Tuesday's List: The Chapter Headings of Neil deGrasse Tyson's Latest Book

In my mind, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is currently the greatest popularizer of science in the world today, a worthy successor of past giants like Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan.  He has written a number of books over the years, but it wasn't until his latest, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, that I got around to reading one.  This one I purchased on Kindle, so I can take it with me wherever I go and read it...and reread it...at my pleasure on my cellphone.  Tyson's book should be adapted to a twelve-part television series, although there is a great amount of overlap with Cosmos, which Sagan was responsible for the first time around and Tyson for its remaking...

The chapter headings are in blue and capitals, along with some commentary from me about each.  Hope you enjoy it and get around to reading this remarkable book.  I know I'm going to look at some of Neil deGrasse Tyson's earlier works...

1  THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD
    Perhaps the most amazing thing about the beginning of the universe is the exactitude with which events can be measured by the "one ten-million-trillion-trillion-trillionth of a second" after the instant of the Big Bang and lengths by "one hundred billion trillionths of a meter" with precise times given for when the different fundamental forces of the cosmos each became distinct...yet nothing is known of what happened before the Big Bang...
2  ON EARTH AS IN THE HEAVENS
    Newton and Einstein established the universality of physical laws...not just on Earth, which isn't intuitively obvious...
3  LET THERE BE LIGHT
    There was no light in the universe until after 380,000 years when it had cooled enough for electrons to combine with nuclei to form atoms...freeing photons to travel unimpeded from collisions with them throughout the cosmos...
4  BETWEEN THE GALAXIES
    Who would have thought it: the so-called "space" between the galaxies is full of things like "dwarf galaxies, runaway stars, runaway stars that explode, million-degree X-ray-emitting gas, dark matter, faint blue galaxies, ubiquitous gas clouds, super-duper high-energy charged particles, and the mysterious quantum vacuum energy"...I don't know about you, but that last one kind of creeps me out...    
5  DARK MATTER
    Since dark matter does not interact with light or chemically with other matter, it's virtually impossible to pin down...yet there is a big discrepancy between the observed motions of galaxies with their known masses and the theories that predict those motions, which can only be reconciled by the presence of such a type of mass...
6  DARK ENERGY
    The ever-accelerating expansion of the universe can only be accounted for by inserting the concept of dark energy which, like dark matter, has never been observed or measured...its existence was accidentally predicted through Einstein's "blooper" of his "cosmological constant lambda"...
7  THE COSMOS ON THE TABLE
    A element-by-element romp through the Periodic Table, and their respective origins in the cosmos...
8  ON BEING ROUND
    Spheres are the natural shape of objects in the universe...but only when gravity exceeds the chemical and physical bonds between the matter within the objects.  At a certain mass threshold, celestial objects form spheres...hence smaller, irregular-shaped moons like Mars' Phobos and Deimos...and spheres like our Moon and the larger moons of the gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune...
9  INVISIBLE LIGHT
    In the early 1800s, the light spectrum was expanded to include invisible infrared and ultraviolet...as we now know, the visible light portion of the electromagnetic spectrum is relatively small, with the waves, in order from shortest to longest, being the gamma rays, X-rays, ultraviolet light, visible light, infrared light, radio waves, and microwaves...although this list is far from comprehensive.  So with instruments detecting non-visible sources of radiation we can learn much more about the universe...
10 BETWEEN THE PLANETS
    Asteroids, comets, gravitational and magnetic field effects from other planets, the solar wind (high-energy charged particles ejected by the sun), dust...and of course all those moons...are a few of the "goodies" to be encountered in the supposedly empty space between the planets in our solar system...
11 EXOPLANET EARTH
    Many planets...called "exoplanets" for being outside our solar system...have been discovered in other star systems of late.  How would intelligent, scientifically and technologically adept beings in a distant star system be able to detect Earth's presence as an exoplanet from their perspective...and what scientific means that are now available to us would reveal to them the nature of our home planet, whether it supports life...and even possibly intelligent life?
12 REFLECTIONS ON THE COSMIC PERSPECTIVE
     The author expresses his deep concerns for the ongoing problems here on Earth, but also stresses that much of the trouble and turmoil around us could be ameliorated if more and more people took on a cosmic perspective, which he lays out as a kind of manifesto...

I finished chapter 12 at page 208, so this is a pretty short book.  Tyson introduces the many concepts without snowing the reader under in overly technical explanations...but in the final analysis, he is true to his opening words: "The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you."  That having been said, Neil deGrasse Tyson made a whole lotta sense to me...