
A Brief History of Black Holes
And Why Nearly Everything You Know About Them Is Wrong
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Narrated by:
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Dr. Becky Smethurst
About this listen
This audio edition is narrated with dazzling enthusiasm by the author, Dr Becky Smethurst.
Right now, you are orbiting a black hole.
The Earth orbits the Sun, and the Sun orbits the centre of the Milky Way: a supermassive black hole, the strangest and most misunderstood phenomenon in the galaxy.
In A Brief History of Black Holes, the award-winning University of Oxford researcher Dr Becky Smethurst charts five hundred years of scientific breakthroughs in astronomy and astrophysics. She takes us from the earliest observations of the universe and the collapse of massive stars, to the iconic first photographs of a black hole and her own published findings.
A cosmic tale of discovery, Becky explains why black holes aren’t really ‘black’, that you never ever want to be ‘spaghettified’, how black holes are more like sofa cushions than hoovers and why, beyond the event horizon, the future is a direction in space rather than in time. Told with humour and wisdom, this captivating book describes the secrets behind the most profound questions about our universe, all hidden inside black holes.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2022 Dr Rebecca Smethurst (P)2022 Macmillan Publishers International LimitedListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
In a rare blend of scientific insight and writing as elegant as the theories it explains, Brian Greene, one of the world's leading string theorists, peels away the layers of mystery surrounding string theory to reveal a universe that consists of 11 dimensions where the fabric of space tears and repairs itself, and all matter-from the smallest quarks to the most gargantuan supernovas-is generated by the vibrations of microscopically tiny loops of energy.
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Well Written, Good Narration
- By Verena on 06-12-09
By: Brian Greene
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Cosmos
- A Personal Voyage
- By: Carl Sagan
- Narrated by: LeVar Burton, Seth MacFarlane, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and others
- Length: 14 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Cosmos is one of the bestselling science books of all time. In clear-eyed prose, Sagan reveals a jewel-like blue world inhabited by a life form that is just beginning to discover its own identity and to venture into the vast ocean of space.
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Over-acting voice actors
- By John on 11-09-17
By: Carl Sagan
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How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch
- In Search of the Recipe for Our Universe, from the Origins of Atoms to the Big Bang
- By: Harry Cliff
- Narrated by: Harry Cliff
- Length: 11 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Harry Cliff - a University of Cambridge particle physicist and researcher on the Large Hadron Collider - sets out in pursuit of answers. He ventures to the largest underground research facility in the world, deep beneath Italy's Gran Sasso mountains, where scientists gaze into the heart of the Sun using the most elusive of particles, the ghostly neutrino. He visits CERN in Switzerland to explore the "Antimatter Factory," where the stuff of science fiction is manufactured daily (and we're close to knowing whether it falls up).
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Excellent
- By Adrian on 01-06-23
By: Harry Cliff
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On the Origin of Time
- Stephen Hawking's Final Theory
- By: Thomas Hertog
- Narrated by: Ethan Kelly
- Length: 12 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Perhaps the biggest question Stephen Hawking tried to answer in his extraordinary life was how the universe could have created conditions so perfectly hospitable to life. In order to solve this mystery, Hawking studied the big bang origin of the universe, but his early work ran into a crisis when the math predicted many big bangs producing a multiverse—countless different universes, most of which would be far too bizarre to harbor life.
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1960 ’s to 1980’s Re-Hash of History
- By Ron A. Parsons on 11-13-23
By: Thomas Hertog
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The Biggest Ideas in the Universe
- Space, Time, and Motion
- By: Sean Carroll
- Narrated by: Sean Carroll
- Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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The most trusted explainer of the most mind-boggling concepts pulls back the veil of mystery that has too long cloaked the most valuable building blocks of modern science. Sean Carroll, with his genius for making complex notions entertaining, presents in his uniquely lucid voice the fundamental ideas informing the modern physics of reality. In the tradition of the legendary Richard Feynman lectures presented sixty years ago, this book is an inspiring, dazzling introduction to a way of seeing that will resonate across cultural and generational boundaries for many years to come.
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Accompanying PDF is Included
- By Barton on 11-21-22
By: Sean Carroll
Excellent primer and updater
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Entertaining and Informative
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Superb and many more to come i hope. i know more
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beautiful
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science and the art of inspirational storytelling
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her humor brings the work the humanity we appreciate.
the up-to-date information
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Great, but a bit oversimplified
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Excellent space history lesson
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My favorite astrophysicist
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Black holes for dummies
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