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). 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 all ebook purchases, you will be prompted to create an account or login with your existing HarperCollins username and password. It's a complex but amazing book - the authors walked me through very many things I have previously not understood at all (despite intensive reading).

Black Holes doesn't do this – not even close – and my eyes began to glaze over every time a new equation was introduced and then explained in a dense and academic series of paragraphs without much in the way of respite.Put in these terms, there is no greater or lesser mystery here than Wigner’s miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics. Now that was a remarkable discovery because temperature was just a thing you could measure on a thermometer, but it was really only fully understood when we knew that everything is made of atoms. Minkowski spacetime diagrams are however touched upon very briefly, and meeting them again in the later chapters I was a bit confused. This is a bit unusual start (at least for me, a nonphysicist who learn only from popular science book), because I always learn about a black hole from a physical process (the collapse of a star), not a purely theoretical one like Schwarzschild's.

There’s time dilation, as well as the twin paradox – I liked the idea that you can “gain time” compared with stationary observers while accelerating, but this also can cut you off from some regions of spacetime (now some ideas in Death's End by Liu Cixin make more sense! It doesn't appear to have any moving parts at all, so immediately back in the 1970s, there was a sign that there may be something deeper to black holes. As a science book, I'm sure this must be a remarkable and accurate piece, but as a popular science book, it must be considered something of a failure. Anyway, the two particles would be entangled, and one of them escapes, while the other one remains inside the hole.What I’m trying to say is that I don’t think that this book is only for the space-ey academics; anyone can enjoy it too. If you're not a physicist (or not yet a physicist) and you want to understand what Einstein and relativity theory are all about, you would do well to read this book. It was a very pleasant surprise, as I found myself working hard to keep up with the author as he took Penrose diagrams in a new direction, and explosed the Information Paradox and other black hole basics in new ways. We have a picture where the interior of the black hole becomes — in some sense — the same place as the exterior.