''Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries'' is a 2007

popular science ''Popular Science'' (also known as ''PopSci'') is an American digital magazine carrying popular science content, which refers to articles for the general reader on science and technology subjects. ''Popular Science'' has won over 58 awards, incl ...

book written by

Neil deGrasse Tyson Neil deGrasse Tyson ( or ; born October 5, 1958) is an American astrophysicist, author, and science communicator. Tyson studied at Harvard University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Columbia University. From 1991 to 1994, he was a po ...

. It is an

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of several of Tyson's most popular articles, all published in

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between 1995 and 2005, and was featured in an episode of ''

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''.

Summary

''Death by Black Hole'' is divided into seven sections: The Nature of Knowledge, The Knowledge of Nature, Ways and Means of Nature, The Meaning of Life, When the Universe Turns Bad, Science and Culture, and Science and God. Section 1 comprises five chapters: * Chapter 1, "Coming to Our Senses", discusses how important the augmentation of our five basic senses (sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch) is for expanding scientific knowledge. Tools that convert (seemingly) latent aspects of our environment into quantities we can sense greatly ease scientific discovery. For example,

night vision Night vision is the ability to see in low-light conditions, either naturally with scotopic vision or through a night-vision device. Night vision requires both sufficient spectral range and sufficient intensity range. Humans have poor night vi ...

goggles convert the near-infrared spectrum into the

visible spectrum The visible spectrum is the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that is visual perception, visible to the human eye. Electromagnetic radiation in this range of wavelengths is called ''visible light'' or simply light. A typical human eye wil ...

, making it easier for biologists to observe nocturnal animal behavior. * Chapter 2, "On Earth as in the Heavens", addresses the history of physics and how it came to be known that physical laws observed on Earth are also observed on the sun and the other planets. In short, how physics became a study of the universal rather than just the terrestrial. * Chapter 3, "Seeing Isn't Believing", hints at the pitfalls of generalizing from too little evidence. It begins by making the point that although we know the Earth is round, it appears flat when one observes only a small, local portion of it. * Chapter 4, "The Information Trap", observes that we can view our surroundings at many different scales, and may find different phenomena at different scales. For instance, on a

macroscopic scale The macroscopic scale is the length scale on which objects or phenomena are large enough to be visible with the naked eye, without magnifying optical instruments. It is the opposite of microscopic. Overview When applied to physical phenomena an ...

classical mechanics describes the physical behaviors we observe, while on a smaller scale,

quantum mechanics Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles. It is the foundation of all quantum physics including quantum chemistry, ...

comes into play. *Chapter 5, "Stick-in-the-Mud Science", guides the reader through a series of experiments based primarily on watching how the shadow of a stick, stuck upright in the earth, changes as time passes. For example, one can observe that, in the northern hemisphere, over the course of a day, the shadow of the stick will trace out a semi-circle as it moves clockwise.

External links

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References

2007 non-fiction books Astronomy books Cosmology books Popular physics books Books by Neil deGrasse Tyson W. W. Norton & Company books {{physical-cosmology-book-stub