The Little Book of Black Holes (Science Essentials): 29

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The first sign I was wrong is when I noticed a myriad of Penrose diagrams throughout the book - that is not something I’ve see in popular science books before. Sometimes you will get spacetime diagrams and usually very simple ones at that. As someone who studied physics 20 years ago as an undergraduate (and took a subject on relativity) I can honestly say I’d never seen a Penrose diagram before and I found them a really useful learning tool in the book. As I said, I’ve read a lot of books on this topic and adjacent ones (Thorne, Greene, Smolin, Carrol, etc) and I was genuinely glued to this one. Despite the book’s brevity, Rovelli doesn’t flinch from discussing the tougher concepts. He warns you that you might find some of them a little confusing. I must confess that I’m still a little hazy on whether or not my inability to remember the future is just a perceptual illusion, or if it’s a fundamental consequence of the underlying physics. But Rovelli reassures you that none of that really matters and that what’s important here is the experience of being transported. If that’s true then the book more than does its job. 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. Well, Cox and Forshaw deserve credit for taking a brave plunge (and by my estimate forgoing 99.999999% of their book sales based on Hawking’s formula) because one of the highlights of this book is the scattering of equations that are accompanied by careful explanation and insight.

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The authors try to describe the spacetime by something called Penrose diagrams. I think I did a good job understanding it to some extent. But when it came to quantum entanglement in the last chapters, I kind of gave up. Because the equations involved with those chapters were more complex than the rest. The issue with today's small pop science books is that they don't intend to provide coherent information about something but for commodifying the simplified works of complex minds to the public under the pretext of preaching that knowing the name of something is intelligent rather knowing about something and being able to clearly understand it. The author not only provides very accessible summaries of seven key theories and foundational principles within physics, but he explains what it’s like to be a scientist. He writes this in a very narrative, easy-to-follow way, but it allows you to look up a word without breaking that pace and flow within each of the seven chapters. The more accurately you know the positions of particles, the less accurately you can know their speeds, and vice versa"Hawking lets us into his thoughts a bit, like a tiny window, not too much. But he talks about this special connection he feels with Sir Isaac Newton. Also, he seems to see himself standing on the shoulders of Albert Einstein and building off of the legacy that Einstein’s life work left behind. For rest all the topics discussed with relevant theories is par excellence. language is good to read and understand but very simple for a book. I have always been a science-fiction fan, and I think that having at least a cursory interest in astronomy comes with the territory. I've spent hours watching meteor showers, and I freak out — and make a wish — whenever I see a shooting star. I was in the path of totality during the 2017 solar eclipse, which made me cry, and the 2019 lunar eclipse, which had me obsessively texting my friends with updates. In short, I love stars and the moon and the sun and whatever else is out there. All these questions are exciting, and we all want to know their answers. But the point is, are these questions answered in this book? Stephen Hawking takes you on this virtual tour where he talks about different topics, combines philosophies and scientific explanations, and does everything. But he doesn’t answer all these questions directly. So you won’t get a ready-made answer to all these questions. A 'naked' singularity is a theoretical scenario in which a star collapses but an event horizon does not form around it - so the singularity would be visible."

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But this is a book for the layperson and Rovelli understands this limitation, glossing over finer detail in pursuit of an impression of the wonder that lies at the heart of the cosmos and his theorising. And in his hands it’s an effective technique. It is also worrying that Smethurst seems to put those who 'challenge the existence of dark matter' on a par with flat earthers - 'It came about after over three decades worth of observations and research pointed to no other plausible conclusion' - this simply isn't true. The reality is that dark matter particles have never been detected, while modified gravity theories arguably explain more than dark matter does. Both theories have flaws, but at the moment, it's all too common for popular astronomy/astrophysics books like this to give a casual dismissal of anything but those elusive particles. That simply isn't good science.i.e.) the very boundary of the observable universe is also 2D surface encoded with info about real 2D object. Reality Is Not What it Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity by Carlo Rovelli, translators: Simon Carnell, and Erica Segre. Call Number: Shields Library QC178 .R69313 2017 My reason for being sceptical is that I assumed this book would be a fairly watered-down affair with the usual dose of hand-wavy analogies that end up obscuring or misconstruing most of the real physics. Well, I was very wrong!

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The problem here is that it is not how physics works. In physics, we have what is called the conservation of information. Even if you throw a book on fire, the information in the book will somehow be encoded in the heat and light ade in burning the book. Leonard Susskind gives a fantastic example in the book. Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carolo Rovelli; translators Simon Carnell and Erica Segre (UK : Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books, 2015). Call number: PSE Library QC24.5 C38 2015 At the same time, it takes several days to get enough data to get a clear picture over a long period. So it’s an enormous task that takes place over years and years. I think I tabbed this book more than a typical fiction book! There’s so many new terms and cool analogies to focus on. My favourite being the analogy that we’re all made out of stardust or ‘supernova poop’.This is definitely a hard read. I had to read some chapters again and again to understand ( not fully though). So if you are going to read this book, and understand it thoroughly, you should spend some time on it. 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). A singularity is what you end up with when a giant star is compressed to an unimaginably small point."