Black Holes: The Key to Understanding the Universe

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I suppose owning a “Schrödinger’s cat: Wanted dead and alive” t-shirt didn’t actually qualify me to understand this book (although it certainly increased my nerd cred). The problem here is that it is not how physics works. In physics, we have what is called the conservation of information. Even if you throw a book on fire, the information in the book will somehow be encoded in the heat and light ade in burning the book. Leonard Susskind gives a fantastic example in the book.

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."

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. There’s an old saying I think by Stephen Hawking that every equation you include in a popular level science book will half the effective book sales. Well, Cox and Forshaw deserve credit for taking a brave plunge (and by my estimate forgoing 99.999999% 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. 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. This is definitely a hard read. I had to read some chapters again and again to understand ( not fully though). So if you are going to read this book, and understand it thoroughly, you should spend some time on it.

Gravity! The Quest for Gravitational Waves by Pierre Binétruy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Call Number: PSE Library QC178 .B56 2018My 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! A lyrical science communicator’: Carlo Rovelli. Photograph: Roberto Serra/Iguana Press/Getty Images

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." 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 2017 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.The more accurately you know the positions of particles, the less accurately you can know their speeds, and vice versa" 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.