In this book, Asimov brought together a bunch of essays he had previously published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. They were categorized under four parts: The Earth, The Stars, The Universe and Literature. The last part contains only one essay, in which Asimov argues that Milton would have been a great science fiction writer, had he been only born at the right time. The other three parts are more related to each other, as all of them discuss aspects of the physical world.
The essays are written in a way that entices the reader to partake in the joy of discovery. Scientific discoveries are not presented as mere facts; much on the contrary, hypotheses are put to the test and subsequently validated or rejected, just in the way science works in the real world. What great classes must have been those of Asimov!
I personally enjoyed the description of Scaliger’s work on calendars, who meticulously investigated ancient and modern calendar systems and also set up his own; the first day on his calendar is January 1, 4713 BC, because that was a Sunday with a new moon (which happens every 532 years) and also because in that year a census would have been taken if the Roman empire had already been born (since the Romans, after AD 300, took a census every 15 years).
In his essays concerning the Universe, he describes many, many elementary particles and at what point in time they were allowed to exist, as the Universe cooled down after the big bang. He puts forth an interesting idea: that initially there was one really tiny and hot particle, which he named holon, with all the mass of the Universe, and that the breaking down of this particle into smaller ones later resulted in the Universe as we know it. The beauty of this idea is that this breaking down of the holon is the same breaking down which still happens today in particle decay.
In the Introduction, Asimov claimed he had a mission: to fight the creationists, who are “not content to believe and not content to persuade”. They want to “enforce their views on the public and to erase all freedom of thought”. I was surprised (although, really, I should not) to see that this battle is not a new one.
Each of the essays begins with a short personal story which more or less serves as a starting point for the real thing. Not only these stories are amusing, but they also bring us closer to Asimov, the person, as though he was beginning a lecture with a joke.
Sadly, the book is obsolete and Asimov dead. When talking about the observation of planets and stars, for instance, he mentions that “an obvious change for the better would be to place a large telescope on the moon, or in orbit”; well, that has already been done a long time ago. The whole discussion on big bang is probably seriously dated too.
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