Chris After I finished this book, I wondered who the intended audience was. I had imagined it to be a kind of “When Breath Becomes Air: Prominent Social Scientist Edition,” but it’s only a minority of posts in which EOW does in fact reflect on living and dying (or structure and agency, or his grandchildren, or the nature of historical memory or the
or the enterprise of sociology, or…). When you consider that this book is a reprint of his blog from CaringBridge, in which he was simply trying to keep his friends, family, and colleagues updated on the progress of his cancer, this makes sense. So it falls short of being a full-blown memoir of living with a terminal illness by definition.
And as an account of an experience of living with and dying of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) (and receiving a bone marrow transplant along the way), it’s probably already outdated, just given the constant evolution of cancer care.
But there’s a saying in academe, “Scratch a theory; find a biography.” EOW was about as prominent a social scientist as they come--and, even more rare, he was an optimistic one. Whereas I’m not sure I would read an end-of-life journal from any given prominent scholar within my field of interest or expertise, in this case it may well enrich one’s
enrich one’s understanding of EOW’s scholarly ideas to get to know the personality behind them. (I can’t vouch for this personally, having not read any of his scholarly books.) It is something to remain optimistic, matter-of-fact, and appreciative of life on one’s deathbed--and I think I would be inclined to "believe" his scholarly ideas that much more,
It’s also unusual for scholars of any stripe to even acknowledge that they live anywhere besides in their heads (i.e., certainly not in their bodies!). EOW deserves some serious props for being so frank about a domain that many academics are very uncomfortable in and certainly would not post about on a public CaringBridge page.
The same prominence that makes this book viable also makes EOW a little annoying, especially early on in the book/blog (i.e., before the cancer takes over, alas). He was a White man of a certain age who was a tenured professor at a major research university, and every so often I read a passage that seemed to reflect that and went “Wha--?”
For example: - His realization that “the capacity to exert effort may just be outside of one’s control.” (p. 11) Glad he finally got there, I guess? - The discussion about how having joy in one’s work was more important than any achievements (true; also much easier to accomplish if you are fortunate enough to have a job that has given you both) (p. 24)
- “...since I am very chatty, have interesting things to say, and am always eager to foster personal relations, my experience could be very different than that of many other patients.” (p. 36) This may just be the introvert in me speaking, but isn’t it up to others to say whether what you have to say is interesting?!
He does acknowledge his privilege a couple times, to his credit.
I will say, it was heart-wrenching to read this in "actual book" form and watch the pages in my right hand dwindle, even before he knew that the end was near. :/
Let's look at this book. What can we say about it? It's got nearly 500 pages, it's nicely produced, it's got some famous names on the cover. The blurb says it's based on a popular introductory astronomy course the authors gave at Princeton. Well, that tells us something, but it doesn't tell us what we want to know. Is it any good?
So let's stop for a moment and think about how we might answer the question. It doesn't really make any sense unless we have something to compare it with. What other books are like that, introductions to astronomy written by experts and aimed at smart laypeople?
So I'm going to start by taking three books that fit the general description, and I'm going to talk a bit about what they're like and how they're organized. I could pick books written recently, but I think that's a bad idea for a couple of reasons. First, there aren't a lot of books like this, and second, you don't have any perspective when you take recent
take recent stuff. I'm going to take some older books, where we know how things worked out for them from our early twenty-first century point of view. I'm going to look at those books and at the end I'm going to compare them with Welcome to the Universe.
Number one. Here's Exposition du système du monde, by Pierre-Simon de Laplace. Laplace published it in 1796 and it was the most famous pop science book in France for the next century. It's worth reading even today. Next up, Arthur Berry's A Short History of Astronomy.
It came out in 1898, and it was still the standard text at the beginning of World War II. And third, Fred Hoyle's Frontiers of Astronomy. It was published in 1955, and it was a major non-fiction bestseller. I read in Alan Lightman's and Roberta Brawer's very nice book Origins that it inspired a whole generation of astrophysicists.
Now all these books are examples of what Welcome to the Universe is trying to give you, a good one-volume summary of modern astronomy. What do we find in them? First of all you're going to get some history. People have been doing astronomy for more than two thousand years.
You've got to say something about that, both the things they got right and the things they got wrong. Because when you do science, you always get some things wrong. Later generations of scientists correct the things you got wrong. That's how you make progress.
Next, you write about the things scientists have found out recently, the cutting-edge material. Some of your audience will know this stuff but most of them won't. And then you add some bullshit, because scientists are just people and they love to bullshit when they think they can get away with it.
