Imagine if MST3K did Carl Sagan’s “[b:Cosmos|55030|Cosmos|Carl Sagan|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388620656s/55030.jpg|3237312]”; that’ll give you an idea of what this is like. What Cham and Whiteson have written is a book about science (primarily physics and cosmology) densely peppered with jokes. Not all of the jokes are funny, but there are so many, you can just wait for the next one. Sometimes they’re just there for illustration (e.g., explaining gravity as the thing that makes you fall off of your pet llama), and sometimes they’re more important (e.g., explaining rolled-up dimensions in terms of farts in a hallway).
I imagine some people might find the jokes distracting. I find them endearing, but your mileage may vary. In any case, the humor in the book helps convey the fun in science. Does it lack gravitas? Sure, but who cares about gravitas when there’s stuff to be discovered?
More specifically, as the title indicates, the book concentrates on unsolved problems. It taps right into whichever primeval instinct makes us want to go look inside a closed box, or beyond the next hill, to see what’s there. Yes, of course they leave out a lot of details, but the authors do a good job of explaining what we currently know, and how that relates to what we don’t yet know. Some of the questions are simple (“Is there life elsewhere in the universe?” “How big is the universe?”) and some require more explanation: “What is dark matter?” requires an explanation of what we know about dark matter, the better to appreciate how much we still don’t know.
One minor point I want to mention: there are two recurring characters, Oog and Groog, caveman scientists trying to figure out the world they live in. But they’re ignorant, not stupid. That is, there’s an awful lot they don’t know, but given what they do know, they’re quite good at drawing conclusions, and at figuring out the right questions to ask.
This book concentrates on physics and cosmology (although it dips its toe into biology in the last chapter), but it would be easy to write similar ones about other branches of science.
In the end, the message is, Do not despair because we know so little; rejoice because there is so much left to explore.