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A Brief History of Black Holes: And why nearly everything you know about them is wrong

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Mă aflu în situația bizară că știu multe fără să înțeleg totul. Știu, de pildă, că fizicienii încearcă să ofere „o descriere completă a universului”. Mai știu că o astfel de descriere nu este, deocamdată, cu putință. Mai știu că Hawking a fost obsedat de realizarea unei teorii fizice unificate (mecanica cuantică + teoria relativității generalizate), fără de care sus-numita descriere nu este posibilă. Prima teorie (cea cuantică) susține că „universul e guvernat de întîmplare”, fapt pe care Einstein nu l-a acceptat niciodată. A doua oferă o viziune deterministă. Only Hawking could write this book - simple, to the point and extremely resourceful. Cosmology is not an easy subject neither can everyone understand its deep connotations. Hawking made it understandable in the most layman terms possible. It's just incredible how Hawking explains to us the complex and mindboggling secrets and concepts of physics and our universe, with amazing wit , clarity, and simplicity.

A Brief History of Black Holes: And why nearly everything you

we had that unique quality called curiosity when we were children, but then, as we grew up , we somehow lost that ability to ask and question, we no longer felt the same thirst for knowledge and a deeper understanding of things as we reached adulthood, those questions we abandoned as our busy lives got in our way.. Stephen then went on to Cambridge to do research in Cosmology, there being no-one working in that area in Oxford at the time. His supervisor was Denis Sciama, although he had hoped to get Fred Hoyle who was working in Cambridge. After gaining his Ph.D. he became first a Research Fellow, and later on a Professorial Fellow at Gonville and Caius College. After leaving the Institute of Astronomy in 1973 Stephen came to the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, and since 1979 has held the post of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. The chair was founded in 1663 with money left in the will of the Reverend Henry Lucas, who had been the Member of Parliament for the University. It was first held by Isaac Barrow, and then in 1669 by Isaac Newton. This is the first book I have ever read about science.This is one of the best selling book of the century.I have found it really infomative and my interest in science seems to build. This book is free from mathematical equations (except E=mc2) which is the best thing about the book. This book is so simple that even a lay person with basic knowledge of science can understand it. A particle that is itself is a micro-BH! (Realize, for example, a Neutron Star is just like a giant neutron!)There were Taylor Swift references, which, I mean, that's all I need to give a book 5 stars. But in all seriousness, it's so informative without being difficult to follow. I would recommend you have a little bit of an interest in physics, because there are some basic concepts that'll just go over smoother if you have some prior knowledge, but even if you know nothing this book is an absolute joy. I listened to the audiobook, narrated by the author herself, and it was amazing. You could feel and hear her enthusiasm about the topic through every sentence and every word. A Brief History of Time is like that -- Professor Hawking doesn't seem to notice when his treatment progresses from the obvious to the arcane, ending with his concept of "imaginary time" (very nearly incomprehensible in this overly brief presentation). It is not clear to me who is in the target audience for this book. At times it tries to explain basic concepts of modern physics in simple language, and at other times it assumes a familiarity with the same subject. For the first time I think I "understand" why absolute time is not consistent with relativity theory or that space-time curvature supplants the notion of gravity, and for that I thank the author. There are a few other things I believe I have a glimpse of having (finally) slogged through the book.

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking | Goodreads A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking | Goodreads

Okay, maybe the people that win these prizes are actually really smart, but then again, the guys who set up Long-Term Capital Management also won a Nobel prize, which proves my point. Stephen Hawking's book is easy to read, but harder to comprehend. In every chapter came a point where my brain couldn't hold another permutation of a theory, and as the book progressed, I ended up taking the same approach as I do when reading a Norse saga for the first time. With sagas, I just read, even if my brain doesn't seem to retain all the information about who is related to who and what they named their horse. Inevitably, at the end, I have a reasonable basic grasp of the saga, and then I have to read it over again to fit more information into that basic understanding. Stephen Hawking writes in a very simple and approachable way. On the surface the book has been written for the common man, for he who has little knowledge of theoretical physics. Apparently this book tops the world list of "bought but not read", which may explain why it's so universally acclaimed as a work of genius. If you know anything much about relativity or cosmology, it comes across as a potboiler, admittedly a well-written one with a great final sentence. I wasn't impressed.Assuming that, our universe is made of perfect/ideal mathematical/geometric objects, like 0D points and/or 1D rings/strings etc! The concept of a body that would trap light, thereby becoming invisible to the rest of the universe, had first been considered by the natural philosophers John Michell and later Pierre-Simon Laplace in the 18th century. They used Newton's gravitational laws to calculate the escape velocity of a light particle from a body, predicting the existence of stars so dense that light could not escape from them. Michell called them "dark stars". That the outcomes of both exercises closely resembled each other is testament to the scientific process as much as our tenacity when it comes to making sense of the universe. For over a century, we have probed a concept that has tested the limits of both nature and science, and have come away with something meaningful. It’s hard not to be romantic about that. This book puts me in mind of the story about how a Harvard number theorist, through some malfunction of the scheduling computer, got assigned to teach an introductory course in pre-calculus. Being one of those individuals to whom math came so easily that they couldn't grasp how difficult others found it, the professor had no idea what to cover in such a course.

