As a renowned astrophysicist and spiritual host of StarTalk, he has written dozens of books over the years, but as they say, you never forget the first one. This designation belongs to a funny volume compiled in 1989, while he was a graduate student at Columbia University, called Merlin’s Voyage to the Universe. This is a collection of over 200 questions asked by the general public for a column he wrote for the West Texas McDonald Observatory’s StarDate newsletter. These various questions covered topics ranging from astronomy and planetary science to gravity, black holes and time travel, which the young scientist in his twenties answered through the persona of an intergalactic essay called Merlin.
“All these questions. and the answers first appeared in the magazine StarDate of the University of Texas McDonald Observatory,” Tyson tells Space.com. “It was for the public and it was to make extra money. Not much because it was a small publication. But anything greater than zero is greater than zero. I had a lot of fun transforming the questions and answers into a real fictional entity, transforming Merlin into a character who spanned all time and saw all the great discoveries of science. Doing something fun with it just made it more interesting to me in hopes that it would be more interesting to the reader. And it turned out that it definitely was.”
