Merlin's Tour of the Universe, Revised and Updated for the Twenty-First Century

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Astrophysics for People in a Hurry takes readers on an entertaining and edifying tour of the universe.

In Neil deGrasse Tyson’s delightful journey through the cosmos, his fictional character Merlin responds to popular questions asked by adults and children alike. Merlin, a timeless visitor from Planet Omniscia in the Andromeda Galaxy, has observed firsthand many of the major scientific events of Earth’s history. Merlin’s friends include the most important scientific figures and explorers of all time—da Vinci, Magellan, Newton, Einstein, and Hubble. While Merlin occasionally recounts playful conversations with these luminaries, all questions are answered with authentic science, infused with wit, wisdom, and an occasional rhyme. With the help of intermittent humorous cartoons, Merlin clarifies the details of familiar phenomena like gravity, light, space, and time, and travels to distant stars and galaxies to describe what makes them tick, rotate, explode, and collapse.

Merlin’s Tour of the Universe is perfect for anyone who harbors burning questions on how the cosmos works.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist, author, and science communicator. In 2017 he became the first American to win the prestigious Stephen Hawking Medal for science communication. He is the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space and a research associate in the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History. From 2006 to 2011 he hosted the educational science television show NOVA ScienceNow on PBS, and in March 2014 he became host of the television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, an update of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Tyson has written several New York Times bestselling nonfiction books.