Summary

Tyson begins his introduction to astrophysics fourteen billion years in the past with the big bang theory, the origin of which remains unknown to the scientific community. Over time and through the work of renowned scientists, two theories detailing the natural behavior of the large and the small have evolved, the theory of modern gravity and the theory of quantum mechanics, respectively. These two theories are widely accepted, yet they remain "incompatible with one another," which has prompted a race in the scientific community toward a working blend of these theories to describe the big bang, which is essentially when the small and the large parted ways (19). This "unimaginably small" window of time that remains a mystery to astrophysicists is called the "Planck era," and Tyson believes knowledge of what happened during that interval will give scientists the ability to...