Black Holes: The Key to Understanding the Universe

4.5 stars.

Honestly, I've not had such a fun time with a science book like this one in a while.

Now I understand why the book is titled in such a way. At first, I thought it was just a catchy title to attract readers. But, by the end of this book, you will understand, why black holes are indeed the key to understanding the Universe.

The author starts from a simple theoretical eternal non-spinning black hole, Schwarzschild's solution of Einstein's General Relativity. 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. But it is intriguing, to learn purely theoretical black holes derived only from Einstein's General Relativity. And, I didn't expect that I would learn the Penrose diagram to understand the infinities of spacetime.

With this book, we will explore the possibilities of the interior of a black hole, starting from Schwarzschild's eternal and non-spinning black hole, Kerr's eternal and spinning black hole, Hawking's non-eternal (radiating) black hole, until the duality of our reality: the Holographic Principle. I can't hold my excitement when the author introduces Quantum Computing with its relationship with the Holographic Principle to simulate our spacetime reality. It is new information for me, and it is mind-blowing.

This book, however, requires you to trust the math behind all the black hole physics and their interpretation. The author did write some equations but it is in the simplest form. There is no detail on the derivation (of course, because this is not a textbook), so we need to trust what the author said. As weird as it may seem, they did the math, experiment, and research more than I did. Hence, I trust them.