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

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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.

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Title summary: “Discusses the concept of gravity from its earliest recognition in 1666 to the discovery of gravitational waves in 2015, and explains why gravity holds the key to understanding the nature of time and the origin of the universe.” Gravity! The Quest for Gravitational Waves by Pierre Binétruy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Call Number: PSE Library QC178 .B56 2018 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. A lyrical science communicator’: Carlo Rovelli. Photograph: Roberto Serra/Iguana Press/Getty Images

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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At the end of the chapter, you will understand everything, and everything will be pretty clear to you, whatever he wanted to explain. What I love about the book is that the personality of Stephen Hawking comes across, and you enjoy reading it. It’s such a beautiful right to read this book. Also, it shows that he was a very humorous person and funny because many times in this book, he gets into this self-deprecating humor thing. A singularity is what you end up with when a giant star is compressed to an unimaginably small point." 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. This is the ultimate vindication of research for research’s sake: two of the biggest problems in science and technology have turned 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. This is one reason why it is vital that we continue to support the most esoteric scientific endeavours. Nobody could have predicted such a link.You can learn about Einstein and how Einstein was the first to think about reality differently and how that led him to write his theory of relativity and everything. The author closes this book with a chapter on his philosophical view concerning science and humanity. Not only do I put this book down a more knowledgeable human being, I had a blast acquiring that knowledge. It all comes down to the author's ability to make something this dense ( :D ) truly enjoyable and funny. Awesome, read it!! It’s always tempting to bask in the self-congratulatory delusion that if I just really concentrate on something hard enough I’d be able to understand it. But this book proved me wrong from the very first spacetime Penrose diagram that slowly sent my protesting brain over the event horizon and to the singularity while being simultaneously vaporized and spaghettified. i.e.) the very boundary of the observable universe is also 2D surface encoded with info about real 2D object.