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alokmohan
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Hawking on the book This book is about a revolution our view of space and time, and its remarkable consequences, some of which are still being unraveled. It is also a fascinating account, written by someone closely involved, of the struggles and eventual success in a search for an understanding of what are possible the most mysterious objects in the universe – black holes.<br /> It used to be through obvious that the surface of the Earth was flat: It either went on forever or it had some rim that you might fall over if you were foolish enough to travel too far. The safe return of Magellan and other round-the-world travels finally convinced people that the Earth’s surface was curved back on itself into a sphere, but it was still through self-evident this sphere existed in a space that was flat in the sense that the rules of Euclid’s were obeyed: Parallel Lines never meet. However, in 1915 Einstein put forward a theory that combined space and time in to something called spacetime. This was not flat but curved or warped by the matter and energy in it. Because spacetime is very nearly flat in our neighborhood, this curvature makes very little difference in normal situations. But the implications for the further reaches of the Universe wre more surprising than even Einstein ever realized. One of the these was the possibility that stars could collapse under their own gravity until the space round them became so curved that they cut themselves off from the rest of Universe. Einstein himself didn’t believe that such a collapse could ever occur, but a number of other people showed it was an inevitable consequence of his theory.<br /> The story of how they did so, how they found the peculiar properties of the black holes in space that were lift behind, is the subject of this book. It is a history of scientific discovery in the making, writing by one of the participants, rather like The Double Helix by James Watson about the discovery of the structure of DNA, which led to