If you look at the three books I just showed you, you can see that they tried to mix up those ingredients a bit differently. Berry is quite conservative. He puts in a lot of history and you can see he's trying not to bullshit you. But sometimes you bullshit without meaning to and he does that quite a lot.
He tells you people like Kant once thought that galaxies were huge collections of stars a long way off, but no one takes that seriously any more. He was wrong! 25 years later, Hubble got good pictures of nearby galaxies, and then you could see that they really were huge collections of stars. Kant was right all along.
Hoyle is the opposite of Berry. He doesn't give you much history and the last third of the book is nothing but bullshit. He has his own theory, the Steady State theory, of how the universe had no beginning and has always been the same. He makes it sound very convincing. But it was completely wrong.
Laplace's book is remarkable. He has a very good, careful history of astronomy. He gives a terrific overview of Newtonian gravitational theory, which was then cutting-edge, state of the art research. He tells you how it was used to explain the movements of Jupiter and Saturn and the Moon, which are really complicated.
They are so complicated that some people thought Newton's gravitational theory was slightly wrong, but Laplace showed it was correct and explains everything. At the end, he has a bullshit section about how the Solar System started. He says he thinks it condensed out of a rotating cloud of gas. This was way past the state of the art in 1796. He was just
1796. He was just guessing. But he was right! His bullshit wasn't bullshit, it was prophetic. We can say that now because we know more. Very few people are as smart as Laplace was.
So let's get back to Welcome to the Universe. What's the mix there? There's quite a lot of history. They don't talk much about the ancient history of astronomy, there's nothing about the old Ptolemaic system with the epicycles and the deferents which Laplace and Berry explain in detail, but they do the more recent stuff very well.
They tell you how Planck found his radiation formula. They do a really good job of explaining what it means and showing you how it's completely central to modern astrophysics. The same with explaining Maxwell's field equations and Einstein's theories of special and general relativity. I really liked this part.
For example, they tell you how general relativity went through several different versions as Einstein was developing it, and how he used a version that wasn't quite right when he did one of his most famous calculations, the one about the advance of the perihelion of Mercury, but luckily it made no difference.
There are lots of other good things, like they give the details of how Rømer used eclipses of Jupiter's moons to estimate the speed of light back in 1676. I'll give them an 8 or even a 9 on the history.
Next, the recent stuff. This is also very good. You get a bang up to date tour of the Solar System with lots of new material about Kuiper Belt objects. There's an interesting section on exoplanets. There's lots of material about galaxy formation, showing you how we now know that dark matter and black holes play an essential role.
Hoyle's 1955 book had a couple of chapters about galaxies. They sound plausible, but today we can see it was all bullshit. Hoyle didn't know about dark matter and black holes. Welcome to the Universe probably gets it right, we have so much more data now.
They have nice material about the LIGO gravitational wave experiment, and how it found a collision between two black holes, and what it means. That's just from last year. Like I said, this book is up to date. I'll give them an 8 or a 9 for the recent stuff too.
And last, the bullshit. To be honest, I think this book has just a bit too much bullshit. I don't mean that in a bad way. Like I said, Hoyle's book has too much bullshit and it was truly inspiring. But I still think this book has too much. There's a very speculative chapter on life in the universe.
There's an even more speculative chapter on time travel. They use the time travel when they talk about what possibly came before the Big Bang. Maybe they'll get lucky the way Laplace did and it will turn out that the bullshit is actually correct! But I think that's against the odds. I'm giving them a 6 on the bullshit.
So all in all, I think this is a pretty good book. I'd say it's better than Berry. It's maybe even better than Hoyle. It's not as good as Laplace, but then that would be a miracle. If you're a smart young teen and you think you might want to be an astrophysicist, you should go out and get a copy. Maybe it'll inspire you.
After I finished this book, I wondered who the intended audience was. I had imagined it to be a kind of “When Breath Becomes Air: Prominent Social Scientist Edition,” but it’s only a minority of posts in which EOW does in fact reflect on living and dying (or structure and agency, or his grandchildren, or the nature of historical memory or the
- His realization that “the capacity to exert effort may just be outside of one’s control.” (p. 11) Glad he finally got there, I guess?
- The discussion about how having joy in one’s work was more important than any achievements (true; also much easier to accomplish if you are fortunate enough to have a job that has given you both) (p. 24)
I will say, it was heart-wrenching to read this in "actual book" form and watch the pages in my right hand dwindle, even before he knew that the end was near. :/