But, by the end of this book, you will understand, why black holes are indeed the key to understanding the Universe. 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. And then we have this idea that there are different pictures of what happened and that they can both be true at the same time. 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. 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.

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. He is a member of the High Energy Physics group at the University of Manchester, and works on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland.Chandrasekhar's work laid the groundwork for understanding the conditions under which massive stars can evolve into black holes, contributing significantly to the theoretical framework of stellar astrophysics and the formation of black holes. Not only do I not yet understand the universe, I don't understand the equations and diagrams in this book. 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! This book goes into detail about different studies done in this area, providing a lot of information.

The first few chapters explain the idea of spacetime interval, special relativity and spend a lot of time introducing Penrose diagrams. 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. In summary, my take with books like these is if you are going to read almost 300 pages about black holes, the nature of space and time and the fabric of reality itself, you might as well learn at least a little bit of the true math and physics if even at a highly superficial level. 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. You said at the beginning of our conversation that this new idea of reality in a black hole is part black hole geometry and part quantum physics.

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.