According to astrophysicist Tyson, director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium, size does matter when it comes to black holes, although the chances of your surviving the encounter aren't good in any case. Tyson takes readers on an exciting journey from Earth's hot springs, where extremophiles flourish in hellish conditions, to the frozen, desolate stretches of the Oort Cloud and the universe's farthest reaches, in both space and time. Tyson doesn't restrict his musings to astrophysics, but wanders into related fields like relativity and particle physics, which he explains just as clearly as he does Lagrangian points, where we someday may park interplanetary filling stations. He tackles popular myths (is the sun yellow?) and takes movie directors--most notably James Cameron--to task for spectacular goofs. In the last section the author gives his take on the hot subject of intelligent design. In this collection of forty-two essays on the cosmos and our place in it, astrophysicist and Hayden Planetarium director Neil deGrasse Tyson explores the nature of knowledge, how we discover the contents of the cosmos, how nature presents herself to the inquiring mind, the meaning of life and the challenges of learning how we got here, all the ways the cosmos wants to kill us, the interface between scientific discoveries and the public's reactions to them, and science and God

Prologue: The beginning of science -- Coming to our senses -- On Earth as in the heavens -- Seeing isn't believing -- The information trap -- Stick-in-the-mud science -- Journey from the center of the Sun -- Planet parade -- Vagabonds of the solar system -- The five points of Lagrange -- Antimatter matters -- The importance of being constant -- Speed limits -- Going ballistic -- On being dense -- Over the rainbow -- Cosmic windows -- Colors of the cosmos -- Cosmic plasma -- Fire and ice -- Dust to dust -- Forged in the stars -- Send in the clouds -- Goldilocks and the three planets -- Water, water -- Living space -- Life in the universe -- Our radio bubble -- Chaos in the solar system -- Coming attractions -- Ends of the world -- Galactic engines -- Knock 'em dead -- Death by black hole -- Things people say -- Fear of numbers -- On being baffled -- Footprints in the sands of science -- Let there be dark -- Hollywood nights -- In the beginning -- Holy wars -- The perimeter of ignorance