Black Holes: The Key to Understanding the Universe

by Brian Cox, Jeff Forshaw

Overview

By the star physicist and author of multiple #1 Sunday Times bestsellers, a major and definitive narrative work on black holes and how they can help us understand the universe. 

At the heart of our galaxy lies a monster so deadly it can bend space, throwing vast jets of radiation millions of light years out into the cosmos. Its kind were the very first inhabitants of the universe, the black holes.

Today, across the universe, at the heart of every galaxy, and dotted throughout, mature black holes are creating chaos. And in a quiet part of the universe, the Swift satellite has picked up evidence of a gruesome death caused by one of these dark powers. High energy X-ray flares shooting out from deep within the Draco constellation are thought to be the dying cries of a white dwarf star being ripped apart by the intense tides of a supermassive black hole – heating it to millions of degrees as it is shredded at the event horizon.

They have the power to wipe out any of the universe’s other inhabitants, but no one has ever seen a black hole itself die. But 1.8 billion light years away, the LIGO instruments have recently detected something that could be the closest a black hole gets to death. Gravitational waves given off as two enormous black holes merge together. And now scientists think that these gravitational waves could be evidence of two black holes connecting to form a wormhole – a link through space and time. It seems outlandish, but today’s physicists are daring to think the unthinkable – that black holes could connect us to another universe.

At their very heart, black holes are also where Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity is stretched in almost unimaginable ways, revealing black holes as the key to our understanding of the fundamentals of our universe and perhaps all other universes.

Join Professors Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw in exploring our universe’s most mysterious inhabitants, how they are formed, why they are essential components of every galaxy, including our own, and what secrets they still hold, waiting to be discovered.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062936691
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	03/28/2023
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	51,056
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Brian Cox, Ph.D., is Professor of Particle Physics at the University of Manchester. Dr. Cox is also a Royal Society research fellow and a researcher on the ATLAS experiment on the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. He is perhaps best known as a science broadcaster and host of the BBC’s hugely popular Wonders series. He is the coauthor of three companion books to these series, which have become #1 Sunday Times bestsellers, as well as two narrative works of popular science, The Quantum Universe and Why Does E = mc2? In the 1990s he played keyboards for the UK pop band D:Ream.

Jeff Forshaw, Ph.D., is Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Manchester, specializing in the physics of elementary particles. In 1999 he was awarded the Institute of Physics Maxwell Medal for outstanding contributions to theoretical physics. He is the coauthor of five books on science with Brian Cox.

Editorial Reviews

A spellbinding cosmic exploration.”  — Kirkus Reviews

“Carl Sagan with a Britpop haircut” — Los Angeles Times on Wonders of the Universe

“It’s as wonderful as the Universe!” — Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report, on Wonders of the Universe

“The master of the universe” — The Times (London) on Wonders of the Universe

From the Publisher

It’s as wonderful as the Universe!

Stephen Colbert

The master of the universe

The Times (London) on Wonders of the Universe

Carl Sagan with a Britpop haircut

Los Angeles Times on Wonders of the Universe

07/01/2022

Known for his BBC Wonders series, BBC podcast "The Infinite Monkey Cage," and numerous Sunday Times best sellers, University of Manchester professor Cox joins with colleague Forshaw to explain those enticing black holes in outer space. With a 40,000-copy first printing.

Library Journal

2022-12-10
A new look at one of the universe’s most intriguing marvels.

Did gravitational waves, spilling from a black hole collision discovered in 2015, signal the opening of a wormhole through space and time? This is just one of many profound questions previously asked only in science-fiction movies and now studied in scientific circles as technology progresses. In their latest collaboration (Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos, The Quantum Universe, etc.), particle physicists Cox and Forshaw ask and answer many such questions. (Their answer to the above is a tantalizing “maybe.”) Black holes are the remains of massive stars that have collapsed under their own gravity. Until recently, they glowed “gently like faint coals in the cold sky,” so distant they existed only “at the edge of our current understanding.” In 1915, Einstein predicted their existence with the Theory of General Relativity, and the concept of “Hawking radiation” resolved an inaccurate view of them (that information disappears into them permanently, a belief challenged when physicist Stephen Hawking described black-hole radiation leaks). Are we close to an understanding? The authors think so. Inside black holes, principles of general relativity and quantum physics collide in such a way it is becoming clear we live in a “quantum universe.” Cox and Forshaw believe that quantum computers will help us solve the last mysteries of black holes in what will be “the ultimate vindication of research for research’s sake: two of the biggest problems in science and technology” turning out to be “intimately related. The challenge of building a quantum computer is very similar to the challenge of writing down the correct theory of quantum gravity.” One way or another, they write, black holes are helping us see the exhilarating extent to which we are “constantly discovering techniques that Nature has already exploited.”

A spellbinding cosmic exploration that resists collapsing under the weight of jargon.

Kirkus Reviews