Brian Cox (1)Ressenyes

Haven't listened to their radio show, but really enjoyed this book.
Nice style, easy humour.
Many of the concepts over my head, but learnt a fair bit.

A very enjoyable book that dashes through the structure of our universe while trying all the time to explain how you get there by looking at simple everyday calculations.

I have read many similar books so not much new information but I really enjoyed the grounding of results into everyday measures. I would figure this book is perfect to convert skeptical conspiracists into some form of reason.

A description of the planets, and our increasing understanding of them, through the history of astronomy and then through the succession of exploratory missions that have been undertaken in the last 50 years or so. What has been revealed is truly amazing, with the frozen gas giants at one one of the system, living at -180 deg C yet still showing signs of atmospheric activity, and desiccated Mercury at the other end.
What surprised me was the number of missions which have been launched, and which I was completely unaware of! It is amazing how they are able to control satellites billions of kilometres away from us.½

Deeper than I expected and quite to hard to follow the descriptions of Penrose diagrams and what one would see whilst tipping into a Black Hole. Enjoyable never the less, and I am now intrigued to read the authors prior book; why E=Mc2. Last few chapters give a good explanation of the more recent ideas around holographic equivalence and the conservation of information in a black hole. I especially liked the last chapter on quantum information redundancy and the link with quantum computing, even if I didn't understand much of it!

Excellent and exhaustive book entertainingly written. If you’re not good at maths I would avoid it. A lot of geometry and algebra, a little calculus.

Nice read. I did not know that its not exactly "energy" that is equal to mass times the speed of light squared. However, Brian Cox tends to be very scatter brained while discussing the issues of relativity and space-time curvature. He will sometimes wander from topic to topic while discussing something in-depth and it took a bit for me to keep track of where he was. I would have also liked to have seen more math. Cox spends several paragraphs each chapter apologizing to the layman about the two to three equations he presents in the succeeding sentences and then presents an equivalent to the Pythagorean theorem. I get it Brian, you are excited to share physics with the lay man, but you don't need to assume that no one has ever had calculus or, indeed, even algebra. Give us some credit and explain things with equations. If you want to pander, give the equation and explain in detail what it means so we can chew over it.

Good book, got better as it went along and the author warmed to his theme. Writing seemed a little disjointed at first.

The only book I've read to really compare this to, is A Brief History of Time which I actually found easy to read. I imagine that book deals with more complicated ideas, but due to the skill of the writer, I ended up understanding almost all of them, and enjoying the book more than the current one where the explanations were not as helpful.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I have had my mind alternately expanded and compressed. Prof. Cox doesn't avoid discussing complex topics or details of physics that ordinarily most would find baffling; instead he patiently explains the concepts clearly using stories and analogies to be sure that the point is well communicated.

I am very much looking forward to exploring his other works.

Einstein’s theory of special relativity for dummies. Which, in this case, is probably most of us.
It will be hard for someone to come up with a simpler way to explain Einstein’s work - if you’re well versed on maths or physics, you will probably find this annoying or maybe too dumbed down. But this isn’t for you - it’s for all people that are curious about Einstein and our universe, can follow a logical discussion, but are not technical enough to follow a more detailed explanation. Not that this isn’t detailed, but Cox and Forshaw go to great lengths to hold your hand along the way and explain it all, using analogies and not a lot of maths to make their point.
And it works. You might feel a bit lost at times, but things will fall into place. And hopefully you will also be able to appreciate the beauty of Einstein’s ideas.

Black Holes: The Key to Understanding the Universe, written by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw, is an excellent introduction that falls into an area of popular science books that can be misleading.

Let me first talk about the broad area of popular science books. This is not, as some people treat it, a single level of science texts, but a spectrum from very basic to something that still requires effort but is not academic. The difficulty is that often books that require some effort and perhaps some familiarity with mathematics gets lumped in with academic books. If we are going to say that academic books are definitely not popular, or that there is no overlap, then we have to be open to shades of popular books. This is, as far as I'm concerned, a popular science book but one that requires some effort and, for a deeper understanding, some math background.

Since I am not an astrophysicist and my last classroom experience with advanced mathematics was a couple of decades ago, I consider myself a layperson with respect to this topic. So I am approaching this book as popular science. My preference, since I have done some reading in the area and taken a few MOOCs on the topic, is for a more rather than less challenging popular science book. If, for whatever reason, you want a challenge and not simply a less nuanced super-basic introduction, this is the book for you.

