Black Holes: The Key to Understanding the Universe

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Thanks to NetGalley and Mariner Books for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review. They are naturally occurring objects, the inevitable creations of gravity when too much matter collapses into not enough space. A good reminder of the incredibly complex, interlinked and fascinating world we live in explained probably as simply as it could be which was still really really complicated.

On close inspection you are compelled to marvel at its delicate sophistication and exquisite precision. He was awarded the 1999 James Clerk Maxwell Medal by the UK's Institute of Physics to recognise outstanding early career contributions to theoretical physics and the 2013 Kelvin Medal for outstanding and sustained contributions to public engagement. In the words of theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner, ‘The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.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! 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. The complexity of the topics discussed meant even Cox and Foreshaw were struggling to simplify the content to an universally understandable level.

What I’m trying to say is that I don’t think that this book is only for the space-ey academics; anyone can enjoy it too. If so, the entropy of the black hole would start falling at some point, when the escaped particles would start matching their friends from before. The first few chapters explain the idea of spacetime interval, special relativity and spend a lot of time introducing Penrose diagrams.The authors' passion for the subject is evident in every page and makes for a captivating and educational read. High energy X-ray flares shooting out from deep within the Draco constellation are thought to be the dying cries of a white dwarf star being ripped apart by the intense tides of a supermassive black hole - heating it to millions of degrees as it is shredded at the event horizon. 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. Information processing – the churning of bits from input to output – is not a construction of computer science, it is a feature of our Universe. D., is Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Manchester, specializing in the physics of elementary particles.