Black Holes: The Key to Understanding the Universe

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A Brief History of Time for the 21st Century At the heart of our galaxy lies a monster so deadly, not even light can escape its grasp. 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).

I have read – and mostly understood – a fair chunk of popular science in my time, and found this book severely wanting when it came to popular science's most important task: bringing the reader along. The complexity of the topics discussed meant even Cox and Foreshaw were struggling to simplify the content to an universally understandable level. The above could be used to help describe visual effects experienced by a traveller either approaching or travelling away from a Black Hole and how at times objects can appear frozen in time, and are observed standing still upon the event horizon.Black Holes doesn't do this – not even close – and my eyes began to glaze over every time a new equation was introduced and then explained in a dense and academic series of paragraphs without much in the way of respite. I'm embarrassed to tell you how many books I've bought that said they were going to explain quantum mechanics. If Hawking was right, black holes would render the Universe fundamentally unpredictable and the foundations of physics would crumble.

The book starts with an extremely engaging “Brief History of Black Holes”, which got me instantly hooked. Not only do I not yet understand the universe, I don't understand the equations and diagrams in this book.Visual information moves away from an object and through space at the speed of light under normal conditions. 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. 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. 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). His work on black hole thermodynamics and the concept of Hawking radiation revolutionized our understanding of these cosmic entities.

Richard Feynman, one of the smartest people who ever lived and did ground breaking work in the field said don't feel bad if you don't understand quantum mechanics - nobody does. Black Holes" by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw is a comprehensive and engaging read for anyone curious about the mysterious phenomenon of black holes.Viewed in this way, black holes are cosmic Rosetta Stones, allowing us to translate our observations into a new language that affords us a glimpse of the profoundest reason and most radiant beauty. If all of the contents of a sphere could be completely described by its surface (as in black-hole thermodynamics), then maybe “volume” and “gravity” are secondary properties, that arise only from quantum entanglement interactions on the surface? Obviously I know Cox is a great science communicator and his previous books with Forshaw have been really well received.

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. We use cookies to personalise content and ads, to provide social media features and to analyse our traffic. Rather than spacetime-as-a-quantum-computer-code pointing to a programmer, we might instead take the view that earth-bound computer scientists have discovered tricks that Nature has already exploited. 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. However, the Cambridge-Manchester commute is killer, and I have somewhat spotty Physics marks from prior attempts.The last three chapters, however, concerning the relationship between quantum entanglement and spacetime were something of a slog.