Read the following excerpt from Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “Death by Black Hole.” That’s the gory moment when your body snaps into tw
o segments, breaking apart at your midsection. Upon falling further, the difference in gravity continues to grow, and each of your two body segments snaps into two segments. Shortly thereafter, those segments each snap into two segments of their own, and so forth, and so forth, bifurcating your body into an ever-increasing number of parts: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, etc. Read the following excerpt from Billy Collins’s “Man Listening to Disc.” The music is loud yet so confidential I cannot help feeling even more like the center of the universe than usual as I walk along to a rapid little version of “The Way You Look Tonight,” What do these two excerpts reveal about the difference in ideas presented by Tyson and Collins?
Tyson presents humans as powerless against the forces of nature, while Collins presents an individual creating his own destiny not beholden to the forces of nature.
Explanation:
In Tyson's "Death by Black Hole", he shows that the center of the universe is not where a person wants to be. At the center of the universe is a black hole that will rip your body up into halves, thus bifurcating your body as many times as possible. On the other hand, Billy Collins creates a character who sees himself as the center of the universe. As though everything revolves around him and there is nothing that he can't do or control. Tyson makes humans small and insignificant at the center of the universe whereas Collins makes the world revolve around them.
