Black Holes: The Key to Understanding the Universe

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The book starts with an extremely engaging “Brief History of Black Holes”, which got me instantly hooked. Nor am I particularly skilled at focussing on multiple things, fond of starting over, or withholding anything of value from the theoretical physicists that they haven't already got covered.

If you're not a physicist (or not yet a physicist) and you want to understand what Einstein and relativity theory are all about, you would do well to read this book. Prachtig boek dat beschrijft hoe de natuurkunde van zwarte gaten verweven is met de wiskunde van quantum computing. Black Holes" by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw is a comprehensive and engaging read for anyone curious about the mysterious phenomenon of black holes. This is why, the authors argue at the end of the book, "it is vital that we continue to support the most esoteric scientific endeavours", because no one could have predicted that we would find such links in studying black holes (pg.

This results in a paradox of essentially creating two copies of the same object / person: one spaghettified, one vaporized. I think Brian and Jeff struck a perfect balance between the technical and narrative explanations for a lay person interested in this subject.

The last few chapters explore the possible ideas of connecting quantum mechanics with gravity, as well as a theory that the world might be a hologram. Hawking radiation theorizes that black holes are not entirely black; they can emit radiation and gradually lose mass over time. The first sign I was wrong is when I noticed a myriad of Penrose diagrams throughout the book - that is not something I’ve see in popular science books before. Black holes are places in space and time where the laws of gravity, quantum physics and thermodynamics collide. As someone who studied physics 20 years ago as an undergraduate (and took a subject on relativity) I can honestly say I’d never seen a Penrose diagram before and I found them a really useful learning tool in the book.You said at the beginning of our conversation that this new idea of reality in a black hole is part black hole geometry and part quantum physics.

O grande feito deste livro foi fazer com que uma ex-estudante de Humanidades, que tinha uma vaga ideia de Física, se sentisse apta a responder a um questionário a esse respeito.I have read – and mostly understood – a fair chunk of popular science in my time, and found this book severely wanting when it came to popular science's most important task: bringing the reader along. I request just about every book on NetGalley that covers topics in astrophysics, even though the field doesn't chagne that fast and many titles strike me as oversimplified.