A Brief History of Black Holes
And why nearly everything you know about them is wrong
Ratings10
Average rating4.5
15
And why nearly everything you know about them is wrong
Ratings10
Average rating4.5
In A Brief History of Black Holes, award-winning University of Oxford researcher Dr Becky Smethurst charts five hundred years of scientific breakthroughs in astronomy and astrophysics. Right now, you are orbiting a black hole. The Earth orbits the Sun, and the Sun orbits the centre of the Milky Way: a supermassive black hole, the strangest and most misunderstood phenomenon in the galaxy. In this cosmic tale of discovery, Dr Becky Smethurst takes us from the earliest observations of the universe and the collapse of massive stars, to the iconic first photographs of a black hole and her own published findings. She explains why black holes aren’t really ‘black’, that you never ever want to be ‘spaghettified’, how black holes are more like sofa cushions than hoovers and why, beyond the event horizon, the future is a direction in space rather than in time. Told with humour and wisdom, this captivating book describes the secrets behind the most profound questions about our universe – all hidden inside black holes. 'A jaunt through space history . . . with charming wit and many pop-culture references' – BBC Sky At Night Magazine
Reviews with the most likes.
From understanding why our sun shines until the death of a black hole. The book truly brings you to a journey of our understanding about black holes, a short documentary of humanity, trying to understand one of the most misterious, fascinating objects in the universe; hence, the title of the book: The Brief History of Black Holes.
The author is able to balance the trade-off between simplicity of the concept and complexity of the details. The passages are easy to understand and yet the physics behind are actually not a trivial things to follow. In some chapters, you can feel the excitement of the author through her words; it is contagious and excites me too! I trully enjoyed reading this book.
I've followed Dr Becky's YouTube channel for some time, so I was delighted to discover she had written a book on Black Holes. I grabbed a copy of the audio-book. I often do this with non-fiction, especially when the author does their own narration.
It turns out that black holes are not the horrors of the universe as we have been lead to believe. What they actually are, I'll leave up to you to discover. No spoilers!
I found this to be a wonderful journey down the rabbit hole of black holes and our current understanding of them, described in a way the average Jo can understand. I found it both enlightening and thoroughly enjoyable.
