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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Loved it
- By Elizabeth Smith on 11-26-24
By: Kelsey Johnson
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The Demon in the Machine
- How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life
- By: Paul Davies
- Narrated by: Nigel Patterson
- Length: 9 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
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Performance
-
Story
What is life? In this penetrating and wide-ranging book, world-renowned physicist and science communicator Paul Davies searches for answers in a field so new and fast-moving that it lacks a name; it is a domain where biology, computing, logic, chemistry, quantum physics, and nanotechnology intersect.
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Thought provoking and rich with insight
- By quantumbikemechanic on 11-13-24
By: Paul Davies
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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
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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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Thought provoking
- By Lee Ann Moyer on 12-09-24
By: Matt Strassler
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Quanta and Fields
- The Biggest Ideas in the Universe
- By: Sean Carroll
- Narrated by: Sean Carroll
- Length: 9 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Sean Carroll is creating a profoundly new approach to sharing physics with a broad audience, one that goes beyond analogies to show how physicists really think. He cuts to the bare mathematical essence of our most profound theories, explaining every step in a uniquely accessible way. Quantum field theory is how modern physics describes nature at its most profound level. Starting with the basics of quantum mechanics itself, Sean Carroll explains measurement and entanglement before explaining how the world is really made of fields.
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only for professionals
- By ATTILIO GALIANI on 10-02-24
By: Sean Carroll
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The Ascent of Gravity
- The Quest to Understand the Force that Explains Everything
- By: Marcus Chown
- Narrated by: Adjoa Andoh
- Length: 9 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Gravity is the weakest force in the everyday world, yet it is the strongest force in the universe. It was the first force to be recognized and described, yet it is the least understood. It is a "force" that keeps your feet on the ground, yet no such force actually exists. Gravity, to steal the words of Winston Churchill, is "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma". And penetrating that enigma promises to answer the biggest questions in science: What is space? What is time? What is the universe? And where did it all come from?
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Fine survey for laymen but flawed
- By Michael on 11-30-17
By: Marcus Chown
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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
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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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very interesting
- By Sequoia Spencer on 08-09-24
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Into the Unknown
- The Quest to Understand the Mysteries of the Cosmos
- By: Kelsey Johnson
- Narrated by: Kelsey Johnson
- Length: 12 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Into the Unknown, astrophysicist Kelsey Johnson takes us to the edge of scientific understanding about the universe: What caused the Big Bang? What happens inside black holes? Are there other dimensions? She doesn’t just celebrate what we know but rather what we don’t, and asks what it means if we never find that knowledge. Exploring the convergence of science, philosophy, and theology, Johnson argues we must reckon with possibilities—including those that may be beyond human comprehension.
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-
Loved it
- By Elizabeth Smith on 11-26-24
By: Kelsey Johnson
-
The Demon in the Machine
- How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life
- By: Paul Davies
- Narrated by: Nigel Patterson
- Length: 9 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What is life? In this penetrating and wide-ranging book, world-renowned physicist and science communicator Paul Davies searches for answers in a field so new and fast-moving that it lacks a name; it is a domain where biology, computing, logic, chemistry, quantum physics, and nanotechnology intersect.
-
-
Thought provoking and rich with insight
- By quantumbikemechanic on 11-13-24
By: Paul Davies
-
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
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Thought provoking
- By Lee Ann Moyer on 12-09-24
By: Matt Strassler
-
Quanta and Fields
- The Biggest Ideas in the Universe
- By: Sean Carroll
- Narrated by: Sean Carroll
- Length: 9 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Sean Carroll is creating a profoundly new approach to sharing physics with a broad audience, one that goes beyond analogies to show how physicists really think. He cuts to the bare mathematical essence of our most profound theories, explaining every step in a uniquely accessible way. Quantum field theory is how modern physics describes nature at its most profound level. Starting with the basics of quantum mechanics itself, Sean Carroll explains measurement and entanglement before explaining how the world is really made of fields.
-
-
only for professionals
- By ATTILIO GALIANI on 10-02-24
By: Sean Carroll
-
The Ascent of Gravity
- The Quest to Understand the Force that Explains Everything
- By: Marcus Chown
- Narrated by: Adjoa Andoh
- Length: 9 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Gravity is the weakest force in the everyday world, yet it is the strongest force in the universe. It was the first force to be recognized and described, yet it is the least understood. It is a "force" that keeps your feet on the ground, yet no such force actually exists. Gravity, to steal the words of Winston Churchill, is "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma". And penetrating that enigma promises to answer the biggest questions in science: What is space? What is time? What is the universe? And where did it all come from?
-
-
Fine survey for laymen but flawed
- By Michael on 11-30-17
By: Marcus Chown
-
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
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
very interesting
- By Sequoia Spencer on 08-09-24