Black Hole Survival Guide
Black Hole Survival Guide

Author: Janna Levin

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2022-03-15

Total Pages: 161

ISBN-13: 1984899791

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From the acclaimed author of Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space—an authoritative and accessible guide to the most alluring and challenging phenomena of contemporary science. "[Levin will] take you on a safe black hole trip, an exciting travel story enjoyed from your chair’s event horizon.” —Boston Globe Through her writing, astrophysicist Janna Levin has focused on making the science she studies not just comprehensible but also, and perhaps more important, intriguing to the nonscientist. In this book, she helps us to understand and find delight in the black hole—perhaps the most opaque theoretical construct ever imagined by physicists—illustrated with original artwork by American painter and photographer Lia Halloran. Levin takes us on an evocative exploration of black holes, provoking us to imagine the visceral experience of a black hole encounter. She reveals the influence of black holes as they populate the universe, sculpt galaxies, and even infuse the whole expanse of reality that we inhabit. Lively, engaging, and utterly unique, Black Hole Survival Guide is not just informative—it is, as well, a wonderful read from first to last.

The Black Hole War
The Black Hole War

Author: Leonard Susskind

Publisher: Little, Brown

Published: 2008-07-07

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0316032697

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What happens when something is sucked into a black hole? Does it disappear? Three decades ago, a young physicist named Stephen Hawking claimed it did, and in doing so put at risk everything we know about physics and the fundamental laws of the universe. Most scientists didn't recognize the import of Hawking's claims, but Leonard Susskind and Gerard t'Hooft realized the threat, and responded with a counterattack that changed the course of physics. The Black Hole War is the thrilling story of their united effort to reconcile Hawking's revolutionary theories of black holes with their own sense of reality -- effort that would eventually result in Hawking admitting he was wrong, paying up, and Susskind and t'Hooft realizing that our world is a hologram projected from the outer boundaries of space. A brilliant book about modern physics, quantum mechanics, the fate of stars and the deep mysteries of black holes, Leonard Susskind's account of the Black Hole War is mind-bending and exhilarating reading.

What Is Inside a Black Hole?
What Is Inside a Black Hole?

Author: Stephen Hawking

Publisher: Brief Answers, Big Questions

Published: 2022-09

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781529392364

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'If you feel you are in a black hole, don't give up. There's a way out' What is inside a black hole? Is time travel possible? Throughout his extraordinary career, Stephen Hawking expanded our understanding of the universe and unravelled some of its greatest mysteries. In What Is Inside a Black Hole? Hawking takes us on a journey to the outer reaches of our imaginations, exploring the science of time travel and black holes. 'The best most mind-bending sort of physics' The Times Brief Answers, Big Questions: this stunning paperback series offers electrifying essays from one of the greatest minds of our age, taken from the original text of the No. 1 bestselling Brief Answers to the Big Questions.

What's Inside a Black Hole?
What's Inside a Black Hole?

Author: Andrew Solway

Publisher: Capstone Classroom

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 52

ISBN-13: 9781403477170

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Explains what is out there in space beyond the planets, further than we can travel and how little we know and how we can find out more.

Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space
Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space

Author: Janna Levin

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2016-03-29

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0307958205

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The authoritative story of the headline-making discovery of gravitational waves—by an eminent theoretical astrophysicist and award-winning writer. From the author of How the Universe Got Its Spots and A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, the epic story of the scientific campaign to record the soundtrack of our universe. Black holes are dark. That is their essence. When black holes collide, they will do so unilluminated. Yet the black hole collision is an event more powerful than any since the origin of the universe. The profusion of energy will emanate as waves in the shape of spacetime: gravitational waves. No telescope will ever record the event; instead, the only evidence would be the sound of spacetime ringing. In 1916, Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves, his top priority after he proposed his theory of curved spacetime. One century later, we are recording the first sounds from space, the soundtrack to accompany astronomy’s silent movie. In Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space, Janna Levin recounts the fascinating story of the obsessions, the aspirations, and the trials of the scientists who embarked on an arduous, fifty-year endeavor to capture these elusive waves. An experimental ambition that began as an amusing thought experiment, a mad idea, became the object of fixation for the original architects—Rai Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Ron Drever. Striving to make the ambition a reality, the original three gradually accumulated an international team of hundreds. As this book was written, two massive instruments of remarkably delicate sensitivity were brought to advanced capability. As the book draws to a close, five decades after the experimental ambition began, the team races to intercept a wisp of a sound with two colossal machines, hoping to succeed in time for the centenary of Einstein’s most radical idea. Janna Levin’s absorbing account of the surprises, disappointments, achievements, and risks in this unfolding story offers a portrait of modern science that is unlike anything we’ve seen before.

