Minkowski spacetime diagrams are however touched upon very briefly, and meeting them again in the later chapters I was a bit confused.

In this artist's rendering, a star makes its closest approach to the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. 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.The book starts with an extremely engaging “Brief History of Black Holes”, which got me instantly hooked.

There are few better than Cox at turning tricksy, potentially dense subjects into captivating 'edutainment' for the masses - be it in BBC documentaries, live shows or books. A glowing stream of material from a star is disrupted as it was being devoured by a supermassive black hole surrounded by a ring of dust and illuminated by high-energy radiation. But it is intriguing, to learn purely theoretical black holes derived only from Einstein's General Relativity.To access your ebook(s) after purchasing, you can download the free Glose app or read instantly on your browser by logging into Glose. You could almost imagine this kind of hot atmosphere of the black hole, which somehow contains the information and re-radiates it out into the universe again. One of them is the description of Einstein and then there's another description, which just looks like some kind of quantum theory, some kind of building blocks of the universe that are entangled together. Not that I want to throw your book into a black hole, but what would happen to it and the information that it contains if I tossed it in?

Perhaps it is inevitable that human beings will encounter enchantment when they commit to exploring the sublime. As a science book, I'm sure this must be a remarkable and accurate piece, but as a popular science book, it must be considered something of a failure.Having read some other reviews, I’ll read some more of their books to see if the message is a bit clearer, or I just don’t get it. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

I was enjoying myself immensely through the first 3/4 of the book, but I must admit that once I was waist deep in the final chapters dealing with quantum entanglement, I was really struggling to keep up. The more the authors enlightened me about Black Holes, the denser my brain became until I eventually passed through the Event Horizon (my ability to read further) which resulted in a Singularity. 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. Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking's 1974 theory about black holes having a temperature kickstarted what has become a quantum revolution in astrophysics.He is best known to the public as a science broadcaster and presenter of the highly popular BBC2 series Wonders of the Solar System. I bought this book because I’ve been reading a lot about black holes and general relativity lately, including Sean Carrol’s latest book on The Biggest Ideas in the Universe (highly recommend). The supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87 was originally photographed by the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration in 2019, left, and was spruced up in a 2023 image generated by the PRIMO algorithm, right.