#1 — Death By Black Hole/Neil deGrasse Tyson

After many hours (about 9 of the last 28), a late night snack, and the removal of a stink bug from the premises, I have completed the first book. Or as NdT would like me to say, I have accomplished 1% of this task.

If you’ve ever wanted to read this book, I would recommend not reading it all in one day. It is notably a series of essays and not a cohesive narrative, which I’m sure wouldn’t be as noticeable if read over a period of weeks, but all at once, the redundancy from chapter to chapter is noticeable (and annoying).

Don’t get me wrong though, this book is fabulous. If you want to learn the broad state of human understanding of the universe (admittedly, the universe of 2007) mixed with just a dab of hardcore science, look no further. NdT has done tremendous things for science communication and he’s just straight up a cool dude. But I have to say, the cover of the book says a lot about content, both of the book and potentially of Mr. Tyson’s character.

You’ll notice that clearly the largest, brightest, and most central part of the cover is not the title of the book, but the name of the author. Astrophysics might be the humbling science, but it’s clearly not that humbling. Despite the fact that I admire NdT tremendously, he comes across, both in his writing and in his aired appearances, as a bit arrogant. As a spokesperson for a large group of people that already suffer from perceptions of elitism and arrogance (the scientific community), this seems like a fatal error. Particularly given the way he painted himself as heir apparent to Carl Sagan in his reincarnation of Cosmos, he has a way to go to embody the profound sense of wonder and humility that Sagan captured and communicated.

Don’t get me wrong though, the book is full of fascinating tidbits and well worth the read for fun fact value alone. Here are some of my favorites:

“[Due to Earth’s mild oblateness] if you stand at sea level anywhere on the equator, you’ll be farther from Earth’s center than you’d be nearly anywhere else on Earth.”

“On Venus you could cook a 16-inch pepperoni pizza in seven seconds, just by holding it out to the air.”

“Unlike any other known planet, the average density of Saturn is less than that of water. In other words, a scoop of Saturn would float in your bathtub.”

“[Scientists have] determined that the universe is really a light shade of beige, or perhaps, cosmic latte.”

“Not only do we live among the stars, the stars live with us.”

But by far the best parts of the book are NdT’s rants about science in pop culture. He rips apart many a Hollywood endeveour, from Titanic to Independence Day, but my personal favorite is his attack on Star Trek;

“V-jer, as it called itself, was an ancient mechanical space probe that was on a mission to explore, discover and report back. The probe was “rescued” from the depths of space by a civilization of mechanical aliens and reconfiured so that it could actually accomplish this mission for the entire universe. Eventually the probe did acquire all knowledge and, in so doing achieved consciousness. The Enterprise stumbles upon this now-sprawling monstrous collection of cosmic information when it’s searching for its original creator and the meaning of life. The stenciled letters on the side of the original probe revealed characters V and ger. Shortly thereafter, Captain Kirk discovers that the probe was Voyager 6, which had been launched by humans on Earth in the late twentieth century. Apparently the oya that fits between the V and the ger had be badly tarnished and was unreadable. Okay. But I have always wondered how V-ger could have acquired all knowledge of the universe and achieved consciousness yet not have known that it’s real name was Voyager.”

NdT’s need to tear apart your favorite movies for the sake of science gets to the heart of the angry arrogance that is reticent throughout his writing/speaking. There’s this disruptive, in-your-face vein throughout of, “this is the truth, get over it” (he actually uses the words ‘get over it’ quite a lot). This fundamentally is not the way to win hearts and minds. Science is a miraculous, awe-inspiring way of thinking that helps us understand ourselves, each other, and the universe. Helping people learn to accept (and maybe even come to love) science is not a matter of shoving it down their throats, its a matter of stimulating excitement, of firm commitment, of gentle insistence. Particularly because at the end of the day, I don’t think that many science deniers are going to pick up/make it all the way through 362 pages of an NdT book, so with that in mind, stop berating the choir.

Book 2: Animal’s People/Indra Sinha

*I would like to call out NdT’s aversion to any kind of non-Western narrative on scientific knowledge, he notes directly that “the Northern Hemisphere is where civilization began” which argumentatively might be true based on his definition of civilization, but is pretty dismissive of advanced astro-physical cultures in South America, not to mention that a cradle of life was recently discovered in South Africa.