A Crack in Everything

How Black Holes Came in from the Cold and Took Cosmic Centre Stage

By: Marcus Chown

Narrated by: Clive Mantle

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.

©2024 Marcus Chown (P)2024 Head of Zeus

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.