Black Holes: The Key to Understanding the Universe

Product Information

They have the power to wipe out any of the universe’s other inhabitants, but no one has ever seen a black hole itself die. Generally Cox is really good at simplifying complex ideas but here, except for the odd paragraph or two, he failed. It seems outlandish, but today’s physicists are daring to think the unthinkable – that black holes could connect us to another universe. They have the power to wipe out any of the universe's other inhabitants, but no one has ever seen a black hole itself die.

I usually just read once a day, but this book caught me off guard with its complexity I decided to read it once more. There are some bits that I have to ‘look up’ to understand better; and a few bits that I was like alright – I will highlight this now, but I’ll come back to it later. Thanks to NetGalley and Mariner Books for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review. If all of the contents of a sphere could be completely described by its surface (as in black-hole thermodynamics), then maybe “volume” and “gravity” are secondary properties, that arise only from quantum entanglement interactions on the surface? 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.Professor Jeff Forshaw is a theoretical physicist and Professor of Particle Physics at the University of Manchester. I recently attended one of Brian Cox's Horizons Live lectures in Manchester (which I reviewed here), where Cox proved to be engaging and able to explain difficult concepts clearly to a general audience.

Having read some other reviews, I’ll read some more of their books to see if the message is a bit clearer, or I just don’t get it. Wondering if it was possible to top up my knowledge so a book wouldn't make a fool of me again, I immediately looked up entry requirements to complete a 4 year physics degree at the University of Manchester. They were explored in depth (haha), and some concepts were really challenging (like how space and time change places inside the black hole), but the youtube videos helped making some sense of it.However, through the tangled web of math and concept, the things that I was able to glimpse were quite mind boggling. 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? There is grandeur in this view of life,’ wrote Darwin, ‘with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, while this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. Black Holes doesn't do this – not even close – and my eyes began to glaze over every time a new equation was introduced and then explained in a dense and academic series of paragraphs without much in the way of respite. If you don't see a follow up to this review it means I've found the wormhole to another universe or travelled to another time or dimension.

Black holes are places in space and time where the laws of gravity, quantum physics and thermodynamics collide. He is perhaps best known as a science broadcaster and host of the BBC’s hugely popular Wonders series. 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.

billion light years away, the LIGO instruments have recently detected something that could be the closest a black hole gets to death. Authors Brian Cox and Jeffrey Forshaw do an excellent job at simplifying complex theoretical physics concepts into something digestible for an amateur audience. This is a bit unusual start (at least for me, a nonphysicist who learn only from popular science book), because I always learn about a black hole from a physical process (the collapse of a star), not a purely theoretical one like Schwarzschild's.