
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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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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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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Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand
- Fifty Wonders That Reveal an Extraordinary Universe
- By: Marcus Chown
- Narrated by: Marcus Chown
- Length: 5 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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So much of our world seems to make perfect sense, and scientific breakthroughs have helped us understand ourselves, our planet, and our place in the universe in fascinating detail. But our adventures in space, our deepening understanding of the quantum world, and our leaps in technology have also revealed a universe far stranger than we ever imagined. With brilliant clarity and wit, best-selling author Marcus Chown examines the profound science behind 50 remarkable scientific facts that help explain the vast complexities of our existence.
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Amazing Scientific Facts Clearly Presented
- By Amazon Customer on 11-19-23
By: Marcus Chown
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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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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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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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AMAZING-READ QUEER BOOKS
- By Grace Haws on 04-23-25
By: Riley Black
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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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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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Air-Borne
- The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe
- By: Carl Zimmer
- Narrated by: Joe Ochman
- Length: 15 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Every day we draw in two thousand gallons of air—and thousands of living things. From the ground to the stratosphere, the air teems with invisible life. This last great biological frontier remains so mysterious that it took over two years for scientists to finally agree that the COVID pandemic was caused by an airborne virus. In Air-Borne, award-winning New York Times columnist and author Carl Zimmer leads us on an odyssey through the living atmosphere and through the history of its discovery.
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Very clarifying look at how messy science can be
- By webtraverser on 03-04-25
By: Carl Zimmer
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Alien Earths
- The New Science of Planet Hunting in the Cosmos
- By: Dr. Lisa Kaltenegger
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell, Dr. Lisa Kaltenegger
- Length: 8 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Riveting and timely, a look at the research that is transforming our understanding of the cosmos in the quest to discover whether we are alone.
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I really enjoyed her perspective on the subject
- By Vladimir Randy Jeune on 11-02-24
What listeners say about A Crack in Everything
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- David Benjamin
- 02-24-25
Complex science, good narrative
This goes way over the head of a non scientific reader, but the stories are often fascinating, and the over arching concept is clear. It’s a good book that ‘s occasionally mind numbing. I know nothing, but I love physics books. I didn’t quite love this, but it’s fine, and black holes are fundamental.
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- WLC
- 01-30-25
Accessible/Well Written Book on Black Holes
This is an informative, interesting, and well-written book on the history of discovery and understanding of black holes. It starts with mathematical discoveries of theoretical physicists in the early 1900’s and progresses to recent observations on gravitational waves resulting from black hole events and observations of the Event Horizon Telescope. Stories and concepts presented are accessible, although not always easily understandable, to those without math or physics background. Speculative thoughts are presented on the future of understanding of black holes and their relationship to uniting understanding of quantum theory and general relativity and other fundamental concepts.
The narrator is excellent.
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