A Brief History of Time for the 21st Century

In the center of our galaxy lies a monster so deadly that not even light can escape its grasp. Its secrets await discovery. It is time to explore the most mysterious inhabitants of our universe: black holes.

At the heart of our Galaxy, there is a supermassive black hole, 4 million times more massive than our sun. A place where space and time are so distorted that light is trapped if it dares to enter within 12 million kilometers. According to Einstein, within it lies the end of time. According to 21st-century physics, reality might be much stranger.

Black holes are found where the most massive stars once shone and at the limits of our current understanding. They are natural phenomena, the inevitable creations of gravity when too much matter collapses into a confined space. Yet even though the laws of nature predict them, they do not fully describe them.

Black holes are places in space and time where the laws of gravity, quantum physics, and thermodynamics collide. Initially thought to be so intellectually problematic that they simply couldn't exist, it is only in recent years that we have started to discern a new synthesis: a profound connection between gravity and the theory of quantum information that describes a holographic universe where space and time emerge from a network of quantum bits, and wormholes span the void.

In this innovative book, Professor Brian Cox and Professor Jeff Forshaw take you to the limits of our understanding of black holes. A scientific journey at the edge of research spanning a century of physics, from Einstein to Hawking and beyond, concluding with the astounding realization that our world might operate like a giant quantum computer.

Pages: 288, Dimensions: 12.9x12.9cm