Black Holes

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.

In this groundbreaking book, Professor Brian Cox and Professor Jeff Forshaw take you to the edge of our understanding of black holes; a scientific journey to the research frontier spanning a century of physics, from Einstein to Hawking and beyond, that ends with the startling conclusion that our world may operate like a giant quantum computer.

About the author

Professor Brian Cox CBE FRS is Professor of Particle Physics at the University of Manchester and the Royal Society Professor for Public Engagement in Science. He has worked on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the HERA accelerator at DESY and the Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab. Cox has written and presented numerous TV series for the BBC, including the Wonders Trilogy, Forces of Nature, The Planets and The Universe. He is also the co-presenter of The Infinite Monkey Cage.

Professor Jeff Forshaw is a theoretical physicist and Professor of Particle Physics at the University of Manchester. Together with Professor Cox, he has written three bestselling science titles: Why Does E=mc²?, The Quantum Universe and Universal. He was awarded the 1999 James Clerk Maxwell Medal by the UK’s Institute of Physics to recognise outstanding early career contributions to theoretical physics and the 2013 Kelvin Medal for outstanding and sustained contributions to public engagement.