44 pages • 1 hour read
Neil Degrasse TysonAstrophysics for People in a Hurry
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaKey Figures
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Neil deGrasse Tyson, PhD, is an astrophysicist, science popularizer and teacher, and administrator of the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He got his bachelor of arts from Harvard and his doctorate from Columbia University; both degrees are in astrophysics. He has written or co-written several books and hosted multiple TV programs, including Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, Nova Science Now, and StarTalk. “In November 2000, the main-belt asteroid 1994KA, discovered by David Levy and Carolyn Shoemaker, was named 13123–Tyson” in the author’s honor (176-77).
Tyson is widely considered the heir to the legacy of his mentor, Carl Sagan, an astrophysicist, exobiologist, and the prominent science writer and educator of his generation. Tyson’s work on his Cosmos series honors the earlier series of the same name by Sagan.
Isaac Newton
Widely considered one of the greatest scientists in history, Englishman Isaac Newton (1642-1727) figured out the universal laws of motion and gravity, co-invented calculus, made important contributions to optics, invented the first reflecting telescope, and made many other contributions to human knowledge. In Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, Newton is important chiefly for his discovery that the laws of physics apply everywhere, from an apple falling off a tree to the stars moving through the heavens.
Albert Einstein
Following in Newton’s footsteps was Albert Einstein, a German scientist who, in the early 20th century, showed that gravity is the bending of space caused by the mass of objects and that objects moving past us at high speed, or inside a very large gravitational field, operate at a different time rate. These discoveries modify Newton’s laws to account for the enormous distances and sizes of very large objects in space. In the present book, Einstein’s work shows how strange the universe can be; his discoveries also demonstrate the way science, rather than preaching dogma, improves old theories through further research and analysis.
Fritz Zwicky
Feisty and brilliant, Swiss-American astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky taught at the California Institute of Technology for four decades and discovered that the Coma supercluster’s member galaxies orbit each other much faster than their masses suggest. Other galactic clusters later were found to behave in the same way, which means either there is more mass within the clusters than can be detected or there’s something wrong with the theory of gravity. Zwicky coined this mysterious force “dark matter.” He also developed the concept of supernovas and helped invent jet engines. The author mentions him to give credit to early scientists who had the genius and foresight to recognize the challenges science now faces.
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By Neil Degrasse Tyson
