning the essays are relatively short: just 8+ pages on average, which my brain appreciated.

 

    The essays cover a wide variety of science-related topics.  Some of my favorites were:

    05 : Stick-in-the-Mud Science

        The amazing experiments you can do with just a stick, a string, and an hourglass.

    12 : Speed Limits

        Measuring the speed of light.

    25 : Living Space

        How likely is life to develop elsewhere in the Cosmos.

    26 : Life in the Universe

        How likely is intelligent life to develop elsewhere in the Cosmos.

    30 : Ends of the World

        Three possible ways it might happen.

    32 : Knock ‘em Dead

        Mass extinctions: what caused them?

 

    This is my second Neil deGrasse Tyson book (the other one is reviewed here), and once again I was in awe of his ability to simplify complex scientific concepts to where even readers with non-technical backgrounds can comprehend and enjoy them.  Tyson has a knack for blending science with modern-day culture.  Deep subjects such as Lagrange points and quasars are mentioned alongside things like Pink Floyd (Dark Side of the Moon, naturally), Star Trek “redshirts”, and astrophysical bloopers Tyson noticed while watching several blockbuster science fiction movies.

 

    The book is a trivia nerd’s delight.  I was surprised to learn that an unopened can of Pepsi will float in water, while an unopened can of Diet Pepsi will sink.  I learned the etymology of the words algorithm, solstice, and quasar; laughed at the use of the terms spaghettification and astro-illiteracy; and smiled when the author revealed he’s had an asteroid named after him (”13123 Tyson”).  The world’s record low temperature (-129°F, in Antarctica) gave me shivers, while the world’s record high temperature (+136°F, in Libya) made me break out in a sweat.

 

    The science-oriented trivia was equally enlightening.  I enjoyed learning about Foucault’s pendulum, why the astronomer Percival Lowell honestly believed he observed canals on Venus, and how a Greek mathematician named Eratosthenes calculated the Earth’s circumference (to within 15% of the precise value) in the third century BCE.  The odds of life developing somewhere else in the Universe were much higher than I would have guessed, and I was fascinated that the element Technetium doesn’t occur naturally on Earth but has been found in the atmosphere of a couple of red giant stars in our galaxy.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.8*/5, based on 2,047 ratings.

    Goodreads: 4.07*/5, based on 29,573 ratings and 1,367 reviews

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Syzygy (n.) : a conjunction or opposition, especially of the moon with the sun.

Others: Noctilucent (adj.).

 

Excerpts...

    One night a couple decades ago, while I was on winter break from graduate school and was staying at my parents’ house north of New York City, I turned on the radio to listen to classical music.  A frigid Canadian air mass was advancing on the Northeast, and the announcer, between movements of George Frideric Handel’s Water Music, continually tracked the descending outdoor temperature: “Five degrees Fahrenheit.”  “Four degrees.”  “Three degrees.”  Finally, sounding distressed, he announced, “If this keeps up, pretty soon there’ll be no temperature left!”  (pg. 180)

 

    When people believe a tale that conflicts with self-checkable evidence it tells me that people undervalue the role of evidence in formulating an internal belief system.  Why this is so is not so clear, but it enables many people to hold fast to ideas and notions based purely on supposition.  But all hope is not lost.  Occasionally, people say things that are simply true no matter what.  One of my favorites is, “Wherever you go, there you are” and its Zen corollary, “If we are all here, then we must not be all there.”  (pg. 297)

 

“Get your facts first, and then you can distort ‘em as much as you please.” (Mark Twain)  (pg. 329)

    I can’t think of anything to quibble about in Death by Black Hole, other than a single typo on page 132 referring the reader to “Section 9” for more information about the possibility of God stepping in “every now and then to set things right”.  There is no section 9.  That’s probably a printing error, since correct would be “Section 7”.

