To Infinity and Beyond is a dramatic title for a collection of science facts organized by scale. We open with a chapter on baseballs and rockets in the atmosphere, zoom out to the solar system, where Tyson talks about how planets being in retrograde is an optical illusion, then cuts to a discussion of stories that mention other worlds, with a generous sprinkling of the “Actually, Icarus never could have flown” pedantry Tyson sometimes wanders into in the too-eager pursuit of being clever. There are a lot of sidebars that are visually ugly on Kindle (regardless of whether one uses white or black pages) and sometimes random. Why do whales suddenly appear in a discussion of the planets? And nary a Star Trek reference! (Well…NDT does mention that “Star Trek voyagers have to obey the prime directive”, so perhaps I’m too harsh.) There are three sections: Earth, Solar System, and — the rest of it. If you’re completely new to anything astronomical, I could see the book as an introductory smorgasbord: to me, though, it seemed like a bunch of random materials published elsewhere recollected here. I did find it alarming that there are ‘virtual particles’ which can apparently pop into existence anytime they feel like it. I do so miss the ol’ Newtonian universe.
(That’s Astrophysics/Cosmology down. Next up? Biology. Bam. Geology. Bam.)
Quotations
For Earth to become another Venus, we would first have to burn 10 times the quantity of fossil fuels our planet now holds. The slogan “Save the Earth,” laudable as the sentiment may be, misses the point and fails to convey the far more disturbing truth: Earth cares not a whit for us. It endured billions of years before our emergence and will continue to endure billions of years after the last Homo sapiens takes a final breath. As Dr. Ian Malcolm says in the 1993 film Jurassic Park, “Life finds a way.” But “life” may not necessarily include humanity.
Clearly resolved horizontal belts interlaced with countless smaller cyclones and anticyclones also make Jupiter look like an archaeological cross section of a Big Mac, bun included.
Meet the virtual particle. No, it’s not the kind of matter you’d find in an alternate universe. Virtual particles are the real magician’s rabbits of the universe, popping into and out of existence, out of thin air—indeed, the thinnest of air, which we might instead call “thin space.” Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle of quantum physics forces us to accept that the space between ordinary particles seethes with virtual particles that pop in and out of existence, undetected. As a result, we cannot call that space empty.
