Reviewed by David Bullock
Just touching the surface science writer Marcus Chown gives an extensive history into the discovery, science and theories behind the astronomical object known as a black hole. He writes an engaging read that most should find facilitating, no matter what background in his new book A Crack in Everything: How Black Holes Came in From the Cold and Took Cosmic Centre Stage. Whether you are the general public a student or an academic who just wants a primer on the topic, Chown writes wonderfully, telling a history of how black holes became a topic of science.
In his career, Chown was a scientist himself. He studied and worked as an astronomer at Cal Tech in California but eventually went back to his homeland in the United Kingdom to become a science journalist with a beat on everything he had worked on as a scientist before. “I am totally fascinated by science,” he said in a phone interview with TheSpacePage.com, “And I want people to know the things that I know. [And] I hope they would be as excited [about them] as I am.“
Black holes are an interesting topic that turned a lot of heads in a little more than a hundred years they were studied. Einstein didn’t believe they existed and Chown even writes about Einstein and his doubts in the book.
Chown sets the scene in his book in Germany during World War One. There, astrophysicist Karl Schwarzschild started the notion that parts of space and time was “cloaked” from reality. Even though the name black hole did not exists, on paper the theory of such an object was born. Chown tell the story of scientist to scientist over the years that added to the notion of what we know as black holes today.
“Not only are they not black, but they are one of the luminous objects in the universe,” continued Chown in his interview. “We [as humans] only could have arisen with the creation of a black hole [in the center of our galaxy].” The Milky Way, our home galaxy has a black hole in the center of it, like all other galaxies. But compared to other galaxies, the black hole in the center of the Milky Way is very small, which leads scientists to believe that it must give clues to why we exist on the edge of this particular galaxy, and could we have existed in any galaxy with a black hole.
All and all, A Crack in Everything, is a good read. Chown is a good writer and you won’t be disappointed if you pick up this book.
Chown left the interview on a positive note, based on all the theoretical work done on black holes, the space telescopes that study black holes and the arrays of telescopes around the planet that enabled people to see the first image of the black hole in the center of our galaxy on May 12, 2022, he gave a little perspective, “We’ve done terrible things to the planet.. but we’ve seen to the edge of space and time and I think that’s a really incredible thing.”