I found the explanations and examples/analogies to be very effective in discussing the concepts. The analyses using the formulas were, with some effort on my part, very helpful as well, though admittedly some remained just beyond my grasp (for now). I will also say that I think this is one of those books that can be read without too much close attention paid to the math. What I mean is that while the explanations centered on math certainly offer the opportunity for better understanding, they can be skimmed, and the concepts still understood because of the wonderful explanations.

I would highly recommend this for those who are willing and want to put in the effort, or for those with some formal education in the area. My first introduction to relativity was with the Brehme diagram way back in 1976 and seeing how graphic representations have evolved was fascinating. For those who don't mind skimming the math in order to get to the conceptual explanations, this will be a good book for you. If you want a very basic, relatively math-free explanation and don't really care for any nuance, this might not be the one for you.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.½

Whether on stage, television or in a podcast, Brian Cox is one of the most approachable science popularisers alive today. And black holes remain some of the most alluring phenomena in astrophysics, which is why it's a surprise that Black Holes, a marriage of a subject that captures our imagination with an author usually so adept at firing our imagination, turned out to be a tough and overly-academic read.

It starts promisingly, with Cox positing that black holes are "cosmic Rosetta stones" (pg. 21) that give us many valuable – and unexpected – scientific insights. They are, the book's subtitle has it, "the key to understanding the universe", and after providing an overview of black hole research, from Einstein to Hawking, Cox leads us deeper into the rabbit hole with discussions of worldlines, the 'Kerr wonderland', quantum gravity and the idea of the universe as a hologram.

Leads us, but soon leaves us behind. I recently attended one of Brian Cox's Horizons Live lectures in Manchester (which I reviewed here), where Cox proved to be engaging and able to explain difficult concepts clearly to a general audience. He was also keen to impress a sense of wonder about the makeup of the universe. This, to my great surprise and dismay, wasn't really replicated in Black Holes, even though the topic was much the same. This book, co-written with Jeff Forshaw, one of Cox's colleagues at the University of Manchester, reads for the most part like a dry textbook for undergraduates. It is packed full of diagrams (moving far beyond the Penrose diagram which Cox utilised in his live show), graphs and equations of rapidly increasing complexity.

Now, as a general rule, whenever someone produces a graph I reach for my revolver, but I imagine even those readers who are more inclined to jump through the various mathematical hurdles Cox and Forshaw erect will find them a bit excessive. I once read a popular science book (The Universe in Your Hand by Christophe Galfard) which gamely introduced the reader to all the wonders of then-contemporary astrophysics with the promise that only one equation (Einstein's famous E=mc2) was needed in order to understand it. Black Holes doesn't do this – not even close – and my eyes began to glaze over every time a new equation was introduced and then explained in a dense and academic series of paragraphs without much in the way of respite.

Very well, you might say – what did you expect? And certainly I didn't go into Cox's book expecting an easy time of it. The topic is an intense and difficult one, even before you get to the cutting-edge stuff which the authors discuss in the final chapters. And yet, it did feel like a textbook, like there might be an exam waiting at the end. "It is worth checking that you understand the diagram well enough… before you read on," Cox writes on page 59. If I had, I might well still be on page 59. I have read – and mostly understood – a fair chunk of popular science in my time, and found this book severely wanting when it came to popular science's most important task: bringing the reader along.

It's a great shame, because the cutting-edge ideas delivered, however imperfectly, in the book are fascinating and profound. The 'Rosetta stone' analogy proves apt, as the authors show that a study of black holes leads us to a greater understanding of the makeup of the universe and the nature of spacetime, gravity and reality itself. This is why, the authors argue at the end of the book, "it is vital that we continue to support the most esoteric scientific endeavours", because no one could have predicted that we would find such links in studying black holes (pg. 263).

It's a fair point, but the book itself doesn't do enough to bring those esoteric ideas into the minds of the mainstream reader, and the impact of this profound discussion is consequently diminished. In the Horizons Live show I attended, Cox joked about performing an 'equation solo' in the arena (which is usually reserved for musical acts), but Black Holes' equations are less a blistering thirty-second solo of astonishing impact and more like those indulgent twenty-minute soloes where you wish the guitarist would bring it home and we can get back to the song itself. Too often, I was left wondering who Cox and Forshaw believed they were talking to in the book – surely they must have noticed many of their readers had fallen behind?

