
A Crack in Everything
How Black Holes Came in from the Cold and Took Cosmic Centre Stage
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Narrated by:
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Clive Mantle
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By:
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Marcus Chown
About this listen
Bloomsbury presents A Crack in Everything by Marcus Chown, read by Clive Mantle.
What is space? What is time? Where did the universe come from? The answers to mankind’s most enduring questions may lie in science’s greatest enigma: black holes.
A black hole is a region of space where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. This can occur when a star approaches the end of its life. Unable to generate enough heat to maintain its outer layers, it shrinks catastrophically down to an infinitely dense point.
When this phenomenon was first proposed in 1916, it defied scientific understanding so much that Albert Einstein dismissed it as too ridiculous to be true. But scientists have since proven otherwise. In 1971, Paul Murdin and Louise Webster discovered the first black hole: Cygnus X-1. Later, in the 1990s, astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope found that not only do black holes exist, supermassive black holes lie at the heart of almost every galaxy, including our own. It would take another three decades to confirm this phenomenon. On 10 April 2019, a team of astronomers made history by producing the first image of a black hole.
A Crack in Everything is the story of how black holes came in from the cold and took cosmic centre stage. As a journalist, Marcus Chown interviews many of the scientists who made the key discoveries, and, as a former physicist, he translates the most esoteric of science into everyday language. The result is a uniquely engaging book that tells one of the great untold stories in modern science.
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Story
As Dorian Lynskey writes, “People have been contemplating the end of the world for millennia.” In this immersive and compelling cultural history, Lynskey reveals how religious prophecies of the apocalypse were secularized in the early 19th century by Lord Byron and Mary Shelley in a time of dramatic social upheaval and temporary climate change, inciting a long tradition of visions of the end without gods.
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A book that I needed
- By TJ Schreiber on 02-19-25
By: Dorian Lynskey
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Life as No One Knows It
- The Physics of Life's Emergence
- By: Sara Imari Walker
- Narrated by: Sara Imari Walker
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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What is life? This is among the most difficult open problems in science, right up there with the nature of consciousness and the existence of matter. All the definitions we have fall short. None help us understand how life originates or the full range of possibilities for what life on other planets might look like. In Life as No One Knows It, physicist and astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker argues that solving the origin of life requires radical new thinking and an experimentally testable theory for what life is.
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Fascinating thought patterns
- By John linden on 09-10-24
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Seven Social Movements That Changed America
- By: Linda Gordon
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 17 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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How do social movements arise, wield power, and decline? Renowned scholar Linda Gordon investigates these questions in a groundbreaking work, narrating the stories of many of America's most influential twentieth-century social movements. Beginning with the turn-of-the-century settlement house movement, Gordon then scrutinizes the 1920s Ku Klux Klan and its successors, the violent American fascist groups of the 1930s.
By: Linda Gordon
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What It's Like to Be a Dog
- And Other Adventures in Animal Neuroscience
- By: Gregory Berns
- Narrated by: Joe Hempel
- Length: 7 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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What is it like to be a dog? A bat? Or a dolphin? To find out, neuroscientist Gregory Berns and his team began with a radical step: they taught dogs to go into an MRI scanner - completely awake. They discovered what makes dogs individuals with varying capacities for self-control, different value systems, and a complex understanding of human speech. And dogs were just the beginning. In What It's Like to Be a Dog, Berns explores the fascinating inner lives of wild animals from dolphins and sea lions to the extinct Tasmanian tiger.
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If You Were Disappointed In HOW DOGS LOVE US--
- By Gillian on 03-23-18
By: Gregory Berns
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Witches
- The Transformative Power of Women Working Together
- By: Sam George-Allen
- Narrated by: Merritt Hicks
- Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Covens. Girl bands. Ballet troupes. Convents. In all times and places, girls and women have come together in communities of vocation, of necessity, of support. In Witches, Sam George-Allen explores how magic happens wherever women gather. Female farmers change the way we grow our food. Online beauty communities democratize skin-care rituals. And more than any other demographic, it’s teen girls that shape our culture.
By: Sam George-Allen
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THR3E
- By: Matt Stanley
- Narrated by: John Pirhalla
- Length: 10 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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In California, Sonny Boden, fresh out of prison for killing his grandparents, hides behind a mask of normalcy while luring hitchhikers to their deaths. But when paranoid schizophrenic Dwight Paulson witnesses one of Sonny's murders, he believes they share a twisted bond and begins his own killing spree. Meanwhile, Joe Wilder, a shattered family man plagued by apocalyptic voices, is drawn into the carnage. As their paths intertwine, bodies amass, and Sonny’s carefully constructed lie begins to unravel. He’s caught between two killers—each one threatening to expose his crimes.
