Astrophysics for Young People in a Hurry

"Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History. I’ve actually heard him talk: I was speaking at European AstroFest, giving a talk on comparisons between planets and Earth, and he gave a great talk on astrophysics, about detecting distant galaxies and other really interesting stuff. We felt this book was just really nicely written. In the first sentence he writes, “in the beginning, nearly 14 billion years ago, the entire universe was smaller than the period that ends this sentence.” He really has a good way of capturing the enormity of what you’re looking at. “Science should be fun, and we wanted books that get that across” The book has nice little digressions too, where he talks about the physics. So there’s a little bit about Newton and the impact that had and then there’s things about the oblateness of the Earth—in other words, it isn’t exactly spherical—and that you’re a little bit lighter at the equator than you are at the poles. So there are lots of little titbits throughout the book, but also a really nice narrative through what is current in astrophysics, what we know about the Big Bang and other questions. The book is very readable and we thought it would reach out to a lot of children. I learned something from these books! Definitely. Reading all these books was good for me. I suspect a number of these books we’ll be constantly going back to for facts. Keep it simple, it’s great."