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3.94 AVERAGE
3.94 AVERAGE
informative
slow-paced
informative
fast-paced
This was a really fun (and very short) work about black holes but comes with a treatment of the physics as best as the layperson can hope to understand them. Levin does a very good job conveying all that she can about this insanely complex topic to dolts such as myself.
adventurous
informative
fast-paced
funny
informative
lighthearted
fast-paced
challenging
informative
medium-paced
I often wondered why there were no good books just on black holes. Now there is. Just finished Janna Levin’s new book and it was great and is exactly the black hole 101 you need. One nitpick is that Hawking was described as an ailing Oxford physicist and not a late Cambridge one :(
Don’t take the three out of five stars as a detractor for this book. It’s interesting, and the first chapter really grabs the reader. For me this was a 3/5 simply because much of it was just over my head.
I’m glad I read Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness by Rosenblum & Kuttner earlier this year. Without that explanation of spooky interactions, superposition, and the basics of quantum mechanics, I think I would have been hopelessly lost with Levin’s work.
I like Levin’s sense of humor; it’s kind of dark. The last line of the book is the best example, subtle and intentional. I have a much better understanding of the Event Horizon now. The 1997 movie just didn’t explain it very well (*shock*). I also feel like I understood the details of the theory in this book better than the chapters discussing the reality of black holes.
I learned that black holes dissipate as they split photon pairs and create Hawking Radiation. Hawking Radiation being yet another thing I now sort-of understand.
In retrospect, I took a lot away from Black Hole Survival Guide, more than I thought upon closing the book.
Finally, black holes are nothing.
I’m glad I read Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness by Rosenblum & Kuttner earlier this year. Without that explanation of spooky interactions, superposition, and the basics of quantum mechanics, I think I would have been hopelessly lost with Levin’s work.
I like Levin’s sense of humor; it’s kind of dark. The last line of the book is the best example, subtle and intentional. I have a much better understanding of the Event Horizon now. The 1997 movie just didn’t explain it very well (*shock*). I also feel like I understood the details of the theory in this book better than the chapters discussing the reality of black holes.
I learned that black holes dissipate as they split photon pairs and create Hawking Radiation. Hawking Radiation being yet another thing I now sort-of understand.
In retrospect, I took a lot away from Black Hole Survival Guide, more than I thought upon closing the book.
Finally, black holes are nothing.
Given the counter-intuitive, mind-boggling, subject matter this was somehow... underwhelming. I think the problem was the stuttering central metaphor/thought-experiment (the perspective of 'Alice' vs the reader) which was picked up and dropped in a fairly ad-hoc way. Interesting, but there are better 'pop' guides out there.
