Paperback review: Tweeting the Universe - Tiny Explanations of Very Big Ideas, By Marcus Chown and Govert Schilling

Short and tweet answers to almost everything

David Evans
Saturday 27 April 2013 12:20 EDT
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In this book Marcus Chown and Govert Schilling address the very biggest questions in tweet-sized answers.

For the most part, the 140-character restriction leads them to a matter-of-fact style ("How do we know there was a Big Bang? Universe expanding, so must have been smaller in past") but there is something poetic about other entries ("Centre of galaxy is a place of extreme violence. Great tsunamis of interstellar gas collide"). The authors have been caught between two stools: Tweeting the Universe lacks both the flexible, interactive nature of a twitter feed and the long-form development of argument provided by a traditional science book. But you can't help but admire the concision.

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