Black Holes: The Key to Understanding the Universe

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Telescopes can get a clearer, more tense image of something in outer space. If multiple telescopes worldwide work in unison, looking at the same thing, they can compare the data and get a much-sharpened image. That’s what researchers are attempting to do. It’s a massive task as weather patterns are different in different parts of the world that meet ideal conditions at these different telescopes. 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!

Quantum Fuzz: The Strange True Makeup of Everything Around Us by Michael S. Walker (Amherst, New York : Prometheus Books, 2017). Call number: PSE Library QC174.12 .W347 2017The Ascent of Gravity: The Quest to Understand the Force that Explains Everything by Marcus Chown (London Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2017). Call Number: PSE Library QC178 .C295 2017 All of this disregards entirely that I am already sort of tied up with a pseudo-career in a different scientific discipline and do not relish the thought of attending university again. Nor am I particularly skilled at focussing on multiple things, fond of starting over, or withholding anything of value from the theoretical physicists that they haven't already got covered. 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. The more accurately you know the positions of particles, the less accurately you can know their speeds, and vice versa"

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. It could have been a pamphlet but they made it a book with a lot of empty spaces and charging like it's worth ₹100 (5 US dollars in purchasing power parity).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. Five Photons: Remarkable Journeys of Light Across Space and Time by James Geach (London : Reaktion Books, 2018). Call Number: Shields Library QB461 .G43 2018

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. Also, as a reader who is not using these texts for any academic purposes, I think Cox’s writing is so much easier to ‘digest’ (and much more enjoyable in general) than Hawking’s (only comparing this to a few of Hawking’s books that I’ve previously read). I think it might be important to clarify that – I’m not comparing them based on ‘who’s the better (astro)physicist’ or whose ‘work’ was more ‘important’; but only of whose writing/books I had found more ‘enjoyable’. Hope that helps? Stephen Hawking discusses a grand unified theory in a brief history of time. The idea behind a grand unified theory is that laws can connect general relativity and quantum mechanics. It is also sometimes called the theory of everything.

The best discovery in this whole matter, I guess, is; "During most of the life of a normal star, over many billions of years, it will support itself against its own gravity by thermal pressure, caused by nuclear processes which convert hydrogen into helium." 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. 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. 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. 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.

Quantum mechanics implies that the whole space is filled with pairs of virtual particles and antiparticles, which are constantly materializing in pairs, separating, and then coming together again and annihilating each other. 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. While saying this, I think the authors try their best to convey these complex ideas to the layman. I have read considerable amount of books about the universe and this is the hardest so far. But even though this it's hard to read, I think we can see through these theories from a mathematical point of view. Because at the end of the day it's all about maths. 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 2017From the publisher “These seven short lessons guide us, with simplicity and clarity, through the scientific revolution that shook physics in the twentieth century and still continues to shake us today…” A jaunt through space history . . . with charming wit and many pop-culture references' – BBC Sky At Night Magazine 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." 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.