 

    A number of Amazon and Goodreads reviewers felt otherwise.  Some of their complaints:

 

    Neil deGrasse Tyson’s writing is too cute.  The book had no pictures of black holes.  The book’s cover was torn and the pages wrinkled.  Fake print.  Too hard.  Too simple (“cute beginner astronomy book”).  Too pessimistic.  Too anti-creation.  Too scary.  Not enough about black holes.

 

    Sigh.  For me, this was a great read that thoroughly met my expectations.  The essays are deep, yet not incomprehensible, unlike some other astrophysics books I’ve struggled through.  I highly recommend it to anyone seeking a greater understanding about how the Cosmos got here, where it’s going, what we know about the objects and forces that make up the Universe, and how we obtained that knowledge.

 

    9½ Stars.  One last teaser for the book.  Chapter 12 presents the history of scientists trying to determine the speed of light, starting with Galileo in the 1600s and continuing to the present day.  It thoroughly fascinated me.  The teaser is: if you wanted to do your own testing, how would you go about trying to measure the speed of light?

Hyperspace - Michio Kaku

   1994; 334 pages.  Full Title: Hyperspace – A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10^th Dimension.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Quantum Physics; Astrophysics; Science.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

 

    We live in a universe that has ten dimensions.  Not nine.  Not eleven.  Not three.  Not four.  There’s an outside chance that it actually has twenty-six dimensions, but let’s not go there.  Trying to visualize ten dimensions is going to be enough of a challenge.

 

    Part of that is our eyes’ fault.  We “see” in only three dimensions – length, width, and depth.  We might say we also “see” in a fourth dimension, time, and that’s valid, but it’s a temporal dimension, and here we are focusing on spatial ones.

 

    Physicists say the magic number is ten, and hey, they’re pretty smart.  But they admit they can’t see those extra dimensions either, their instruments can’t detect them, and they have no idea where those added dimensions might be hiding.  I have to wonder then, why do they even think such things exist?

 

    Michio Kaku gives us the answer early in this book: "The laws of nature are simpler in higher dimensions."

 

    Whatever that means.  And that's why I decided to read Hyperspace.

 

What’s To Like...

    Michio Kaku divides the fifteen chapters in Hyperspace into four sections, namely:

    Part 1: Entering the Fifth Dimension (Chapters 1-4)

        The early days of theorizing about higher dimensions, up through Einstein’s “e = mc²”.

    Part 2: Unification in Ten Dimensions  (Chapters 5-9)

        Quantum Physics, Superstrings, and what happened before the Big Bang.

    Part 3: Wornholes: Gateway to Another Universe?  (Chapters 10-12)

        Black Holes, Parallel Universes, and Time Machines.

    Part 4: Masters of Hyperspace.  (Chapters 13-15)

        How the World ends and how Ten Dimensions may provide an escape hatch.

 

    The chapters all have catchy titles, such as “Mathematicians and Mystics”, “The Man Who ‘Saw’ the Fourth Dimension”, “Einstein’s Revenge”, and “Signals from the Tenth Dimension”.  I found each section to be fascinating, but my favorite was Part 3’s chapters where Michio Kaku shows how to create a black hole that connects with a parallel world (which is not the same as a “multiverse”), how to build a Time Machine, and how we might interact with Multiverses.

 

     Michio Kaku demonstrates a clever way to visualize a fourth spatial dimension by creating a two-dimensional world (a stick figure on a sheet of paper), and asks us to imagine what happens if we “peel” that guy off the sheet of paper and immerse him in our 3-D world.  His eyes only work in two dimensions, so he sees magical things appearing out of nowhere, then disappearing just as miraculously.  Amazingly, a book was written in 1884 about such a two-dimensional world, titled Flatland by Edwin Abbot Abbot.  My local digital library has several copies of it (it is only of novella length), and I’ll probably borrow and read it sometime soon.

 

    There is of course lots of “sciency” stuff in the book, including mathematics (learn what’s so special about the number “1729”), chemistry (what phases does an ice cube undergo as you heat it to 10^{32 °}K), and futurology (eight different ways the world might end).  We spend a lot of time examining subatomic particles (there are hundreds of different kinds of them), and even how a much-ridiculed branch of mysticism called Theosophy embraced the concept of higher dimensions.

