Black Holes: The Key to Understanding the Universe

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I especially appreciated the clear explanations of Penrose diagrams and their use to explain different types of black holes.

Now that was a remarkable discovery because temperature was just a thing you could measure on a thermometer, but it was really only fully understood when we knew that everything is made of atoms. But the things that I did understand were quite fascinating, although my brain slid off a few pages that looked like this and gave me a flashback to a college physics textbook that may have caused a few nightmares a couple of decades ago. I like Brian Cox's TV shows and i am going to see him Live next year, this book is excellent but heavy going, i think it is impossible to explain these things in simple terms, so it will take me awhile to navigate this book, one section at a time!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. That the quest to understand the infinities in the sky has led inexorably to the discovery of a holographic universe enchanting in its strangeness and logical beauty serves to underline Van Gogh’s insight.

Maybe the next hundred pages will deliver the blindingly lucid insight I have been seeking all my life. We say that nothing can come out of a black hole and yet, Stephen Hawking is famous for his Hawking radiation, which does come out of a black hole. As a side note, I do recommend reading this one in parallel or subsequent to reading Carrol’s above mentioned book which will give you a great basis in special and general relativity. However, through the tangled web of math and concept, the things that I was able to glimpse were quite mind boggling. 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.I request just about every book on NetGalley that covers topics in astrophysics, even though the field doesn't chagne that fast and many titles strike me as oversimplified. This book, however, requires you to trust the math behind all the black hole physics and their interpretation. Hawking discovered that when you put those two frameworks together, there's a prediction, which is black holes have a temperature. This results in a paradox of essentially creating two copies of the same object / person: one spaghettified, one vaporized. And what they're trying to tell us seems to be that space and time are not fundamental properties of the universe, but they emerge from a deeper theory.

I understood beforehand that, the faster one travels through space the slower time goes relative to the observer. It is packed full of diagrams (moving far beyond the Penrose diagram which Cox utilised in his live show), graphs and equations of rapidly increasing complexity. As viewed from the outside, you can picture the book as being completely incinerated as it approaches the horizon, with all the bits of information being smeared around. If the wheel rotates faster than the cameras FPS then the wheel on film is seen to Counter rotate, seeming to spin in the opposite direction.Hawking radiation theorizes that black holes are not entirely black; they can emit radiation and gradually lose mass over time.