On page 210, the authors write that "there are electrons in your hand and electrons in the Andromeda Galaxy, separated by over 2 million light years, [but] linked through quantum entanglement". It's a good line, and the sort of thing that readers of popular science like myself lap up. But such lines are too rare in Black Holes, which too often forgets to invoke this sense of wonder. It's noteworthy that the page immediately following this line provides not one or two, but four equations. As a science book, I'm sure this must be a remarkable and accurate piece, but as a popular science book, it must be considered something of a failure.

Indeholder "Tak til", "1. Universets historie", "2. Hvor gammelt er det", "3. At veje jorden", "4. Afstanden til stjernerne", "5. Einsteins teori om tyngdekraften", "6. Big Bang", "7. At veje universet", "8. Hvad skete der før Big Bang?", "9. Vores plads i universet", "Appendiks", "Universets udvikling", "Billedhenvisninger", "Stikordsregister".

Brian Cox forklarer kosmologi og hvad vi ved og ikke ved om universet på nuværende tidspunkt.

I want to love a book like this, a book that guides the reader or listener to amazing scientific insights. Unfortunately I did not because the book's general attitude rubbed me the wrong way. Don't ask me why.

A few tangible things:

* The book (at least the edition I consumed) is dated. For instance, the Higgs boson was found by the Large Hadron Collider a couple of years after this book was written.

* It explicitly avoids even letting the user get a glimpse of any complicated math. Just to be able to pretend everything is very simple. A lot is very simple. All is not very simple.

* It avoids mentioning things that complicates the current picture, except when saying over and over again that some day we might figure out even better theories and models. For instance, if time is like any other dimension in spacetime, why can't it move backwards?

All in all it dumbs down things a bit too much. I'm probably just not in the book's target audience, so what book should I read instead?

This was far less horrible than I expected. Attempts at witticism are cringeworthy but sparse and the literary quotes while abundant are bearable. I've not seen the TV show the book keeps mentioning but going on previous experience it's probably mostly closeups of Brian Cox in gormless wonder.

Really informative and thought provoking. I will definitely reread to get a better understanding of some of the more challenging scientific concepts.

Not exactly light reading but definitely fascinating. I have a feeling ill probably come back to it with a notepad at some point to get a better grasp of some of the more complex aspects.

To quote the words of Prof Cox: 'Amazing'

Stunning photogrpahy and digestible physics

A very good book explaining a non really intuitive topic. I liked it more than his "quantum universe" book and I think it's much more easiert to understand.

I've already written a review of this book....well not quite....because my review was of a paperback version and this is the large hardback colour version of this book designed to accompany a BBC Science Program. As one can gather from my other review, I was not happy with the paperback version. (The diagrams were too small, printing in black and white lost most of the details. So I looked for the "real" version of the book to form a judgement. And, I must confess, it is altogether a much better and very different experience. For a start, there are probably close to 10x the number of illustrations...and many of them quite large. And the addition of full colour makes such a huge difference ....especially with something like the blackbody spectrum ...showing how far the infra red extends (for example).