 

    As I expected, Michio Kaku’s infectious optimism shines throughout the book, but it was also enlightening to learn some anecdotal details of his life.  In high school, he built his own atom smasher in his parents’ garage, no small feat both from an engineering and a financial standpoint.  And watching the carp swim around in a pond at the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco triggered his youthful mind to ponder the imponderable: higher dimensions.  I am in awe of his thought processes.

 

Excerpts...

    Throughout this book, we have emphasized the fact that the laws of physics unify when we add higher dimensions.  When studying the Big Bang, we see the precise reverse of this statement.  The Big Bang, as we shall see, perhaps originated in the breakdown of the original ten-dimensional universe into a four- and six-dimensional universe.  Thus we can view the history of the Big Bang as the history of the breakup of ten-dimensional space and hence the breakup of previously unified symmetries.  This, in turn, is the theme of this book in reverse.  (pg. 195)

 

    Futurology has deservedly earned this unsavory reputation because every “scientific” poll conducted by futurologists about the next decade has proved to be wildly off the mark.  What makes futurology such a primitive science is that our brains think linearly, while knowledge progresses exponentially.  For example, polls of futurologists have shown that they take known technology and simply double or triple it to predict the future.  Polls taken in the 1920s showed that futurologists predicted that we would have, within a few decades, huge fleets of blimps taking passengers across the Atlantic.  (pg. 276)

 

As we approach the speed of light, we are blissfully unaware that we are turning into slow-witted pancakes.  (pg. 83 )

    I can’t find much to quibble about Michio Kaku’s writing, opinions, and/or scientific history in Hyperspace.  My biggest criticism has to do with the theories themselves, which were developed by other physicists along the way.

 

    It isn’t that those theories are wrong – it’s that in most cases they can’t be verified by testing.  The ten-dimension universe is a mathematical construct created by physicists to aid in finding the elusive GUT, the “Grand Unified Theory” which will unite the laws of macro-physics (“Newtonian”), micro-physics (Quantum), and Gravity into one cohesive and easy-to-understand system.  Thus far, GUT is a pipe-dream, ten dimensions or not.

 

    I could gripe that I had almost zero comprehension of Chapter 6, “Einstein’s Revenge”, but that’s mostly a reflection of my mental acuity (or lack thereof), not the author’s presentation.  Also , a section in the concluding Chapter of the book regarding "Holism vs. Reductivism" seemed silly to me, but then, I’m solidly in the Reductivist camp, and it’s really more relevant to the arts than to science.

 

    That’s about it.  To be clear, Hyperspace was a slow-yet-fascinating read for me, which is what I expect whenever I pick up a book on Quantum Physics.  It answered my fundamental question: “What’s the Big Deal about Ten Dimensions”, and if there’s no direct evidence for it, along with multiverses, parallel worlds, time travel, and wormholes, well, so what?  Check back in a thousand years or so (or maybe just a hundred), and the answer will quite likely be significantly different.

 

    9 Stars.  If you’ve been thinking about reading a book on Quantum Physics, but are scared that it will all be “over your head”, here’s my present list of writers on the subject, ranked from “most reader-friendly” to “most challenging”:  Lisa Randall - Michio Kaku - Neil DeGrasse Tyson - Brian Greene - Stephen Hawking.   The order is subject to change as I read more books, and additions of other authors as I broaden my literary-&-scientific horizons. 

Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs - Lisa Randall

   2015; 371 pages.  Full Title: Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs – The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Paleontology; Astrophysics; Quantum Physics; Science; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

    Dinosaurs!  Everybody, be they child or adult, is fascinated by them.  They dominated the earth for an astounding 165 million years - from 231 million to 66 million years ago - meaning, as one meme has put it, that Tyrannosaurus Rex was closer in time to listening to Justin Bieber than in meeting up with a Stegosaurus.

