Black Holes: The Key to Understanding the Universe

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So if you are going to read this book, and understand it thoroughly, you should spend some time on it. An amazingly in depth insight into what the greatest minds are currently uncovering about some of the most fantastical aspects of our reality. His work on black hole thermodynamics and the concept of Hawking radiation revolutionized our understanding of these cosmic entities. I think Brian and Jeff struck a perfect balance between the technical and narrative explanations for a lay person interested in this subject.

It’s a nice book, even though it really lacked the explanatory power of “ The Quantum Universe: Everything That Can Happen Does Happen”, which I loved. Just um, brush up on your Penrose diagrams before you jump in (or hover for eternity at the horizon, depending on who you ask). It's time to explore our universe's most mysterious inhabitants Black Holes At the heart of the Milky Way lies a supermassive black hole 4 million times more massive than our Sun. 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.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”. The 'Rosetta stone' analogy proves apt, as the authors show that a study of black holes leads us to a greater understanding of the makeup of the universe and the nature of spacetime, gravity and reality itself. Ok it might be difficult for some to grasp, but undoubtedly I would say re-read it to benefit from gaining an understanding of this subject. Not for nothing did Sir David Attenborough once proclaim: 'If I had a torch I would hand it to Brian Cox.

Anyway, now we come to another “real” (in a sense that it was observed) property of black holes - Hawking radiation. Now the two team up once again with Horizons, an exploration of these amazing objects--and why they continue to confirm that Einstein's theory of general relativity is such a brilliant explanation of the universe around us. 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. For all ebook purchases, you will be prompted to create an account or login with your existing HarperCollins username and password. But even though this it's hard to read, I think we can see through these theories from a mathematical point of view.

Anyway, here the authors speak about the Hawking particles (the virtual pairs) and their entanglement. We have a picture where the interior of the black hole becomes — in some sense — the same place as the exterior. Since it contradicts the second law of thermodynamics, they (Bekenstein) came up with the solution: the information, and so, entropy of infalling objects remain on black hole’s event horizon, inscribed onto it in bits of Planck-length, making black holes the highest-entropy objects in all the universe. Cox has written and presented numerous TV series for the BBC, including the Wonders Trilogy, Forces of Nature, The Planets and The Universe.