It started off very basic, simple enough for most educated readers to follow along, but around 30% it really got into the science of black holes and the space around them. 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.

A good portion of the book is a crash course in Einstein's theory of relativity (special and general). Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, developed in 1915, laid the theoretical foundation for the existence of black holes. 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.I would advise a bit of a science background and perhaps a few other easier books in the subject first if you want to get the most out of this book, but if you don’t mind a bit of challenge and denser stuff flying over your non-physicist head then like me, you can brave it, and maybe you’ll like it, too.

It will take a while to digest but the trajectory of the explanation provides a foundation for understanding which I appreciate. In “Black Holes” some topics are only brushed upon, and I wish the authors provided a deeper understanding through metaphors and analogies, which they're great at. It was a very pleasant surprise, as I found myself working hard to keep up with the author as he took Penrose diagrams in a new direction, and explosed the Information Paradox and other black hole basics in new ways.For such a genius to be able to explain things in everyday terms but still be “grounded” and throw in everything from Monty Python, through Hitchhikers Guide to Manchester drizzle (and you need to have lived in Manchester to understand that is not bad), this book is a must have, as the sheer enormity of the concepts and expanse of space and all that go with Black Holes. The topic is an intense and difficult one, even before you get to the cutting-edge stuff which the authors discuss in the final chapters. De beschrijving van de formule voor de temperatuur van een zwart gat is natuurlijk ook superhandig om te hebben voor als je ooit in de buurt bent. They help us to know which pages are the most and least popular and see how visitors move around the site.

We are now equipped to answer that question for black holes that do not spin, according to general relativity…For our purposes, we are going to recruit three more astronauts to join Red and Blue from the previous chapter in their exploration of the supermassive black hole in M87. However, through the tangled web of math and concept, the things that I was able to glimpse were quite mind boggling. So if you are going to read this book, and understand it thoroughly, you should spend some time on it.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! I especially appreciated the clear explanations of Penrose diagrams and their use to explain different types of black holes. I think Brian and Jeff struck a perfect balance between the technical and narrative explanations for a lay person interested in this subject. Too often, I was left wondering who Cox and Forshaw believed they were talking to in the book – surely they must have noticed many of their readers had fallen behind?

I will be rereading This book as it felt to me like one of the most simple and complex books on black holes , that neither made me feel smart or dumb. An amazingly in depth insight into what the greatest minds are currently uncovering about some of the most fantastical aspects of our reality. So, the black holes, as we say in the book, they're like Rosetta stones in the sense that they're forcing us to discover that there are different descriptions of our universe. He has worked on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the HERA accelerator at DESY and the Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab. Anyway, the two particles would be entangled, and one of them escapes, while the other one remains inside the hole.At the heart of the Milky Way, there is a distortion in the fabric of the Universe caused by something 4 million times more massive than our Sun.