    Everyone knows that around 66 million years ago, something happened in a flash (which in paleontological terms means a million years or so) and 75% of all life on Earth perished, including all dinosaurs that couldn’t fly or burrow into the ground.  This is called “The Fifth Extinction”.

    But what caused this immense dying-off?  Well, when I was a kid, the prevailing theory was that climate change was the culprit – the inland seas dried up, the Earth was subject to global warming, and the dinosaurs couldn’t cope with the new conditions.

    Then in the 1980s, that hypothesis gave way to the proposition that a giant meteoroid slammed into the Earth and wreaked cataclysmic destruction.  That theory gained traction when an appropriately sized and appropriately timed impact crater was found off the Yucatan coast in Mexico.

    Lisa Randall now adds a new twist to that scenario in the form of the inscrutable essence called “dark matter”.  It can’t be seen, touched, felt, or measured, yet it penetrates and permeates everything in the universe without have any effect, save for a faint gravitational influence.

    Well that’s all fine and dandy, but what sort of evidence can she produce to support such a wild and wacky theory?  Let’s read Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs and find out.

What’s To Like...

    The central hypothesis of Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs is given in its introduction: the Solar System periodically passes through the midpoint of the galactic plane, wherein lurks a dense disk of dark matter.  The gravitational pull from that disk is strong enough to dislodge a flurry of comets from something called the Oort cloud, sending them into random new orbits, one of which impacted the Earth, wiping out the dinosaurs, and allowing mammals, then eventually homo sapiens, to flourish and dominate.

   The book is divided into three parts.  Chapters 1-5 covers the birth of the Universe itself, from a microsecond after the Big Bang through the time when galaxies and individual stars are created.  Chapters 6-15 focuses on the emergence of our Solar System, with special attention on comets and asteroids.  Chapters 16-21 then shows how Dark Matter could affect all of this, plus how scientists might detect and confirm its influence.

    The book is a cosmological delight.  If you’re interested in, but have never understood the whole concept of Dark Matter (that's me!) , this book will bring you enlightenment.  Moreover, I was impressed by the attention paid to the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud, both parts of the Solar System that most people have never heard of.  And I was surprised to learn that the Universe, the Milky Way, and our own Solar System are all pretty much “flat”, and why this is so.

    I enjoyed meeting Fritz Zwicky, who first proposed the existence of Dark Matter, and Fred Whipple (not the guy who squeezes the Charmin), who first called comets “dirty snowballs”.  I also learned why meteor craters, both on the Earth and the Moon are almost perfectly round, when you’d think they’d be off-center since whatever caused them is coming in at an angle.

    I laughed at some of the acronyms in the book.  There are “Squids” (Superconducting Quantum Interfering Devices), “Machos” (Massive Compact Halo Objects), “Wimps” (Weakly Interfering Massive Particles), and the mind-boggling “Edelweiss” (Expérience Pour Détecter les Wimps en Site Souterrain).  It was kewl to see Arizona’s Meteor Crater get some ink, ditto for my alma mater Arizona State University, and weird to see Chelyabinsk mentioned, since this is the second book I’ve read this year that featured it.

Kewlest New Word ...

Putative (adj.) : generally considered or reputed to be true.

Others: Conflated (v.).

Excerpts...

    The Milky Way galaxy is in a group of galaxies known as the Local Group, which is a gravitationally bound system of galaxies whose density is higher than average.  The Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy, also known as M31, dominate the group’s mass, but dozens of smaller galaxies belong to the group too – mostly satellites of the two bigger ones.  The gravitational binding force of the Local Group prevents the Milky Way and Andromeda from receding from each other with the Hubble expansion.  Their paths are actually converging and in about four billion years they will collide and merge.  (loc. 1441)

    In the early 1950s, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey at the University of Chicago did a famous experiment in which they heated a flask of water that was enclosed by a container filled with methane, ammonia, and hydrogen.  Their goal was to mimic the primordial ocean in the early atmosphere.  An electrical discharge acting on the water vapor played the role of lightning in their artificially created “atmosphere”.  Miller and Urey successfully produced amino acids with their simple apparatus, demonstrating that the production of amino acids in solar and extra-solar environments is actually no so surprising.  (loc. 3720)

Kindle Details…

    Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs is presently discounted at Amazon, going for the awesome price of only $1.99.  Lisa Randall has four other science e-books available, ranging in price from $7.49 to $9.99.

