BLACK HOLES: Key to Understanding the Universe - 9780008390655

BLACK HOLES: Key to Understanding the Universe
By (author) Professor Brian Cox , By (author) Professor Jeff Forshaw

Format Paperback | 288 pages
Dimensions 153 x 234 x 22mm | 420g
Publication date 06 Oct 2022
Publisher HarperCollins Publishers
Imprint William Collins
Publication City/Country London, United Kingdom
Language English
Illustrations note 73 b/w, illus, Index
ISBN10 0008390657
ISBN13 9780008390655

A Brief History of Time for the 21st Century
At the heart of our galaxy lies a monster so deadly, not even light can escape its grasp. Its secrets lie waiting to be discovered. It's time to explore our universe's most mysterious inhabitants


Black Holes

At the heart of the Milky Way lies a supermassive black hole 4 million times more massive than our Sun. A place where space and time are so warped that light is trapped if it ventures within 12 million km. According to Einstein, inside lies the end of time. According to 21st-century physics, the reality may be far more bizarre.



Black holes lie where the most massive stars used to shine and at the edge of our current understanding. They are naturally occurring objects, the inevitable creations of gravity when too much matter collapses into not enough space. And yet, although the laws of nature predict them, they fail fully to describe them.


Black holes are places in space and time where the laws of gravity, quantum physics and thermodynamics collide. Originally thought to be so intellectually troubling that they simply could not exist, it is only in the past few years that we have begun to glimpse a new synthesis; a deep connection between gravity and quantum information theory that describes a holographic universe in which space and time emerge from a network of quantum bits, and wormholes span the void.