Books with title The Sky Is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist

From the author of Astrophysics for People in a Hurry and the host of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey,a memoir about growing up and a young man's budding scientific curiosity.This is the absorbing story of Neil deGrasse Tyson's lifelong fascination with the night sky, a restless wonder that began some thirty years ago on the roof of his Bronx apartment building and eventually led him to become the director of the Hayden Planetarium. A unique chronicle of a young man who at one time was both nerd and jock, Tyson's memoir could well inspire other similarly curious youngsters to pursue their dreams.Like many athletic kids he played baseball, won medals in track and swimming, and was captain of his high school wrestling team. But at the same time he was setting up a telescope on winter nights, taking an advanced astronomy course at the Hayden Planetarium, and spending a summer vacation at an astronomy camp in the Mojave Desert.Eventually, his scientific curiosity prevailed, and he went on to graduate in physics from Harvard and to earn a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Columbia. There followed postdoctoral research at Princeton. In 1996, he became the director of the Hayden Planetarium, where some twenty-five years earlier he had been awed by the spectacular vista in the sky theater.Tyson pays tribute to the key teachers and mentors who recognized his precocious interests and abilities, and helped him succeed. He intersperses personal reminiscences with thoughts on scientific literacy, careful science vs. media hype, the possibility that a meteor could someday hit the Earth, dealing with society's racial stereotypes, what science can and cannot say about the existence of God, and many other interesting insights about science, society, and the nature of the universe.Now available in paperback with a new preface and other additions, this engaging memoir will enlighten and inspire an appreciation of astronomy and the wonders of our universe.

From the author of Astrophysics for People in a Hurry and the host of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey,a memoir about growing up and a young man's budding scientific curiosity.This is the absorbing story of Neil deGrasse Tyson's lifelong fascination with the night sky, a restless wonder that began some thirty years ago on the roof of his Bronx apartment building and eventually led him to become the director of the Hayden Planetarium. A unique chronicle of a young man who at one time was both nerd and jock, Tyson's memoir could well inspire other similarly curious youngsters to pursue their dreams.Like many athletic kids he played baseball, won medals in track and swimming, and was captain of his high school wrestling team. But at the same time he was setting up a telescope on winter nights, taking an advanced astronomy course at the Hayden Planetarium, and spending a summer vacation at an astronomy camp in the Mojave Desert.Eventually, his scientific curiosity prevailed, and he went on to graduate in physics from Harvard and to earn a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Columbia. There followed postdoctoral research at Princeton. In 1996, he became the director of the Hayden Planetarium, where some twenty-five years earlier he had been awed by the spectacular vista in the sky theater.Tyson pays tribute to the key teachers and mentors who recognized his precocious interests and abilities, and helped him succeed. He intersperses personal reminiscences with thoughts on scientific literacy, careful science vs. media hype, the possibility that a meteor could someday hit the Earth, dealing with society's racial stereotypes, what science can and cannot say about the existence of God, and many other interesting insights about science, society, and the nature of the universe.Now available in paperback with a new preface and other additions, this engaging memoir will enlighten and inspire an appreciation of astronomy and the wonders of our universe.

As the youngest-ever Director of the Hayden Planetarium, Neil de Grasse Tyson is America's best-known astrophysicist, constantly called upon by the media to explain news-making scientific phenomena such as the discovery of water on Mars. How did an African American kid growing up in the Bronx, expected by everyone to become a star athlete, not an intellectual, become an extraordinarily successful scientist? This is the fascinating and moving account of Tyson's love affair with the night sky, beginning with the fateful day when he, as a small boy, happened to turn a pair of binoculars up toward the moon and was struck with wonder.Packed with gorgeous descriptions of the night sky, The Sky Is Not the Limit invokes the grandeur of the cosmos as it tells Tyson's compelling personal story. In addition, it is a perceptive look at life and society as seen through the eyes of an astrophysicist, providing a valuable look into how scientists work in, and think about, the social, political, and physical world. From that eye-opening first glimpse of the moon, through his struggle to fulfill his dream of becoming an astrophysicist, to the triumphant opening of the new Hayden Planetarium, Tyson's story is remarkable.