Astrophysics for people in a hurry

Prelude

Imagine yourselves climbing steep steps, treaded long and standing facing an endless valley; a beautiful scenery.

Wouldn’t you feel suddenly insignificant before it’s massiveness? Forget the cliff, look at the sky with all those billion stars and planets and darkness between them! Does our presence even matter?

The Beginning

“Astrophysics for people in a hurry”, sounded like one of the quick coursera sessions where you get some basic idea of what’s going on. A few pages down, I realised: this book gives us much greater view than that!

People would have known Neil deGrasse Tyson from his Cosmos series. He is quite a popular astrophysicist, also he appears in a lot of television shows and brings rocket science to our halls.

He begins thus.

Right in the first chapter we feel an astounding awe for the human ability that detected the big bang! We know, at least from some random insta posts, that we are a part of star dust. But do we know how exactly? Humans have traced the tiniest of the subatomic particles from some 14 billion years ago when it all “started”. And from then on there is a steady track on how these sub-subatomic particles have fused in among them all the way to form complex metals like Iron or Uranium. Clumps of all these star dust, from a tiny little singularity, is what we call a planet or star or pulsar or asteroid or you or me!

The beauty of his narration is explaining with no little of a child’s curiosity, the event that led to those discoveries. Say for eg, how the Cosmic Microwave background is detected as noise signals in Bell laboratories antennae; or a uniform pulse like a Morse code, as what was believed to be from some faraway aliens, being received from almost all sides in space leading to the discovery of Pulsars.

Interludes

Each of the 12 chapters in the book has scope to become separate books of its own. But you know, this is for people in a hurry. Among the most famous astrophysics terms, he explains us dark energy, dark matter, what is between galaxies and the concept of multiverse.

My wish is to see three of these chapters, being developed into bulky books with his style of narration. All these are no way connected to each other, but let me try to give a rough idea on each of those.

First among that is astrophysics view on the periodic table. By far this is an altogether different perspective of chemical elements. I wish periodic table was taught to me like he puts things here. As an astrophysicist, he names this episode as “The Cosmos in the table” and compares the periodic table to that of a zoo. A Zoo with one-of-a-kind animals, the elements.

From The Cosmos in the table

How else could we believe that sodium is a poisonous, reactive metal that you can cut with a
butter knife, while pure chlorine is a smelly, deadly gas, yet when added together they make sodium chloride, a harmless, biologically essential compound better
known as table salt?

At least you might think chemical elements are connected to physics. How about this chapter – “On being Round”. Puzzled right? This is one full essay of explaining roundedness of the bodies in universe. There are not much hexagonal planets or square moons or 3D trapezoidal asteroids and definitely no skull shaped exoplanets that you might see in Guardians of Galaxy Vol 2. What intrigues me about this chapter is that, I didn’t expect this coming at all! I expected some geeky technical stuff. Instead, Tyson emphasises the importance of basic principles on which any complex hypothesis is seated!

Sorry Marvel fans. There is no such “Knowhere”

Third is my most favorite episode, on which I would like to see a TV series. The chapter is “Exoplanet Earth”, where he gives an external view on what we know as ‘our own planet’. For an intelligent alien living in some distant galaxy how will our planet look? What are some of the clues we give out involuntarily to those aliens and what will those people think about our blue planet based on those clues. I ain’t revealing any details/spoilers on this episode here. Looking from this standpoint is outright amazing and people in a lot of hurry should read this first!

Finale

There’s a question hanging right from Prelude right? Let me state what Neil deGrasse Tyson here:

How could that be (feeling insignificant)? Every time I see the endless space, I feel alive and spirited and connected. I also feel large, knowing that the goings-on within the three-pound human brain are what enabled us to figure out our place in the universe.

I no longer feel insignificant.