I don't remember ever watching the TV series but somewhere I came across this little book that was designed to accompany the BBC TV series with Professor Brian Cox (and in smaller fonts ...Andrew Cohen who was apparently the Executive producer of the BBC Science Unit..and so probably taking the credit here for the toil of many underlings). I only realised after I had bought the paperback book that there is apparently a more lavish hardback book ...which looks like it has the colour plates embedded into the text rather than being gathered together in one section as they are in the paperback. In fact, the paperback version is not good. The diagrams appear to have been lifted from a larger version (maybe with colour in the larger version) but they are generally so small and the printing is so faint that it is hard to read or interpret. So this was disappointing.
However, I persevered and to give credit where it is due, Brian Cox does a workman-like job of bringing some aspects of science to the masses (in this case just me). As he says in the opening chapter ...this book is about science and about asking the sort of questions that a child might ask...and usually doesn't get a satisfactory answer; why is the sky blue? why are stars and planets round? why are plants green? I thought that I had a reasonable grasp on all of these issues but Brian opened my eyes to quite a few new wrinkles or things that I had not thought about. He, most appropriately, starts off with a discussion about snowflakes and symmetry ...leading into chemistry and the fundamental building blocks and forces of nature...the strong force, the weak force, electromagnetism and gravity. And why is the earth round (well more or less round)..it's because gravity is pulling everything inwards towards the centre. And he makes the point...which I had not thought about before, that we can't have really high mountains on earth because the ground under them will not be strong enough to resist the downward pressure. But on Mars you can have very high mountains,...24 km high. And once an object in our solar system gets to be about 600 km across the force of gravity is sufficient to pull it into a spherical shape. The earth is spinning, however, and the spin makes the earth a slightly oblate spheroid. And the snowflake has a hexagonal symmetry because of the angular bonds in the water molecules ..so the shape of the snow crystals is indicative of a deeper structure.
Brian then moves into a discussion of space and time and describes one of Einstein's contributions that you are a rest in an inertial frame of reference if an isolated object is either remaining at rest or continuing in a straight line. And the earth is accelerating towards the sun ...but net effect is it orbits the sun in a elliptical orbit. (Must confess the I've always has a mental difficulty in accepting this idea of accelerating towards the sun...but travelling in a "fixed" elliptical orbit. And the moon (which probably was formed by a collision of the earth with another planet) has a major impact on the earth. Contrary to popular belief, the moon doesn't circle the centre of the earth but a spot about 4,700km from the centre of the earth (which is the centre of mass of the earth/moon system). (The earth has a radius of 6,376 km). And the earth, in turn orbits around this centre of mass in roughly a circle. Because the earth is rotating around this centre of mass (and spinning on it's axis) there is a centrifugal force which counterbalances the pull of the moon's gravity....and it's this centrifugal force which spins the tides out on the side facing away from the moon. And for the side facing (underneath) the moon, the gravitational pull is slightly greater than the gravitational pull at the centre of the earth. So the oceans are pulled towards the moon...and, in fact, the earth's crust is deformed by about 0.5m too.
Maxwell developed his equations relating the electric and magnetic fields where the speed of light enters the equations as a constant. Einstein's brilliance was to take the equations at face value and insist that the speed of light remained constant when we hop between inertial frames of reference. Brian goes on to discuss the familiar issues of measuring time in different frames of reference and discusses the world timeline that we all experience plus "forbidden " zones that are not within our "light cone".
If we take Einstein's theory of relativity at face value, it leads to the idea of the Block Universe. Spacetime can be pictured as a 4D blob over which we move, encountering the events on our world lines as we go. But whilst the theory leads to this it is not necessarily correct.
He now moves on to the question of how did life begin. It seems that the earth formed 4.54 billion years ago and there is good evidence that life had gained a foot hold by 3.5 billion years ago. And living things are made out of simple building blocks. It's chemistry. And chemistry is all about the movement of electrons. We have a bit of a digression here whilst Brian describes the rather macabre experiments around 1800 with corpses and electricity...making the corpses twitch and move.....with some ideas about bringing them back to life.
There is increasing evidence from analysis of ancient zircons that the very young earth was a world of moderate temperatures, stable oceans and familiar air (though oxygen levels were low) and there are some indications that life may have been established 4.1 billion years ago.
But life appears to run contrary to the second law of thermodynamics because living things are highly ordered. Though as Schrodinger pointed out, events within a living system cannot be isolated from their environment . For example if you have a bunch of atoms of hydrogen and oxygen in a box and they spontaneously combine to form water...the water is in a more ordered state than the atoms. So what has happened here? Well whilst the entropy of the system of atoms has been lowered by the chemical reaction, a large amount of energy has also been released, This heat is absorbed into the surroundings ...thus increasing the entropy of the environment by more than the entropy increase associated with the formation of the water molecules. Living things work in the same way.
The energy generating mechanisms used by living things are basically sugar combines with oxygen giving CO2 plus water ...and a wax candle burning is essentially the same sort of reaction. In both cases electrons are transferred from a long chain carbon molecule to oxygen. But with respiration (life) the electron is transferred via a lot of steps (about 15) usually involving iron. The steps are also used in photosynthesis. And all living things store part of the energy in ATP..like batteries. As the electrons are passed down the respiratory chain they are used to pump protons across membranes. For every pair of electron 10 protons are pumped. In the vicinity of the membrane (6 billionths of a m thick), the electric field is 30 million volts per m...roughly like a lightning strike on us. This "waterfall" of protons is used to produce ATP out of two "empty" molecular components known as ADP plus P. All living things seem to use the same system which suggests that this biochemistry is very ancient.
