Cosmic Adventure

November 2, 1998
A breezy miscellany of essays, this stimulating second book from Berman (Secrets of the Night Sky), astronomy columnist for Discover magazine, is a compendium of little-known facts, controversies, unexplained phenomena and unorthodox theories. With the aid of numerous illustrations and diagrams, Berman helps readers conceptualize what it might be like to travel to the outer edges of our finite but unbounded universe--or to leap into a metauniverse made up of trillions of previously undetected lesser universes. Mystery, he shows, is everywhere: scientists are still trying to explain the full moon's brilliance, or why the sunspot cycle stopped dead in its tracks between the years 1640 and 1715, or why the Hubble Space Telescope indicates that the universe is only 11 to 14 billion years old, while many stars seem older. Many of the pieces feel like quick, topical magazine columns: Berman's scenario for an alien invasion of Earth, for instance, or his survey of awesome astronomical spectacles such as eclipses and meteor storms. Still, the author, director of the Overlook Observatory in Woodstock, N.Y., is a first-rate popularizer, as when he explicates the celestial and atmospheric phenomena that passengers can glimpse outside their jet-plane window, and the mounting evidence that immense black holes may not simply be collapsed stars but are "dark matter" equal in weight to millions of suns. Since life on Earth is scheduled for total extinction in just 1.1 billion years, when our steadily warming sun will eventually cook all life, there is still time to read Berman's free-wheeling cosmic tour, which will open perspectives for the astronomically clueless as well as for seasoned stargazers. Agent, Al Zuckerman.