The audiobook is frustrating because it is quite hard at times to follow the algebra amd you don’t get any of the pretty postures the book has... but beyond that this is a great piece.

Beyond Neil’s funny quips about the eventual potential fish found on the moon Europa being called europeans, the book offers two key jewels:
- a derivation of E = mc^2 that is the most intuitive I have ever read
- an application of the Copernican Principle to everyday estimation of how long things will last

Many other perspective views that tie the universe up into a pretty weird object, but walking through the steps that took us there.

Only big critique is that Gott does not really describe his strongest critics in the business of universes, he drifts over how contested many string theory approaches have been.

Great read nevertheless... ( )

Astrophyisics for people in less of a hurry than those who went for "Astrophysics for People in a Hurry". I liked it more, but I didn't get into it very far, because it is slower going. Also, I had started reading "Asimov's Guide to Earth and Space", which has a somewhat similar topic, but was proving much more fun to read.

Given that I am a layperson and my calculus is far behind me, I still believe that I was conceptually able to grasp at least a quarter of the matter in the book, the rest remaining "dark matter" for me, existent, imaginable but not yet graspable. The authors do a great job of explication, but this still means that thus is a challenging book. I do feel that my understanding of the process behind E=mc2 for instance rose to a higher level as a result of spending quality time with these 3 intelligent and witty men. ( )

" Bienvenidos al universo" es un viaje por el cosmos muy personal de la mano de tres de los astrofísicos más importantes de hoy en día. Inspirado en el curso de introducción a la astronomía enormemente popular que Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michael A. Strauss y J. Richard Gott enseñaron juntos en Princeton, este libro abarca todo sobre los planetas, las estrellas, las galaxias, los agujeros negros, los agujeros de gusano... ¡y los viajes en el tiempo! Da cuenta de los últimos descubrimientos en astrofísica con una narrativa amena e informativa, permitiéndonos viajar desde nuestro sistema solar hasta las fronteras más lejanas del espacio. ¿Cómo viven y mueren las estrellas? ¿Cómo Plutón perdió su condición de planeta? ¿Cuáles son las probabilidades de vida inteligente en otros planetas? ¿Cómo empezó el universo? ¿Por qué se está expandiendo y por qué la expansión se está acelerando? ¿Es nuestro universo parte de algún multiverso infinito? Contestando a éstas y a otras preguntas, los autores te abrirán los ojos a las maravillas del cosmos, compartiendo sus vastos conocimientos sobre cómo funciona el universo.

Ugggggg .... I have been trying to write this review for four days. Maybe it takes me a percentage of the time I took to read the book to formulate a review? It did take me over a week to read Welcome to the Universe, with Neil deGrasse Tyson's name in bigger font than the other two co-authors. At first that made me sad for the other two authors, but then I got miffed over J. Richard Gott's chapters, where there's a lot of I did this!, which probably shouldn't annoy me as much as it did, since he did figure this stuff out, but it seemed kind of braggy to me and I just want to learn abstractly about science, not be amazed that the author I'm reading now did this stuff.

So I got annoyed.

Cool idea I did get from Welcome to the Universe: think of everything as bread. Slice horizontally (like here in North America) for one slice of space-time, but slice on an angle (like a baguette) for a relative slice of space-time. The bread is still the same, but how one views what's happening in/on the bread changes. I'm glad I got to that before I got fed up with physics.

Ooh -- and something else -- I found out what word I wanted for a review of another physics book ages ago: falsifiable. I couldn't remember that word, but much of what was written in The Universe is a Machine wasn't falsifiable, so, from a science perspective, those ideas were kind of a non-starter. But that has nothing really to do with the book I'm supposed to be reviewing ...

I'm in a weird place with physics books. I probably have enough math background that if I really wanted to, I could read textbooks rather than pop-science books (albeit much more slowly, and with a pad and pencil in hand for figuring things out), but I don't want to read a physics textbook. But then I read pop-science books and get frustrated that details I want to understand (like math stuff) is missing. But I don't want to read a physics textbook. But I want to know more about what's behind the science, which is generally math that I could probably understand given enough time and pencil lead. But I don't want to write physics notes in bed. But I want to know more!

Is the moral that I should stop reading about cosmology and relativity? I mean, both of those things are going to go scootering on along in life without me understanding them or not.

Science is hard.

Welcome to the Universe by Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michael A. Strauss, and J. Richard Gott went on sale September 1, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. ( )