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

Short and tweet answers to almost everything

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.