Black Holes: The Key to Understanding the Universe

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It's a great shame, because the cutting-edge ideas delivered, however imperfectly, in the book are fascinating and profound. For such a genius to be able to explain things in everyday terms but still be “grounded” and throw in everything from Monty Python, through Hitchhikers Guide to Manchester drizzle (and you need to have lived in Manchester to understand that is not bad), this book is a must have, as the sheer enormity of the concepts and expanse of space and all that go with Black Holes. Chandrasekhar's work laid the groundwork for understanding the conditions under which massive stars can evolve into black holes, contributing significantly to the theoretical framework of stellar astrophysics and the formation of black holes. They are good at drawing connections between seemingly esoteric theory and everyday practicalities’ Independent on Sunday --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

However, the Cambridge-Manchester commute is killer, and I have somewhat spotty Physics marks from prior attempts. With stunning illustrations and insightful analogies, the book takes readers on a journey through the universe, exploring the formation and behavior of black holes. I can't hold my excitement when the author introduces Quantum Computing with its relationship with the Holographic Principle to simulate our spacetime reality.Then moving on to Thermodynamics which is more in my wheel house and finally wraps it up with Quantum Mechanics and a bit of Information Theory. Meanwhile a person crossing the black hole event horizon would feel nothing out of ordinary (except for being spaghettified), but the spacetime is stretched out so much that the outside observer would never see the infalling person cross the event horizon, so the information about them would rest on the surface? I like Brian Cox's TV shows and i am going to see him Live next year, this book is excellent but heavy going, i think it is impossible to explain these things in simple terms, so it will take me awhile to navigate this book, one section at a time! Following the “Kerr Wonderland” chapter there’s “Real Black Holes from Collapsing Stars” chapter, which got me relieved – thank God the Kerr wonderland isn’t “real”. It’s a great overview of “black-hole-history”, starting with theoretical black holes, the discovery and properties of real ones, and further speculation, including what it means for our worldview.

Thanks to NetGalley and Mariner Books for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review. We are now equipped to answer that question for black holes that do not spin, according to general relativity…For our purposes, we are going to recruit three more astronauts to join Red and Blue from the previous chapter in their exploration of the supermassive black hole in M87. The above could be used to help describe visual effects experienced by a traveller either approaching or travelling away from a Black Hole and how at times objects can appear frozen in time, and are observed standing still upon the event horizon.The role of information science in describing black holes may be pointing us towards a novel description of Nature, but this does not imply we were programmed. It's a fair point, but the book itself doesn't do enough to bring those esoteric ideas into the minds of the mainstream reader, and the impact of this profound discussion is consequently diminished. There’s time dilation, as well as the twin paradox – I liked the idea that you can “gain time” compared with stationary observers while accelerating, but this also can cut you off from some regions of spacetime (now some ideas in Death's End by Liu Cixin make more sense! Information processing – the churning of bits from input to output – is not a construction of computer science, it is a feature of our Universe.

A black hole in Einstein's theory is just a distortion in the fabric of space-time where even light itself cannot escape. Viewed in this way, black holes are cosmic Rosetta Stones, allowing us to translate our observations into a new language that affords us a glimpse of the profoundest reason and most radiant beauty. This is most likely a 5* book, but I’m only rating it on my own reading experience (including my obvious ignorance to space stuff). It is packed full of diagrams (moving far beyond the Penrose diagram which Cox utilised in his live show), graphs and equations of rapidly increasing complexity.

He has worked on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the HERA accelerator at DESY and the Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab. Minkowski spacetime diagrams are however touched upon very briefly, and meeting them again in the later chapters I was a bit confused.

The authors' passion for the subject is evident in every page and makes for a captivating and educational read. Now, as a general rule, whenever someone produces a graph I reach for my revolver, but I imagine even those readers who are more inclined to jump through the various mathematical hurdles Cox and Forshaw erect will find them a bit excessive.Our team is made up of book lovers who are dedicated to sourcing and providing the best books for kids. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. This book goes into detail about different studies done in this area, providing a lot of information. And black holes remain some of the most alluring phenomena in astrophysics, which is why it's a surprise that Black Holes, a marriage of a subject that captures our imagination with an author usually so adept at firing our imagination, turned out to be a tough and overly-academic read.