Black Holes: The Key to Understanding the Universe

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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.

A singularity is what you end up with when a giant star is compressed to an unimaginably small point." X-rayWide Field of M87 Galactic Core. Credit, X-ray: NASA/CXC/Villanova University/J. Neilsen; Radio: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration 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.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 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 Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carolo Rovelli; translators Simon Carnell and Erica Segre (UK : Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books, 2015). Call number: PSE Library QC24.5 C38 2015

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. 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. Five Photons: Remarkable Journeys of Light Across Space and Time by James Geach (London : Reaktion Books, 2018). Call Number: Shields Library QB461 .G43 2018 Neil Tyson is one of the greatest scientific educators we have ever had. He is probably unmatched when writing popular science books, where he covers topics that can be very counterintuitive. But he explains astrophysics very smoothly that anybody can understand without scientific knowledge. 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."

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. A jaunt through space history . . . with charming wit and many pop-culture references' – BBC Sky At Night Magazine