“All science is either physics or stamp collecting.” (Lord Rutherford)  (loc. 3927 )

    For me, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs was a fascinating book, but reading Lisa Randall’s technical justifications for her hypothesis can be brain-numbing, particularly the sections involving Quantum Physics.  Trying to comprehend the various “darks”: Dark Matter, Black Holes, Dark Energy, Anti-Dark Matter, Partially Interacting Dark Matter, Double-Disk Dark Matter, and Dark Disk Gravity, was also quite the challenge.  Many nights, after 15-30 minutes of reading this book, I was ready to switch to reading something more relaxing.

    I don’t think this is in any way a fault on the author's part.  Lisa Randall is proposing something radically new here, and her readers are going to range from a.) other astrophysicists, b.) other scientists (like me), and c.) people without a technical background.  If she solely caters to any one of those groups, the other two will be sorely disappointed.  Her astrophysicists colleagues will be particularly nitpicky when looking for holes in her analysis.  You can’t please everybody, but she does a good job in trying.

    Overall I found Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs to be a challenging, fascinating, and enlightening read.  In addition to learning a ton of stuff about Dark Matter, I was especially delighted by the attention given to the Oort cloud and the Kuiper Belt.  Yes, I got lost a lot in the quantum physics chapters.  But a little bit of mental calisthenics is good for the gray matter.

    9 Stars.  We’ll close with a brain teaser.  Suppose scientists detect a huge “Near Earth Object”, still weeks away, but headed for a crash landing on Earth.  What is our best strategy to deal with it:
    a.) try to blow it up,
    b.) try to deflect it by pushing it sideways, or
    c.) something else?

    Answer in the comments.

The Future of Humanity - Michio Kaku

   2018; 307 pages.  New Author? : Yes.  Full Title: The Future of Humanity: Our Destiny In The Universe.  Genres : Non-Fiction; Science; Cosmology.  Overall Rating : 9½*/10.

    There comes a time when you just have to pack things up and move.  We’re not talking about selling your house, we’re talking about leaving planet Earth at some point in the future.  It might be because of a nuclear holocaust, a plague, rising ocean levels, or an impending head-on collision with a killer asteroid.  Any of these scenarios could happen in the not-too-distant future.

    Relocating on the moon is a quick but futile answer, but Mars is a logical choice.  We’ll just get out the shovels, build space colonies, and terraform the climate there.  Alas, even that may not be the final solution.  Someday our sun will go supernova and scorch all the inner planets, including both Earth and Mars.

    We’ll then have to relocate to another solar system around some nearby star.  That’s a bigger undertaking, since the closest one is four light-years away and might not have any habitable planets for us.  Even worse, our Milky Way galaxy is on a course to crash into the neighboring Andromeda galaxy, so there may come a day when we might have to relocate to a different galaxy.

    Whew, we’re a long way from being able to do that, but even then we might not be done relocating. Someday our entire universe use up all its energy and just go dark and cold.  Then what?

    Let’s hope that by then we’ve figured out how to go hopping around to those parallel dimensions those quantum physicists having been telling us about.

What’s To Like...

    I read Origins, by Neil deGrasse Tyson a few months ago (reviewed here), which dealt with the chronological order of “births” in the Cosmos, in descending order of magnitude:  the Universe, the Milky Way Galaxy, our Sun, the Planets, and lastly life here on Earth.  In Michio Kaku’s The Future of Humanity that order is reversed, dealing with the “deaths” of each of those entities.  One hopes it is also in chronological order, since escaping each demise is an increasingly difficult technological challenge.

