Death by Black HoleDeath by Black Hole

According to astrophysicist Tyson, director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium, size does matter when it comes to black holes, although the chances of your surviving the encounter aren't good in any case. Tyson takes readers on an exciting journey from Earth's hot springs, where extremophiles flourish in hellish conditions, to the frozen, desolate stretches of the Oort Cloud and the universe's farthest reaches, in both space and time. Tyson doesn't restrict his musings to astrophysics, but wanders into related fields like relativity and particle physics, which he explains just as clearly as he does Lagrangian points, where we someday may park interplanetary filling stations. He tackles popular myths (is the sun yellow?) and takes movie directors--most notably James Cameron--to task for spectacular goofs. In the last section the author gives his take on the hot subject of intelligent design. Readers of Natural History magazine will be familiar with many of the 42 essays collected here.
In this collection of forty-two essays on the cosmos and our place in it, astrophysicist and Hayden Planetarium director Neil deGrasse Tyson explores the nature of knowledge, how we discover the contents of the cosmos, how nature presents herself to the inquiring mind, the meaning of life and the challenges of learning how we got here, all the ways the cosmos wants to kill us, the interface between scientific discoveries and the public's reactions to them, and science and God.