Black Holes: The Key to Understanding the Universe

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I would advise a bit of a science background and perhaps a few other easier books in the subject first if you want to get the most out of this book, but if you don’t mind a bit of challenge and denser stuff flying over your non-physicist head then like me, you can brave it, and maybe you’ll like it, too. All of our books are 100% brand new, unread and purchased directly from the publishers in bulk allowing us to pass the huge savings on to you! The challenge of building a quantum computer is very similar to the challenge of writing down the correct theory of quantum gravity.

I especially appreciated the clear explanations of Penrose diagrams and their use to explain different types of black holes. Anyway, the two particles would be entangled, and one of them escapes, while the other one remains inside the hole.In short, I really liked this book, but wished it had more thorough explanations, and maybe a clearer differentiation of purely theoretical from “verified”, but that might be the noob in me talking. These cookies allow us to count visits and traffic sources so we can measure and improve the performance of our site. The author starts from a simple theoretical eternal non-spinning black hole, Schwarzschild's solution of Einstein's General Relativity. 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. That the quest to understand the infinities in the sky has led inexorably to the discovery of a holographic universe enchanting in its strangeness and logical beauty serves to underline Van Gogh’s insight.

You could almost imagine this kind of hot atmosphere of the black hole, which somehow contains the information and re-radiates it out into the universe again. But this book proved me wrong from the very first spacetime Penrose diagram that slowly sent my protesting brain over the event horizon and to the singularity while being simultaneously vaporized and spaghettified. 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.

It's a complex but amazing book - the authors walked me through very many things I have previously not understood at all (despite intensive reading).

There are few better than Cox at turning tricksy, potentially dense subjects into captivating 'edutainment' for the masses - be it in BBC documentaries, live shows or books. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Now that was a remarkable discovery because temperature was just a thing you could measure on a thermometer, but it was really only fully understood when we knew that everything is made of atoms.

It started off very basic, simple enough for most educated readers to follow along, but around 30% it really got into the science of black holes and the space around them. I think Brian and Jeff struck a perfect balance between the technical and narrative explanations for a lay person interested in this subject. This, to my great surprise and dismay, wasn't really replicated in Black Holes, even though the topic was much the same.

De beschrijving van de formule voor de temperatuur van een zwart gat is natuurlijk ook superhandig om te hebben voor als je ooit in de buurt bent. So, the black holes, as we say in the book, they're like Rosetta stones in the sense that they're forcing us to discover that there are different descriptions of our universe. Obviously I know Cox is a great science communicator and his previous books with Forshaw have been really well received. But if you like to know more about the universe, and would like to really like to see how the real scientists go about it, try this book. He is a member of the High Energy Physics group at the University of Manchester, and works on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland.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. It was a very pleasant surprise, as I found myself working hard to keep up with the author as he took Penrose diagrams in a new direction, and explosed the Information Paradox and other black hole basics in new ways. Beginning with Stephen Hawking's work in the 1970s, it was understood that black holes are not only interesting from an astrophysical perspective, but they actually set up a fundamental clash of principle between the two great pillars of 20th and 21st century physics, which are Einstein's theory of gravity and quantum theory. But the things that I did understand were quite fascinating, although my brain slid off a few pages that looked like this and gave me a flashback to a college physics textbook that may have caused a few nightmares a couple of decades ago.