By: Matt Stanley
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Waves in an Impossible Sea
- How Everyday Life Emerges from the Cosmic Ocean
- By: Matt Strassler
- Narrated by: Christopher Grove
- Length: 11 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In Waves in an Impossible Sea, physicist Matt Strassler tells a startling tale of elementary particles, human experience, and empty space. He begins with a simple mystery of motion. When we drive at highway speeds with the windows down, the wind beats against our faces. Yet our planet hurtles through the cosmos at 150 miles per second, and we feel nothing of it. How can our voyage be so tranquil when, as Einstein discovered, matter warps space, and space deflects matter? The answer, Strassler reveals, is that empty space is a sea, albeit a paradoxically strange one.
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No pdf
- By Mark on 01-14-25
By: Matt Strassler
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When the Earth Was Green
- Plants, Animals, and Evolution's Greatest Romance
- By: Riley Black
- Narrated by: Wren Mack
- Length: 9 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Riley Black brings us back in time to prehistoric seas, swamps, forests, and savannas where critical moments in plant evolution unfolded. Each chapter stars plants and animals alike, underscoring how the interactions between species have helped shape the world we call home. As the chapters move upwards in time, Black guides listeners along the burgeoning trunk of the Tree of Life, stopping to appreciate branches of an evolutionary story that links the world we know with one we can only just perceive now through the silent stone, from ancient roots to the present.
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No argument
- By Anonymous User on 05-20-25
By: Riley Black
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Space Oddities
- The Mysterious Anomalies Challenging Our Understanding of the Universe
- By: Harry Cliff
- Narrated by: Harry Cliff
- Length: 7 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Something strange is going on in the cosmos. Scientists are uncovering a catalogue of weird phenomena that simply can’t be explained by our long-established theories of the universe. After decades of fruitless searching, could we finally be catching glimpses of a profound new view of our physical world? Or are we being fooled by cruel tricks of the data? In Space Oddities, Harry Cliff, a physicist who does cutting-edge work on the Large Hadron Collider, provides a riveting look at the universe’s most confounding puzzles.
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as compelling as a mystery novel and very informative
- By jimpgh@aol.com on 04-22-24
By: Harry Cliff
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The Impossible Man
- Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius
- By: Patchen Barss
- Narrated by: Jonathan Beville
- Length: 11 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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When he was six years old, Roger Penrose discovered a sundial in a clearing near his house. Through that machine made of light, shadow, and time, Roger glimpsed a “world behind the world” of transcendently beautiful geometry. It spurred him on a journey to become one of the world’s most influential mathematicians, philosophers, and physicists. Penrose would prove the limitations of general relativity, set a new agenda for theoretical physics, and astound colleagues and admirers with the elegance and beauty of his discoveries.
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Flawed
- By Michael on 01-12-25
By: Patchen Barss
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Embers of the Hands
- Hidden Histories of the Viking Age
- By: Eleanor Barraclough
- Narrated by: Eleanor Barraclough
- Length: 10 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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In imagining a Viking, a certain image springs to mind: a barbaric warrior, leaping ashore from a longboat, and ready to terrorize the hapless local population of a northern European town. Yet while such characters define our imagination of the Viking Age today, they were in the minority. Instead, in the time-stopping soils, water, and ice of the North, Eleanor Barraclough excavates a preserved lost world, one that reimagines a misunderstood society.
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Author is an excellent reader!
- By K on 02-11-25
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Taking Manhattan
- The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America
- By: Russell Shorto
- Narrated by: Russell Shorto
- Length: 11 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1664, England decided to invade the Dutch-controlled city of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island. Charles II and his brother, the Duke of York, had dreams of empire, and their archrivals, the Dutch, were in the way. But Richard Nicolls, the military officer who led the English flotilla bent on destruction, changed his strategy once he encountered Peter Stuyvesant, New Netherland’s canny director general.
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I really appreciated how the author continually related the past to what we see today.
- By Jaelyn Dean on 05-22-25
By: Russell Shorto
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The Precipice
- Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity
- By: Toby Ord
- Narrated by: Toby Ord
- Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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This urgent and eye-opening book makes the case that protecting humanity's future is the central challenge of our time. If all goes well, human history is just beginning. Our species could survive for billions of years - enough time to end disease, poverty, and injustice, and to flourish in ways unimaginable today. But this vast future is at risk. With the advent of nuclear weapons, humanity entered a new age, where we face existential catastrophes - those from which we could never come back.
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The 80000hours website is better
- By Cristi on 08-06-20
By: Toby Ord
Complex science, good narrative
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The narrator is excellent.
Accessible/Well Written Book on Black Holes
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