Mapping the Heavens
Mapping the Heavens

Author: Priyamvada Natarajan

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2016-04-28

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0300221126

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A theoretical astrophysicist explores the ideas that transformed our knowledge of the universe over the past century. The cosmos, once understood as a stagnant place, filled with the ordinary, is now a universe that is expanding at an accelerating pace, propelled by dark energy and structured by dark matter. Priyamvada Natarajan, our guide to these ideas, is someone at the forefront of the research—an astrophysicist who literally creates maps of invisible matter in the universe. She not only explains for a wide audience the science behind these essential ideas but also provides an understanding of how radical scientific theories gain acceptance. The formation and growth of black holes, dark matter halos, the accelerating expansion of the universe, the echo of the big bang, the discovery of exoplanets, and the possibility of other universes—these are some of the puzzling cosmological topics of the early twenty-first century. Natarajan discusses why the acceptance of new ideas about the universe and our place in it has never been linear and always contested even within the scientific community. And she affirms that, shifting and incomplete as science always must be, it offers the best path we have toward making sense of our wondrous, mysterious universe. “Part history, part science, all illuminating. If you want to understand the greatest ideas that shaped our current cosmic cartography, read this book.”—Adam G. Riess, Nobel Laureate in Physics, 2011 “A highly readable, insider’s view of recent discoveries in astronomy with unusual attention to the instruments used and the human drama of the scientists.”—Alan Lightman, author of The Accidental Universe and Einstein's Dream

Einstein's Monsters
Einstein's Monsters

Author: Chris Impey

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2019-09-17

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0393357503

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“[A] skillfully told history of the quest to find black holes.” —Manjit Kumar, Financial Times Black holes are the best-known and least-understood objects in the universe. In Einstein’s Monsters, distinguished astronomer Chris Impey takes readers on a vivid tour of these enigmatic giants. He weaves a fascinating tale out of the fiendishly complex math of black holes and the colorful history of their discovery. Impey blends this history with a poignant account of the phenomena scientists have witnessed while observing black holes: stars swarming like bees around the center of our galaxy; black holes performing gravitational waltzes with visible stars; the cymbal clash of two black holes colliding, releasing ripples in space time. Clear, compelling, and profound, Einstein’s Monsters reveals how our comprehension of black holes is intrinsically linked to how we make sense of the universe and our place within it.

The Rise and Fall of the Black Hole Paradigm
The Rise and Fall of the Black Hole Paradigm

Author: Abhas Mitra

Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Published: 2021-01-22

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 9389104157

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Black holes have turned out to be the cornerstone of both physics and popular belief. But what if we were to realize that exact black holes cannot exist, even though their existence is apparently suggested by exact general relativistic solutions, and Roger Penrose won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics ‘for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity’? While it might seem far-fetched to claim so, it will be worth remembering that the finest theoretical physicists like Albert Einstein and Paul Dirac did not believe in black holes, and Stephen Hawking finally thought that there are no exact black holes. While the black hole paradigm has become commonplace in popular consciousness, in the last decade, noise has consistently grown about the many physical effects which can inhibit the formation of exact mathematical black holes. In The Rise and Fall of the Black Hole Paradigm, Abhas Mitra shows us how, much before these developments, he had proven why the so-called black holes must only be black hole pretenders. He identified these black hole candidates to be Magnetospheric Eternally Collapsing Objects (MECOs) and, along with Darryl J. Leiter and Stanley L. Robertson, generalized them. Recent evidence for the existence of strong magnetic fields around so-called black holes may provide confirmations of his claim.

The Little Book of Black Holes
The Little Book of Black Holes

Author: Steven S. Gubser

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2017-09-25

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 1400888298

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Dive into a mind-bending exploration of the physics of black holes Black holes, predicted by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity more than a century ago, have long intrigued scientists and the public with their bizarre and fantastical properties. Although Einstein understood that black holes were mathematical solutions to his equations, he never accepted their physical reality—a viewpoint many shared. This all changed in the 1960s and 1970s, when a deeper conceptual understanding of black holes developed just as new observations revealed the existence of quasars and X-ray binary star systems, whose mysterious properties could be explained by the presence of black holes. Black holes have since been the subject of intense research—and the physics governing how they behave and affect their surroundings is stranger and more mind-bending than any fiction. After introducing the basics of the special and general theories of relativity, this book describes black holes both as astrophysical objects and theoretical “laboratories” in which physicists can test their understanding of gravitational, quantum, and thermal physics. From Schwarzschild black holes to rotating and colliding black holes, and from gravitational radiation to Hawking radiation and information loss, Steven Gubser and Frans Pretorius use creative thought experiments and analogies to explain their subject accessibly. They also describe the decades-long quest to observe the universe in gravitational waves, which recently resulted in the LIGO observatories’ detection of the distinctive gravitational wave “chirp” of two colliding black holes—the first direct observation of black holes’ existence. The Little Book of Black Holes takes readers deep into the mysterious heart of the subject, offering rare clarity of insight into the physics that makes black holes simple yet destructive manifestations of geometric destiny.

Space: 10 Things You Should Know
Space: 10 Things You Should Know

Author: Rebecca Smethurst

Publisher: Hachette UK

Published: 2019-09-05

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 1841883832

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'Bite-sized, cutting edge science delivered with enormous enthusiasm - all you need to travel the cosmos' CHRIS LINTOTT 'A lot of astrophysics is packed into this neat little book . . . I guarantee you will come away knowing your dark matter from your supermassive black holes' JIM AL-KHALILI This book is for anyone who wants to easily understand the mind-blowing fundamentals of our extraordinary, expanding universe. Written by Oxford astrophysicist Dr Becky Smethurst and composed of ten captivating, simple essays, it guides you swiftly through the galaxies, explaining the mysteries of black holes, dark matter and what existed before the Big Bang, presenting the evidence as to whether we really are alone, illuminating what we still don't know, and much more besides. If you have big questions about Space, this book will provide you with the answers in an engaging and succinct way.