A Brief History of Black Holes: And why nearly everything you A Brief History of Black Holes: And why nearly everything you

I loved this book! Not only because I’m a scientist and space enthusiast but also because it was just enjoyable to read. You do not need to be an astronomer or astrophysicist to understand what’s happening in this book. The author is really great at putting physics into the most simplest terms so that almost anyone could grasp hold of the basics. I came away with a better understanding of the Big Bang theory and why it's plausible (Not the tv show. Its existence is not plausible). I'm trying to sort out the time/space quantifiability thing. That's going to require a reread...and probably further study elsewhere. In 1939, this was still an idea that was too strange to be believed. It would take two decades until the concept was developed enough that physicists would start to accept the consequences of the continued contraction described by Oppenheimer. And World War II itself had a crucial role in its development, because of the US government’s investment in researching atomic bombs. Einstein and Oppenheimer, around 1950. Because I saw this YouTube video the other day that made a really good case for it. <--hosted by this guy called QAnon - sounded totally legit There are irritating writing practices that could have used some editing, e.g., the use of the naked pronominal adjective "this" when in the middle of a dense explanation of an abstruse concept(e.g., "This had serious implications for the ultimate fate of massive stars.").Isn't it amazing that a person can read a book like A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking and come away feeling both smarter and dumber than before he started? What a universe we live in! When he revealed his general theory 1915, Einstein had effectively found a way to marry gravity with the special version of the theory, providing an elegant way to describe the motions and machinations of massive objects in our universe. However, he wasn’t very interested in studying the particular solutions of these equations, each of which could reveal different types of such objects. A pesar de estar escrito para un público "no científico" no puedo decir que creo que sea un libro accesible al 100%. Es cierto que Hawking cumple su promesa de no incluir ni una fórmula matemática (excepto la conocida fórmula sobre la teoría de la relativdad E=MC²) pero los conceptos en sí pueden ser difíciles de imaginar y comprender. De toda la información que Hawking intenta explicar en este libro, ha habido cosas que notaba que se me escapaban. Quizá con algo más de material gráfico habría resultado más sencillo. Einstein wasn’t convinced of this solution and used his own theory to try and disprove Schwarzschild’s results. The paper was published in 1939 but it has largely been forgotten. Schwarzschild himself dismissed his findings as having no practical relevance, claiming that the pressure gradients required to compress a body beyond its Schwarzschild radius couldn’t be realised in nature.

A Brief History of Black Holes | MPIWG - Max Planck Society A Brief History of Black Holes | MPIWG - Max Planck Society

Smethurst is a little hazy on some aspects of history - for example, she says that it wasn't until the 1920s that some nebulae were considered to be galaxies, even though Herschel, amongst others, had suggested this significantly earlier. Also, and how many times do we have to say this, she repeats the myth that Giordano Bruno was the first to suggest the the stars were suns in their own right - he appears to have got the idea from Nicholas of Cusa. but as it turns out, after reading this book, I have come to the conclusion that a lot of theoretical physicists seem to live in the same world that he does. Okay, they probably don't spend their time at the comic book store, or arguing whether Babylon Five is better than Star Trek (actually, one of my primary school friends is a theoretical physicist, and we did have such an argument), but they do seem to see the world in a way that we ordinary people would consider strange. October 31, 2023 | New MIT Design Would Harness 40% of the Sun’s Heat To Produce Clean Hydrogen FuelHighly recommended to everyone who wants to know a little more about this universe and it's secrets. Unfortunately, I don't remember much of it (time for a re-read!) but I remember taking away the idea that time is a sphere. Being Indian, I loved this - because we are strong champions of cyclical time. Also, if time and space are both curved, it creates the possibility of jumping from one place and time to another; which is just delicious. I do believe this is a book every reader should try because it is an important one, full of discussions and ideas that could really open up your mind. But I would warn you to be prepared, although this seems like light reading, much of it may go over your head. The bottom line is that this is a love story about science and math and all the other things that I don't understand very well. This is a book in which Stephen Hawking shows people like me how poor our comprehension skills are.

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