Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.94 AVERAGE
3.94 AVERAGE
adventurous
dark
funny
informative
inspiring
fast-paced
What a brilliant book! It is short, simple, quick, and yet offers such a rich understanding of any possible journey within a black hole, as well as provides a very accessible understanding of all of the physical phenomena that surrounds it. With a heavy and often existential connotation that comes with black holes, and what might happen if someone were ever to cross the event horizon (as we all eventually will), her storytelling is yet lighthearted and humorous. Plus, the artwork was very lovely! 5 stars across the board!
informative
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
I didn’t feel like this was as accessible or comprehensible as it was marketed to be.
challenging
dark
informative
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
tense
medium-paced
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
I went into this book knowing little of black wholes and I'm entirely sure that I know even less than I originally thought. I'm confused and intrigued, which is everything I needed.
Janna Levin has a way of writing like she's talking to you, and while the "guide" theme sometimes stepped away from that, I liked it all the same. Lia Halloran's artwork was a nice addition, though I found it more decorative than informative.
Janna Levin has a way of writing like she's talking to you, and while the "guide" theme sometimes stepped away from that, I liked it all the same. Lia Halloran's artwork was a nice addition, though I found it more decorative than informative.
A friend takes me out in New York to discuss the essentials to include in a black hole survival guide. An accomplished science writer, he asks me to clarify: "Don't I already know everything about black holes?"
"Do you know they are nothing?"
Reading this slim book was like having Janna over for tea. And I say this not as an exaggeration. Anyone who has listened to her interviews will get the same feeling. She writes as she talks. It's as if someone asked her about her views on the black holes and let her speak uninterrupted for an hour or two. This is unlike her other book, [b:Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space|27430326|Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space|Janna Levin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1528655022l/27430326._SY75_.jpg|47481732], which was primarily a historical account on gravitational wave detection. Here Janna lets herself go and passionately discusses the oddity that is a black hole. In thirteen brief chapters she condenses the essence of what black holes are and are not.
I would say this book is a crash course on black holes, but that would be misleading to a complete novice. It discusses things like: relativity of spacetime, black hole evaporation via Hawking radiation, the information-loss paradox, the quantum entanglement etc. There is beauty in how Janna describes these concepts. It feels like she is sharing a personal outlook on something universally known. And I believe I enjoyed it more because of my recent dalliance with other books on the topic. It was pure happenstance that I did the heavy lifting with Kip's book before picking up this one. And I am glad it turned out that way, otherwise the ideas crunched within the short chapters would have flummoxed me for sure. Don't mistake this for a list of dos and don'ts to mind in the vicinity of a black hole. This is more like a Get-To-Know-A-Black-Hole book.
The book turned out to be a 3.5 star read for me. It is not a must read. But if you like Janna, DO pick it up.
If somebody had previously told me that I were to cry over a book dedicated to astro- and quantum physics, I would have found that highly improbable and potentially laughable. Yet here we are. I have read Black Hole Survival Guide three times now; I have cried reading it exactly three times. It's an astounding work of non-fiction that is also simultaneously and surprisingly one of the best examples of contemporary Epic.
I am an old fatalist, I find the idea that cosmos is vast, unknowable, and fundamentally - uncaring - romantic and deeply comforting. So, apparently, does Janna Levin, since she wrote an extensive love letter to a phenomenon known as "black hole" - an area of space with a gravitational field so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. How can one survive it? A black hole is a paradox, it's nothing that exists. A thorn in every scientist's side, the ultimate bearer of existential terror, some-no-thing that is impossible to know empirically and, therefore, a source of endless rumination and inspiration.
Poetic waxing aside, Black Hole Survival Guide taken at face value succeeds at delivering complex theoretical notions in the most accessible and engaging manner, and if Janna Levin were my teacher, I would have ended up loving physics. Shuddering.
Yet I have said that this book is an Epic and I have meant it literally. It's a twisted Odyssey of sorts where you, a hero, traverse the flow of spacetime on your one-way journey past the event horizon. Alice, the one you left behind, sends you love letters encoded into the constant speed of light, fragments of a wishbone, split yellow-blue quantum particles of the colour green, messages that fast-forward at the uninterpretable pace as you get further away. There is a war going on, between "defenders of general relativity" and "avengers of quantum mechanics", a war that will define the outcome of your existence, since you are a thought experiment and they are trying to establish the supremacy over what a black hole is and how it behaves. Regardless, the only thing it will change is what happens to matter formerly known as you post-annihilation, whether Alice might be able to recognize & decode every bit of you emanating outwards with Hawking radiation or not.
Alice dies, you cease to be, black holes stay zero divided by zero. It is as fantastical and rich and all-consuming and tragic as any story ever written. It is exciting and way more appealing than any sci-fi book I have read in a long while. In the closing paragraph of this guide Janna Levin reveals the truth we, heroes on a journey to find the key to the Universe that is about to be swallowed whole should have already known: Ultimately, there only ever was information. This story of our beginning, our evolution, our ambitions to know, our presence here will be strewn into an unreadable form no longer registering time, our history effectively erased.
In the end, there is no surviving black holes.
I am an old fatalist, I find the idea that cosmos is vast, unknowable, and fundamentally - uncaring - romantic and deeply comforting. So, apparently, does Janna Levin, since she wrote an extensive love letter to a phenomenon known as "black hole" - an area of space with a gravitational field so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. How can one survive it? A black hole is a paradox, it's nothing that exists. A thorn in every scientist's side, the ultimate bearer of existential terror, some-no-thing that is impossible to know empirically and, therefore, a source of endless rumination and inspiration.
Poetic waxing aside, Black Hole Survival Guide taken at face value succeeds at delivering complex theoretical notions in the most accessible and engaging manner, and if Janna Levin were my teacher, I would have ended up loving physics. Shuddering.
Yet I have said that this book is an Epic and I have meant it literally. It's a twisted Odyssey of sorts where you, a hero, traverse the flow of spacetime on your one-way journey past the event horizon. Alice, the one you left behind, sends you love letters encoded into the constant speed of light, fragments of a wishbone, split yellow-blue quantum particles of the colour green, messages that fast-forward at the uninterpretable pace as you get further away. There is a war going on, between "defenders of general relativity" and "avengers of quantum mechanics", a war that will define the outcome of your existence, since you are a thought experiment and they are trying to establish the supremacy over what a black hole is and how it behaves. Regardless, the only thing it will change is what happens to matter formerly known as you post-annihilation, whether Alice might be able to recognize & decode every bit of you emanating outwards with Hawking radiation or not.
Alice dies, you cease to be, black holes stay zero divided by zero. It is as fantastical and rich and all-consuming and tragic as any story ever written. It is exciting and way more appealing than any sci-fi book I have read in a long while. In the closing paragraph of this guide Janna Levin reveals the truth we, heroes on a journey to find the key to the Universe that is about to be swallowed whole should have already known: Ultimately, there only ever was information. This story of our beginning, our evolution, our ambitions to know, our presence here will be strewn into an unreadable form no longer registering time, our history effectively erased.
In the end, there is no surviving black holes.
informative
mysterious
medium-paced
Definitely a page turner. Brilliantly written and gorgeously illustrated, this book is an absolute pleasure to read!