Origins has taken me forever, for a variety of reasons. But that doesn't matter, since I have finished at last and can review it. Hopefully my next review won't be so long in coming. It'll be A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, which... Well, it's a rival for The Woman Warrior in terms of density and ridiculousness. I am also reading it for school (as an independent novel choice).
Starting at the fascinating, confusing beginning of light and energy and going up to the modern search for extraterrestrial life, Tyson and Goldsmith explore every stage of our origins. Humans originated from earlier life forms, which originated from earth, which originated from dust around our sun, which originated from the fallout of dead stars, which originated from the earliest density fluctuations in matter, which originated from (something we don't quite know yet but for now let's just say QUANTUM MECHANICS OKAY), which originated from the ultimate (as far as we know!) origin: the beginning of our universe. Combining many fields of science, Origins covers the history of the universe from dark energy to Darwin in a way that relates to humans but does not quite place us at the center of the universe.
Being the cosmology nerd that I am, I naturally loved Part I (although I could barely get around to reading it due to visiting extended family), which is about the origins of the universe. The last couple of chapters, on dark energy and the cosmological constant, are delightfully cosmology-nerdy--so many omega-sub-mus and omega-sub-lambdas. So many. (So many.) Space curvature is neat. Math is neat. Maybe there's a multiverse.
Origins also explains Type Ia supernovae, which y'all need to know about. I had already learned about them from the online course that I started taking over the summer, but there was some new information in Origins as well as a good condensing of what I had already learned. People. Type Ia's are the reason that we know that the expansion rate of the universe is accelerating. IT'S SO COOL. It also happens to be one of the topics of this year's Astronomy event in Science Olympiad, so...I've got a basis already.
Another particularly delightful chapter is "The Elemental Zoo", which goes through all elements of note. Since I like atoms and the periodic table (which sounds so absurdly nerdy but a) it's actually super interesting and complex and b) I should be sounding absurdly nerdy, excuse me), it was absolutely fascinating. For instance, technetium was the first element to be synthesized in labs on earth, but is found in the atmospheres of a certain category of red giant stars...only the stars are far older than the 2-million-year half-life of the element. It's a mystery!! They also mention gallium in this chapter, which, well...Dr. Hilbert is proud of them.
And then there are the pictures. Two sheaves of glossy color photographs of galaxies, stars, the Hubble Deep Field, and planets and moons (which almost without exception are very ugly in my opinion--I mean, Mars is literally tomato soup going a bit off, Jupiter is actual vomit, and Europa has a horrible texture)!! It's very exciting and provides a nice opportunity to break from the dense reading for a brief look at neat galaxies and their weird names.
The only thing that I didn't like about this book was the font. It's really dreadful. It might not bother other people, but I happen to be very sensitive to fonts and I do not particularly like reading a book typed in a bad font. I wish it listed the font on the copyright page so that I could thoroughly roast it by name, but it doesn't. Shame.
In short, I would recommend Origins to people interested in science and the beginnings of it all. It is written with heart and intellect to produce the perfect history of our universe.