Death by Black Hole

Death by Black Hole by Neil deGrasse Tyson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I wanted to like this book. I love reading popular science books. Up to the point where I read this book, Neil DeGrasse Tyson had seemed interesting and amusing when I saw him being interviewed. I should note that this isn't really an original book, but instead a collection of previously published essays, but that didn't bother me either, as I have enjoyed several of those.

But then, as I read the book, I kept coming across errors or, if I'm being more generous in some cases, over-simplifications or badly written or confusing passages. You can say that a lot of them don't matter (like saying that that the names of the days of the week come from the seven "planetes" (wonderers) that the Greek knew about. Except that in English, it is more complicated than that. Sunday is obviously from the Sun. Monday is from the Moon. Tuesday is from Tyr, a Norse god. Wednesday is from Woden, a Norse God. Thursday is from Thor, as Norse god. Friday is from Frieda, a Norse godess. Saturday is from Saturn. So, three out of seven.

Or when his "proof" that you should avoid gamma rays is The Hulk: ("Gamma rays are the sort of radiation you should avoid. Want proof? Just remember how the comic strip character 'The Hulk' became big, green, and ugly.") That is proof?

Another frustrating thing to me is his frequent correction of misunderstandings, where he is taking something literally that is not meant to be taken as literal, and then basking in his intelligence as he corrects those who are misunderstanding the world.

Like saying "those who say 'What goes up must come down!' are misinformed" because the escape velocity of the Earth is 11 km/sec.

Or "A compass points north" (because it points south too, dummies!).

Or "days get longer in the summer and shorter in the winter" (because summer doesn't officially start until the longest day of year, and really, I think that this is a cheat, since most people say "days are longer is summer", not get longer).

Or "the sun rises in the east and sets in the west" (because it is only exactly east and west twice a year).

It is as if someone so smart doesn't understand that people speak in conversational shorthand. These statements are all true in the sense in which people use them in everyday conversation.

An example of the writing problems are sentences like "Isaac Newton passed white light through a prism to produce the now-familiar spectrum of seven colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet, which he personally named. (Feel free to call them Roy G. Biv.)" I don't know how else to read that but that he is saying that Newton either named these seven colors or that he named violet, which is ridiculous. It turns out that he means that Newton decided that the spectrum was made up of these seven colors (because of 7 musical notes and 7 days of the week) and the first to apply the Latin word spectrum to that range of colors.

Or when he repeats the easily disproven notion that most dust is made up of human skin.

Or that he thinks Al Magest is Arabic for "The Greatest" (Akbar is "greatest" in Arabic).

Or the sentence "At this time in the life of a cloud, astrophysicists can only gesticulate what happens next." I don't think that word means what you think it means.

The biggest problems come when he writes about history or religion, which he plainly knows very little about. It becomes clear late in the book what the problem is. He has apparently been taught that the "Conflict Thesis" (i.e. that religion and science are in conflict, always have been, and always will be) is the correct interpretation the world. More about why that is wrong in a minute, but first, lets look at his misunderstandings of history.

First, somewhat ironically if you actually know the history, his recounting that Board of Longitude's sought for a chronometer to determine longitude. Actually the scientists on the board hated Harrison's chronometer and avoided giving him the prize money that he had earned, because they wanted a scientific method of determining the measurement, not a device from a simple mechanic. So here we have a scientist praising scientists for seeking for something that they didn't look for and didn't want, because he believes that scientist are seekers after truth, so they must be motivated out of goodness, when the opposite was what really happened.

Or that Galileo's observations in support of the heliocentric model "shook Christendom" (in case you don't know, it wasn't the extremely religious clergy who disliked heliocentrism, it was the Aristotelians scholars - it wasn't the fact that the theory contradicted the Bible, it was that it contradicted Aristotle). The church didn't really care about what he was doing, because Christianity isn't based on astronomical facts. Galileo was allowed to teach heliocentrism to his students and the first book he wrote on the subject was widely praised. It was only later when he got involved in religion and insulting the pope, and when he insulted those who pointed out the scientific problems* with the theory that he got into trouble.

Or when he says "The Bible says the stars don't change" despite the most famous star (the Bethlehem star) in the Bible is famous because a) it was a new star and b) it "went on before them" (i.e. it moved and the wise men followed it). I'd be interested to see what he is talking about. I looked up every verse in the Bible that mentions stars and couldn't find one verse about them not moving.

He says that we have "no record of anybody in all of Europe recording" the 1054 supernova, because the Church denied that such things could happen (i.e. new stars). First, the claim that no European recorded the event is disputed. But even if it is so, other supernovae in the Middle Ages where recorded in Europe, so what this one being missed says about the Christianity and the Church isn't clear. He wants it to prove that Christianity was holding back science. That seems more than a bit of a stretch. Plus, he says that "Middle Eastern astronomers" wrote about, but the only citation that I can find is to one Nestorian Christian doctor who blamed a plague on the event.

Tyson clearly believes that the Conflict Thesis is correct. He quotes approvingly from Andrew D. White's book "A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom" (1896). The problem is that no serious historian of science thinks that White's book is good history or that the Conflict Thesis is correct. For example, White's book is the primary source of the belief that people believed in a flat Earth before Columbus. He included as many stories, dubious or not, in the book as he could find it helped promote his ideology.

Needless to say, if you only look for evidence that proves you are right and don't care if the evidence is true, you will find plenty of evidence to support you. Stephen Jay Gould perhaps best explained when he noted "White's and Draper's [the other great instigator of the thesis] accounts of the actual interaction between science and religion in Western history do not differ greatly. Both tell a tale of bright progress continually sparked by science. And both develop and use the same myths to support their narrative". It is frankly bizarre that a person of his intellect is still relying on a book more than 100 years old for his information.

I have to say reading this book, with its many errors and biases has soured me on Tyson. And when I see him opening his series Cosmos with the Giorano Bruno story as if he was burned at the stake for his scientific inquiries, it is clear that nothing since this book was written has changed.

*The biggest problem with the theory, at that time, was that there was no measurable parallax with the stars. This meant that the stars would have had to be unbelievably far away (for the understanding of the universe at that time). It wasn't until the 19th Century that measurements were precise enough to overcome this problem.

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