Death by Black Hole

While I may not find Neil de Grasse Tyson to be the sexiest astrophysicist alive, I still find him an interesting guy. He spoke here in Madison back in February and it was at that time that I bought a copy of his book Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandries. Much to my shame, I must admit that it wasn't until a couple weeks ago that I actually began reading it.



The book is a collection of essays that Tyson wrote for Natural History magazine. In them, Tyson waxes scientific about epistemology, the nature of our solar system, the history of his field, how the universe works, and all points in between. These are broad, complicated topics but he does a great job of bringing these ideas to the layreader, with his essays full of wit and humor. For instance, when he discusses how science helps us overcome the limitations of our five senses, he invokes Star Trek and begins a thought experiment by saying, "Suppose a glowing blob of some unknown substance were parked right in front of us."

It is cliché by now to call Tyson the new Carl Sagan but the two have the amazing ability to make me feel like I've been put into the Total Perspective Vortex. Astronomers just have a knack for making me feel small and insignificant. First they talk about how Copernicus and Kepler shredded the geocentric view which put the Earth at the center of everything. More people come along and prove that, while our planet revolves around the Sun, our star is not the center of the universe either. Instead, our neighborhood is in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy which is one of countless galaxies.

Back in the late 1960s, Crosby, Stills, and Nash sang:

We are stardust, we are golden,
We are billion year old carbon

Tyson is happy to explain this lyric by detailing how stars are born and how they die in supernova explosions which send copious amounts of matter out across the universe. Later this matter becomes planets and, at least here on Earth, people. Joni Mitchell, who wrote the song that CSN covered, may not have been an astrophysicist, be she was right – we are indeed stardust.

The title of the book comes from an essay in a section called "When the Universe Turns Bad: All the ways the cosmos wants to kill us". Tyson begins the essay by stating, "Without a doubt, the most spectacular way to die in space is to fall into a black hole. Where else in the universe can you lose your life by being ripped apart atom by atom?"

But there is more here than descriptions of events that took place aeons ago in galaxies far, far away. The chapter called "Stick-in-the-Mud Science" details what you can learn about the Earth's rotation, the period it takes to revolve around the Sun, and the tilt of its axis by using a stick and a timing device. (A clone is involved too.) In "Things People Say", Tyson demolishes commonly held myths such as "The North Star is the brightest star in the nighttime sky", "In space there is no gravity", and "A compass points north".

Tyson also discusses light pollution and how this affects the ability of astronomers to view the sky from Earth. I suspect that as more people move to urban areas, fewer of us look skywards. Light pollution means that the night sky in a city is considerably less interesting than it is out in the country as streetlights and neon signs render all but the brightest objects invisible. Madison's problem isn't as bad as, say, Chicago, and there are opportunities for the public to join astronomers in gazing at the night sky.

You can head to the Washburn Observatory on campus every Wednesday during the summer and the 1st & 3rd Wednesdays the rest of the year.

There's also the the UW Space Place where you can do some rooftop stargazing and attend workshops.

The Madison Astronomical Society engages in a variety of activities and last night they held their annual Moon Over Monona Terrace which is open to the public.