Despite some information overload, this is an irresistible subject, and readers will find Tasker’s richly detailed account...
An astronomical journey that explores how our cosmos “is an unseen creature that we are struggling to understand through the small sections we have uncovered.”
Headlines greeted the 1995 discovery of the first planet circling another sunlike star. The number now approaches 4,000, and more continue to turn up. Astrophysicist Tasker (Solar System Science/Hokkaido Univ.) joins the steady stream of authors eager to tell the story. After reviewing the dazzling technology required to detect planets millions of times further out than Pluto, she explains that planets form along with their sun from a whirling disc of gas and dust. Gravity and heat from the young sun eliminate nearby gas, so inner planets are small and rocky. Further out, gas and unvaporized ice remain, resulting in giant planets with thick atmospheres. Our system—four small, rocky inner planets and four immense, gassy outer planets in symmetrical orbits—gave astronomers confidence in their explanations, until exoplanets destroyed it. The first discoveries were huge “hot Jupiters” so close to parent stars that they orbited in a few days. Equally confusing were “super-earths,” with wildly varying sizes, atmospheres, and orbits. Well-behaved systems like ours barely exist. Everyone yearns to find another planet suitable for life, which would be similar to ours and at a distance from its sun where the temperature allows liquid water to exist. Many are turning up, but Tasker, no Pollyanna, reminds readers that Venus, Mars, and the moon are also in our sun’s temperate zone, and scientists still debate why Earth seems unique. An active researcher, the author clearly knows nearly everything about extrasolar planets, so readers will encounter fascinating details but also learn perhaps more than they want to know about star behavior and planetary formation and evolution.
Despite some information overload, this is an irresistible subject, and readers will find Tasker’s richly detailed account entirely satisfactory—until events overtake it in a few years.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4729-1772-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bloomsbury Sigma
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
Loads of good explaining, with reminders, time and again, of how much remains unknown, neatly putting the death of science...
Bryson (I'm a Stranger Here Myself, 1999, etc.), a man who knows how to track down an explanation and make it confess, asks the hard questions of science—e.g., how did things get to be the way they are?—and, when possible, provides answers.
As he once went about making English intelligible, Bryson now attempts the same with the great moments of science, both the ideas themselves and their genesis, to resounding success. Piqued by his own ignorance on these matters, he’s egged on even more so by the people who’ve figured out—or think they’ve figured out—such things as what is in the center of the Earth. So he goes exploring, in the library and in company with scientists at work today, to get a grip on a range of topics from subatomic particles to cosmology. The aim is to deliver reports on these subjects in terms anyone can understand, and for the most part, it works. The most difficult is the nonintuitive material—time as part of space, say, or proteins inventing themselves spontaneously, without direction—and the quantum leaps unusual minds have made: as J.B.S. Haldane once put it, “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.” Mostly, though, Bryson renders clear the evolution of continental drift, atomic structure, singularity, the extinction of the dinosaur, and a mighty host of other subjects in self-contained chapters that can be taken at a bite, rather than read wholesale. He delivers the human-interest angle on the scientists, and he keeps the reader laughing and willing to forge ahead, even over their heads: the human body, for instance, harboring enough energy “to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.”
Loads of good explaining, with reminders, time and again, of how much remains unknown, neatly putting the death of science into perspective.Pub Date: May 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-7679-0817-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
BOOK TO SCREEN
A media-savvy scientist cleans out his desk.
Tyson (Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, 2017, etc.) receives a great deal of mail, and this slim volume collects his responses and other scraps of writing.
The prolific science commentator and bestselling author, an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History, delivers few surprises and much admirable commentary. Readers may suspect that most of these letters date from the author’s earlier years when, a newly minted celebrity, he still thrilled that many of his audience were pouring out their hearts. Consequently, unlike more hardened colleagues, he sought to address their concerns. As years passed, suspecting that many had no interest in tapping his expertise or entering into an intelligent give and take, he undoubtedly made greater use of the waste basket. Tyson eschews pure fan letters, but many of these selections are full of compliments as a prelude to asking advice, pointing out mistakes, proclaiming opposing beliefs, or denouncing him. Readers will also encounter some earnest op-ed pieces and his eyewitness account of 9/11. “I consider myself emotionally strong,” he writes. “What I bore witness to, however, was especially upsetting, with indelible images of horror that will not soon leave my mind.” To crackpots, he gently repeats facts that almost everyone except crackpots accept. Those who have seen ghosts, dead relatives, and Bigfoot learn that eyewitness accounts are often unreliable. Tyson points out that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, so confirmation that a light in the sky represents an alien spacecraft requires more than a photograph. Again and again he defends “science,” and his criteria—observation, repeatable experiments, honest discourse, peer review—are not controversial but will remain easy for zealots to dismiss. Among the instances of “hate mail” and “science deniers,” the author also discusses philosophy, parenting, and schooling.
A media-savvy scientist cleans out his desk.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-324-00331-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
