Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries

Science is fun, especially when explained by someone with a great sense of humor. Neil deGrasse Tyson is one of a number of scientists—in this case, an astrophysicist—with a talent for explaining scientific discoveries to the rest of us. The essays in his book range from trivial astronomical idiocies in movies, like the faked constellations in Titanic, to all the ways we can be killed by the cosmos—including asteroids crashing into Earth, collisions between galaxies and the eventual death of our sun. Tyson is best, though, in his discussion of why Intelligent Design can’t be science—and what a “science”-based on it would look like, with every unexplained natural phenomenon considered God’s unknowable work. It’s not death by black hole we need to fear, but the death of intellectual inquiry.