Review - Death by Black Hole

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Review - Death by Black Hole - Neil deGrasse Tyson

An unashamed collection of short articles on a wide range of scientific issues, but most with a cosmological flavour, this is a book that it's near impossible to dislike - but equally it's difficult to get excited about it. The articles are too short for Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History, to develop a theme to any great length, and there is the occasional repetition too where topics overlap - but if you like your science bite sized - perhaps as something to read on a subway journey (or in the bathroom), it could well be for you.

Almost inevitably, Tyson is at his best when dealing with cosmology, and he gives a really good feel for both the sense of wonder that drives people to be astronomers and astrophysicists. The more general physics is okay, but less inspired, while he's weakest when he strays into history of science, where his "facts" can be a little out of date or school level, as when he attributes the invention of the telescope to Lippershey.

I'm also rather sad that he pushes the idea of natural laws, which isn't really helpful when trying to get people to understand the scientific method. It's this obsession with "laws" versus theories that lets people say "evolution is just a theory." Scientific laws are very much a concept of the clockwork era of science espoused by Newton. Now, I think, we moved on to understand that our theories are the best we can do at the time, and some of them are very, very solid - like quantum electrodynamics - but are always likely to be eclipsed as we find out more - a future that could well happen, for instance, to many cosmological theories of the present day.

Don't let that put you off, though. Many of the articles are engaging and entertaining. They are written with a light hand, and are easy to consume. If a particular article doesn't really excite you, you can always skip on to another. This isn't in any sense a bad book. It just didn't thrill.

Reviewed by Brian Clegg

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