The New York Times Book of Physics and Astronomy: More Than 100 Years of Covering the Expanding Universe

by Cornelia Dean, Neil deGrasse Tyson (Foreword)

From the discovery of distant galaxies and black holes to the tiny interstices of the atom, here is the very best on physics and astronomy from the New York Times! The newspaper of record has always prided itself on its award-winning science coverage, and these 125 articles from its archives are the very best, covering more than a century of breakthroughs, setbacks, and mysteries. Selected by former science editor Cornelia Dean, they feature such esteemed and Pulitzer Prize-winning writers as Malcolm W. Browne on teleporting, antimatter atoms, and the physics of traffic jams; James Glanz on string theory; George Johnson on quantum physics; William L. Laurence on Bohr and Einstein; Dennis Overbye on the recent discovery of the Higgs Boson; Walter Sullivan on the colliding beam machine; and more.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Physics, Astronomy, History

578 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 3, 2013

Reviews

[Esusands · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book does a very good job of explaining the "what's" "where's" and "when's" but it struggles heavily in the "whys" and "how's" in which I personally am the most excited to know about.

[Andrew Davis · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting review of advances in physics and astronomy over the last 120 years as reported by NYT journalists. Leads us through different hypothesi, and their development.

[JT · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good collection.

[Noah Goats · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've marked this book "Read" and given it four stars, but, I have to be honest, I have only read this book if you define "read" in the loosest possible way. I have read about 20% of this book. What I mostly did was leaf through, skim, and read the articles that jumped out at me for one reason or another (often not getting to the end of them). Still, I enjoyed the time I spent with this book, even if I only got a taste of it.

I enjoyed reading this book because it was fun to get a feeling of the excitement that people had when big scientific discoveries (like the existence of x-rays or the fact that the universe is expanding) were originally made. These were big, mind opening moments, and some of these writers convey a bit of that. My whole life I've known that the universe is expanding, but this fact blew minds when it was first discovered. This book reminds us of the joy of discovery.

It's also kind of fun to see scientists get things wrong, and then to watch as kinks in the theories get worked out over the course of a few articles. Instinctively people want to believe in SCIENCE. And for many people, that means believing that everything science says in the given moment is perfectly true. It is the WORD OF GOD. But, reading this book reminds you that science is a process that moves in fits and starts, that takes you the wrong way for a while before correcting, and then keeps building on the rubble of its own mistakes.

It's an inspiring book in its way, a testament to the human desire to figure stuff out for the sake of figuring stuff out, and of our ability to work through errors and find the truth, or at least something a bit closer to the truth than the last idea.