Black Holes: The Key to Understanding the Universe

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Written by bestselling author Walter Isaacson, Einsten is an introduction to, and celebration of, the scientist whose name is synonymous with ingenuity and intelligence. This was a challenging read for a layperson with an interest in science. I read the whole book but found the journey to be less enlightening than anticipated and leaving me more befuddled than before I started. Foi fácil perder-me e sentir-me a flutuar no espaço enquanto trabalhava. Em suma: consegui traduzir e, ainda assim, aprender e maravilhar-me. A brilliant exploration of the most exotic objects in the universe by Professor Brian Cox and Professor Jeff Forshaw.

O grande feito deste livro foi fazer com que uma ex-estudante de Humanidades, que tinha uma vaga ideia de Física, se sentisse apta a responder a um questionário a esse respeito. All of this disregards entirely that I am already sort of tied up with a pseudo-career in a different scientific discipline and do not relish the thought of attending university again. Nor am I particularly skilled at focussing on multiple things, fond of starting over, or withholding anything of value from the theoretical physicists that they haven't already got covered. At the heart of our galaxy lies a monster so deadly, not even light can escape its grasp. Its secrets lie waiting to be discovered. It’s time to explore our universe’s most mysterious inhabitants

This is definitely a hard read. I had to read some chapters again and again to understand ( not fully though). So if you are going to read this book, and understand it thoroughly, you should spend some time on it. There’s an old saying I think by Stephen Hawking that every equation you include in a popular level science book will half the effective book sales. Well, Cox and Forshaw deserve credit for taking a brave plunge (and by my estimate forgoing 99.999999% of their book sales based on Hawking’s formula) because one of the highlights of this book is the scattering of equations that are accompanied by careful explanation and insight. Professor Jeff Forshaw is a theoretical physicist and Professor of Particle Physics at the University of Manchester. Together with Professor Cox, he has written three bestselling science titles: Why Does E=mc²?, The Quantum Universe and Universal. 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.

I suppose owning a “Schrödinger’s cat: Wanted dead and alive” t-shirt didn’t actually qualify me to understand this book (although it certainly increased my nerd cred). It’s as wonderful as the Universe!”— Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report, on Wonders of the Universe Brian Edward Cox, OBE (born 3 March 1968) is a British particle physicist, a Royal Society University Research Fellow, PPARC Advanced Fellow and Professor at the University of Manchester. 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. He is working on the R&D project of the FP420 experiment in an international collaboration to upgrade the ATLAS and the CMS experiment by installing additional, smaller detectors at a distance of 420 metres from the interaction points of the main experiments. PROFESSOR BRIAN COX CBE FRS is Professor of Particle Physics at the University of Manchester and the Royal Society Professor for Public Engagement in Science. He has worked on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Geneva, the HERA accelerator at DESY, Hamburg and the Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab, Chicago. Cox has written and presented numerous TV series for the BBC, including Wonders of the Solar System, Wonders of the Universe, Wonders of Life, Human Universe, Forces of Nature, The Planets and The Universe. He is also the co-presenter of The Infinite Monkey Cage radio series and podcast. Cox has written numerous bestselling science titles with Jeff Forshaw. For many years, he has lectured the introductory Relativity and Quantum Mechanics course at the University of Manchester, with Jeff Forshaw. The authors try to describe the spacetime by something called Penrose diagrams. I think I did a good job understanding it to some extent. But when it came to quantum entanglement in the last chapters, I kind of gave up. Because the equations involved with those chapters were more complex than the rest.FROM ONE OF THE MOST BRILLIANT MINDS OF OUR TIME COMES A BOOK THAT CLARIFIES HIS MOST IMPORTANT IDEAS It’s always tempting to bask in the self-congratulatory delusion that if I just really concentrate on something hard enough I’d be able to understand it. 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 the ultimate vindication of research for research’s sake: two of the biggest problems in science and technology have turned out to be intimately related. The challenge of building a quantum computer is very similar to the challenge of writing down the correct theory of quantum gravity. This is one reason why it is vital that we continue to support the most esoteric scientific endeavours. Nobody could have predicted such a link. Also, as a reader who is not using these texts for any academic purposes, I think Cox’s writing is so much easier to ‘digest’ (and much more enjoyable in general) than Hawking’s (only comparing this to a few of Hawking’s books that I’ve previously read). I think it might be important to clarify that – I’m not comparing them based on ‘who’s the better (astro)physicist’ or whose ‘work’ was more ‘important’; but only of whose writing/books I had found more ‘enjoyable’. Hope that helps? The story of modern physics has been one of reductionism. We do not need a vast encyclopedia to understand the inner workings of Nature. Rather, we can describe a near-limitless range of natural phenomena, from the interior of a proton to the creation of galaxies, with apparently unreasonable efficiency using the language of mathematics. 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. We should be grateful for it.’