Black Holes

Written by Professor Brian Cox and Professor Jeff Forshaw

Narrated by Professor Jeff Forshaw

A brilliant exploration of the most exotic objects in the universe by Professor Brian Cox and Professor Jeff Forshaw.

At the heart of the Milky Way, there is a distortion in the fabric of the Universe. Caused by something 4 million times bigger than our Sun, it is where space and time are so warped that everything within 12 million kilometres is trapped, even light. This region of no return is called the event horizon, and inside it lies the end of time as we know it. We have named it Sagittarius A* and it is a supermassive black hole.

Black holes lie where the most massive stars used to shine and at the edge of our current understanding. They are the inevitable creations of gravity, when too much matter collapses into not enough space. And yet, although the laws of nature predict them, they fail to fully describe them. The wonderful thing about the ever-increasing number of black holes we have discovered dotted across the Universe is that each one is an experiment conducted by nature that we cannot explain. This means we are missing something deep.

Black holes are places in space and time where the laws of gravity, quantum physics and thermodynamics collide. Originally thought to be so intellectually troubling that they simply could not exist, it is only in the past few years that we have begun to glimpse a new synthesis; a deep connection between gravity and quantum information theory that describes a holographic universe in which space and time emerge from a network of quantum bits, and wormholes span the void.

In this groundbreaking book, Professor Brian Cox and Professor Jeff Forshaw take you to the edge of our understanding of black holes; a scientific journey to the research frontier spanning a century of physics, from Einstein to Hawking and beyond, which ends with the startling conclusion that our world may operate like a giant quantum computer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Release date: Oct 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9781460742303

Professor Brian Cox

Professor Brian Cox, OBE is a particle physicist, a Royal Society research fellow, and a professor at the University of Manchester as well as researcher on one of the most ambitious experiments on Earth, the ATLAS experiment on the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. He is best known to the public as a science broadcaster and presenter of the highly popular BBC2 series Wonders of the Solar System. He was also the keyboard player in the UK pop band D:Ream in the 1990s.

Reviews for Black Holes

[pomo58 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Black Holes: The Key to Understanding the Universe, written by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw, is an excellent introduction that falls into an area of popular science books that can be misleading.Let me first talk about the broad area of popular science books. This is not, as some people treat it, a single level of science texts, but a spectrum from very basic to something that still requires effort but is not academic. The difficulty is that often books that require some effort and perhaps some familiarity with mathematics gets lumped in with academic books. If we are going to say that academic books are definitely not popular, or that there is no overlap, then we have to be open to shades of popular books. This is, as far as I'm concerned, a popular science book but one that requires some effort and, for a deeper understanding, some math background.Since I am not an astrophysicist and my last classroom experience with advanced mathematics was a couple of decades ago, I consider myself a layperson with respect to this topic. So I am approaching this book as popular science. My preference, since I have done some reading in the area and taken a few MOOCs on the topic, is for a more rather than less challenging popular science book. If, for whatever reason, you want a challenge and not simply a less nuanced super-basic introduction, this is the book for you. I found the explanations and examples/analogies to be very effective in discussing the concepts. The analyses using the formulas were, with some effort on my part, very helpful as well, though admittedly some remained just beyond my grasp (for now). I will also say that I think this is one of those books that can be read without too much close attention paid to the math. What I mean is that while the explanations centered on math certainly offer the opportunity for better understanding, they can be skimmed, and the concepts still understood because of the wonderful explanations. I would highly recommend this for those who are willing and want to put in the effort, or for those with some formal education in the area. My first introduction to relativity was with the Brehme diagram way back in 1976 and seeing how graphic representations have evolved was fascinating. For those who don't mind skimming the math in order to get to the conceptual explanations, this will be a good book for you. If you want a very basic, relatively math-free explanation and don't really care for any nuance, this might not be the one for you.Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.