The story then morphs into the familiar discussion about life originating in the under-sea volcanic vents..black smokers and possible hydrogen sulphide chemistry; and white smokers which are not volcanic but result from the reaction of warm water with methane at the ocean floor...and have an alkaline environment.The argument is that one gets a proton gradient between this alkaline environment (with a deficit of protons) and the surrounding seawater's acid environment with a surplus of protons. The argument is that this sets up the conditions needed for photosynthesis or respiration ...with a proton gradient. (Actually, I think one probably gets something like this with the double layer between common clay particles.....and clay lines itself up in nice ordered sheets with regular spacing.......might be worth exploring...). Brian leaves us with the thought that life is really just chemistry and there are some plausible pathways for it to occur spontaneously on the earth.
He then explores the basis of colour and our experience of colour and the formation of the rainbow. In passing he mentions Ibn al-Haytham, who, in the 11th century, was a pretty original researcher....looking for evidence rather than relying on authority....his words about the seeker after truth:..."he should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency". Great! I like it. Other's contributed to the understanding of the formation of the rainbow but it was probably Newton who eventually resolved the issue with a double refraction of white light ..which was composed of all the other visible colours. And so to an an investigation into the origin and nature of light. The energy output of the sun at the top of the earth's atmosphere is 1.41Kw/ square m. in January when the earth is closest to the sun and 1.32 Kw in July when the earth is furtherest away...and the energy output is staggering ...all due to the fusion resulting in an atomic nucleus of one proton and one neutron...it's called a deuteron...Then another proton fuses with the deuteron to form Helium 3 nucleus and two of these fuse together to form a Helium 4 nucleus...with the release of 2 protons.
About this stage, I've just ordered, the larger version of the BBC book. I'll update this review when I receive it but for the moment I'll just continue following Brian Cox as he explains why things shine.
It was Maxwell who realised that light was a travelling disturbance in the electromagnetic field. He saw it as a wave and light has a wavelength...ranging (at least) from 10 to power 8 m (long radio waves) to 10 to power -16 (gamma rays). When electrical charges wiggle they create a changing magnetic field which creates a changing electrical field etc etc. The resulting moving disturbance IS light. The movement suggests a link between temperature and light...but the early models predicted an infinite amount of energy being radiated away from hot objects....obviously not right so Planck proposed another model...crazy but it worked where light could only be emitted in packets. It was Einstein who actually proposed taking the theory seriously and proposed that light is actually composed of little packets (photons)....and even more...that the electromagnetic field is composed of little particles of light.....thus pointing to the deeper structure of quantum theory. Electrically charged particles emit light when they are accelerated....in accord with Maxwell's equations.
Electrons can organise themselves in very specific ways within molecules. If the arrangement of electrons inside a molecule is to be altered then a photon with just the right energy to make the change must be absorbed. Since the energy of a photon is directly related to its colour , a particular molecule will only absorb certain colours of light. In modern language, Rayleigh's formula shows that the probability of a photon to scatter is inversely proportional to the fourth power of its wavelength. This means that blue photos (450nm) are over three times more likely to scatter off gas molecules on their way through than red photons (650nm). That's why we have blue skies during the day and red at dusk.
But why is green the colour of life...the answer is that plants are green because chlorophyll absorbs blue and red photons and the green photons are reflected back into our eyes. Early life probably grabbed their electrons off less stable molecules such as hydrogen sulphide..but at some stage the oxygen evolving complex allowed organisms to replace H2S with the more readily available water. The whole lot was linked together into the Z-scheme (of photosynthesis) which is present in all plants today. His summary of photosynthesis skims over things just a bit too fast. But then, it's incredibly complicated...and probably best left to a specialist book.
Finally he indulges himself with some speculation about life elsewhere in the universe. There is a lot of knowledge packed into this book. And I'll be interested to see how the full sized book handles the message.

Absolutely brilliant.

Lovely, most excellent treatment.

Again a fascinating book. A bit on the technical side. Full of info.

Excellent book. Brian Cox and John Cohen really give detailed information in a style the lay man can understand. I would have like to have learned more of the existence of parallel universes and quarks and quantum mechanics. But it’s only a small thing. Mind expanding stuff.

This book attempts to take us through special relativity, explaining how space and time aren't independent, but part of a larger spacetime, why e=mc squared falls out of these concepts, and then onto general relativity and even the standard model in its entirety. There are lots of passages that are brilliantly and very clearly explained, and this is definitely one of the stronger, more accessible popular physics books out there.

However, I was somewhat frustrated by how uneven it was at times. There are some extremely basic mathematical operations that the book takes pains to explain, which I don't mind, but then also some rather complex mathematics and degree level concepts combined with the mathematics that were far from clear. I'm a scientist myself with a reasonable amount of maths in my research and some of the descriptions walking through the mathematical and theoretical steps just seemed rushed, missing steps and explanation, which seemed a shame. Had the book been longer, taking greater care to explain the critical stages, I think it would have been so much better.

For a book that covers so much ground, I did still learn a lot, but would strongly recommend Oerter's The Theory of Almost Everything over this.