    The Future of Humanity is divided into three sections, namely:

        Part 1: Fleeing to other Planets (chapters 1-6)

        Part 2: Fleeing to Nearby Stars (chapters 7-9)

        Part 3: Fleeing to Faraway Stars and other Galaxies (chapters 10-14)

    The central premise of the book is that sooner or later humanity is going to be faced with every one of these emergencies.  To stay means to perish, and the author is too much of an optimist to resign us to that fate.  Each chapter starts with one or two relevant and witty quotes.  There are a couple diagrams and graphs scattered throughout the book, and a handy index in the back.

    Michio Kaku writes in an easy-to-understand style.  Even if you’re not an astrophysicist, you’ll be able to grasp what he’s talking about.  Numerous references to science fiction books, movies, and TV series help you visualize future technology.  But these are only cited if they are grounded in real-world physics.  If you’re hoping to be “beamed up” via a Star Trek transporter, you’ll be disappointed.

    The book is a treasure trove for all sorts of scientific trivia.  I learned the secret to living longer (caloric restriction), the mechanics of schizophrenia, and the multiple methods used to discover and examine planets revolving around distant stars.  String Theory is simplified to where it actually makes some sense, and the wonders of wormholes, anti-matter (we’ve already made some!), and graphene are detailed.  You’ll even learn what extraterrestrials are most likely to look like.  Take that, Fermi’s Paradox!

    We are obviously a long way from having the technology to do anything more than walk on the moon, but Michio Kaku gives you the most promising ways to accomplish the various astral journeys.  To achieve energy-efficient space flight, we can build “space elevators”.  To get to the nearest star, we can go “comet-hopping”.  To get to distant stars and other galaxies, we’ll probably use “nano-ships” and “transhumanism”.  The book details these and other options, giving the pros and cons of each.

Excerpts...

    Astronomers suspect that the Oort Cloud could extend as far as three light years from our solar system.  That is more than halfway to the nearest stars, the Centauri triple star system, which is slightly more than four light-years from Earth.  If we assume that the Centauri star system is also surrounded by a sphere of comets, then there might be a continuous trail of comets connecting it to Earth.  It may be possible to establish a series of refueling stations, outposts, and relay locations on a grand interstellar highway.  Instead of leaping to the next star in one jump, we might cultivate the more modest goal of “comet hopping” to the Centauri system.  This thoroughfare could become a cosmic Route 66.  (pg. 107)

    Unlike our sun the Milky Way galaxy will die in fire.  About four billion years from now, it will collide with Andromeda, the nearest spiral galaxy.  Andromeda is roughly twice the size of the Milky Way, so it will be a hostile takeover.  Computer simulations of the collision show that the two galaxies will enter a death dance as they orbit around each other.  Andromeda will rip off many of the arms of the Milky Way, dismembering it.  The black holes at the center of both galaxies will orbit around each other and finally collide, merging into a bigger black hole, and a new galaxy will emerge from the collision, a giant elliptical galaxy.  (pg. 295)

Killer asteroids are nature’s way of asking, “How’s that space program coming along?” (pg. 54 )

    It’s tough to come up with anything to quibble about in The Future of Humanity.  I still have trouble comprehending Quantum Mechanics, despite a section devoted to it near the end of this book.  Unfortunately, any solution to intergalactic travel is going to require using it.

    Similarly, Michio Kaku waxes philosophical when discussing hopping to a parallel dimension.  But let’s face it, trying to discuss the technology needed for that is kinda fruitless since we’re not even sure the multiverse exists.

    9½ Stars.  Overall, The Future of Humanity was a delightful read, detailing the “cosmic relocations” we might someday be forced to make, the technology needed to successfully make those moves, and the best-guess timetable to overcoming the astrophysical challenges.  Colleagues have been recommending Michio Kaku’s books to me for quite some time, and I'm bummed I didn't follow up on their recommendations sooner.  I was captivated by the author's effervescent optimism as well as his keen scientific insight.  I'll be reading more of his books in the near future..