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Black Hole Survival Guide
What would happen if you fell into a black hole?
Black holes are the most extraordinary phenomenon in the universe, but they are a riddle that confounds our intuitions.
Anything that enters them can never escape, and yet they contain nothing at all. They are bigger on the inside than the outside suggests. They are dark on the outside but not on the inside. They invert time into space and space into time.
Black holes are found throughout the universe. They can be microscopic. They can be billions of times larger than our sun. Our solar system is currently orbiting a black hole 26,000 light years away at a speed of 200 km per second.
In Black Hole Survival Guide physicist and novelist Janna Levin takes you on a journey into a black hole, explaining what would happen to you in there and why. In the process you'll come to see how their mysteries contain answers to some of the most profound questions ever asked about the nature of our universe.
Black holes are the most extraordinary phenomenon in the universe, but they are a riddle that confounds our intuitions.
Anything that enters them can never escape, and yet they contain nothing at all. They are bigger on the inside than the outside suggests. They are dark on the outside but not on the inside. They invert time into space and space into time.
Black holes are found throughout the universe. They can be microscopic. They can be billions of times larger than our sun. Our solar system is currently orbiting a black hole 26,000 light years away at a speed of 200 km per second.
In Black Hole Survival Guide physicist and novelist Janna Levin takes you on a journey into a black hole, explaining what would happen to you in there and why. In the process you'll come to see how their mysteries contain answers to some of the most profound questions ever asked about the nature of our universe.
142 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 2020
246 people are currently reading
3700 people want to read
About the author
Janna Levin
10 books433 followersJanna Levin, a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University, holds a BA in Physics and Astronomy with a concentration in Philosophy from Barnard College of Columbia University, and a PhD in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her scientific research mainly centers around the Early Universe, Chaos, and Black Holes.
Dr. Levin's first book, "How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space," is a widely popular science book following her personal recollections, as well as scientific studies, in letter format. Her second book, "A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines" (Knopf, 2006), won the PEN/Bingham Fellowship for writers that "honors an exceptionally talented fiction writer whose debut work... represents distinguished literary achievement..."
Dr. Levin also has written a series of essays to accompany exhibitions at galleries in England and been featured on several radio and television programs.
Dr. Levin's first book, "How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space," is a widely popular science book following her personal recollections, as well as scientific studies, in letter format. Her second book, "A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines" (Knopf, 2006), won the PEN/Bingham Fellowship for writers that "honors an exceptionally talented fiction writer whose debut work... represents distinguished literary achievement..."
Dr. Levin also has written a series of essays to accompany exhibitions at galleries in England and been featured on several radio and television programs.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 304 reviews
March 10, 2021
a cute, compact, existential black hole nightmare.
August 22, 2021
I love Janna Levin. She's a fabulous mix of science and arts brilliance. Unfortunately, this book doesn't display that mix near as well as her others. It's quite disjointed in how it plays around the "how to survive a black hole" metaphor/narrative. There's like, a character named Alice you're sort of traveling with who pops up every once in awhile, and sporadic second-person survival-guide-esque rhetoric, but overall it just reads like Levin suddenly remembered that was the gimmick -- so stops her passionate pontificating about how cool physics is, and starts the guide again. I'd rather read one or the other (and her passionate pontificating is my favourite, so probably that), but not a weirdly-edited collection of both.
With that said, I love Janna Levin. She can explain tough concepts really effectively (although I'm still scratching my head about holograms), and she knows how to turn a pretty phrase. If you've never read her, I def wouldn't pick this up before How the Universe Got Its Spots, but it's still a pleasant way to spend an afternoon.
With that said, I love Janna Levin. She can explain tough concepts really effectively (although I'm still scratching my head about holograms), and she knows how to turn a pretty phrase. If you've never read her, I def wouldn't pick this up before How the Universe Got Its Spots, but it's still a pleasant way to spend an afternoon.
November 20, 2020
Mathematics alone cannot tell us what specifically is out there in our universe. The mathematics can speculate only about what is possible. And sometimes mathematics allows us to explore pure potential before any physical manifestations of that potential are discovered.
Black holes were like that, a purely mathematical construct on the page, benign in virtual form, in typescript on paper, unverified for decades, unaccepted for decades, absurd, maligned and denied by some great geniuses of the twentieth century, until physical evidence of real black holes in the galaxy was discovered.
Black holes are a gift, both physically and theoretically. They are detectable on the farthest reaches of the observable universe. They anchor galaxies, providing a center for our own galactic pinwheel and possibly every other island of stars. And theoretically, they provide a laboratory for the exploration of the farthest reaches of the mind. Black holes are the ideal fantasy scape on which to play out thought experiments that target the core truths about the cosmos.
“Black holes have no hair,” as John Wheeler quipped. If you could deduce any other features of the interior, any features other than mass, charge, and spin, it would be as though lines of information were emanating from the black hole, as though the black hole had hair. But the event horizon forbids the flow of information outward and therefore forbids the black hole from acquiring hair. “Black holes have no hair,” at least not for long. Any hair you try to give them will either fall in or be radiated away, restoring the hole to a pristine form. And so the black hole will remain featureless and without defect.
Black holes were like that, a purely mathematical construct on the page, benign in virtual form, in typescript on paper, unverified for decades, unaccepted for decades, absurd, maligned and denied by some great geniuses of the twentieth century, until physical evidence of real black holes in the galaxy was discovered.
Black holes are a gift, both physically and theoretically. They are detectable on the farthest reaches of the observable universe. They anchor galaxies, providing a center for our own galactic pinwheel and possibly every other island of stars. And theoretically, they provide a laboratory for the exploration of the farthest reaches of the mind. Black holes are the ideal fantasy scape on which to play out thought experiments that target the core truths about the cosmos.
“Black holes have no hair,” as John Wheeler quipped. If you could deduce any other features of the interior, any features other than mass, charge, and spin, it would be as though lines of information were emanating from the black hole, as though the black hole had hair. But the event horizon forbids the flow of information outward and therefore forbids the black hole from acquiring hair. “Black holes have no hair,” at least not for long. Any hair you try to give them will either fall in or be radiated away, restoring the hole to a pristine form. And so the black hole will remain featureless and without defect.
March 22, 2021
If somebody had previously told me that I were to cry over a book dedicated to astro- and quantum physics, I would have found that highly improbable and potentially laughable. Yet here we are. I have read Black Hole Survival Guide three times now; I have cried reading it exactly three times. It's an astounding work of non-fiction that is also simultaneously and surprisingly one of the best examples of contemporary Epic.
I am an old fatalist, I find the idea that cosmos is vast, unknowable, and fundamentally - uncaring - romantic and deeply comforting. So, apparently, does Janna Levin, since she wrote an extensive love letter to a phenomenon known as "black hole" - an area of space with a gravitational field so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. How can one survive it? A black hole is a paradox, it's nothing that exists. A thorn in every scientist's side, the ultimate bearer of existential terror, some-no-thing that is impossible to know empirically and, therefore, a source of endless rumination and inspiration.
Poetic waxing aside, Black Hole Survival Guide taken at face value succeeds at delivering complex theoretical notions in the most accessible and engaging manner, and if Janna Levin were my teacher, I would have ended up loving physics. Shuddering.
Yet I have said that this book is an Epic and I have meant it literally. It's a twisted Odyssey of sorts where you, a hero, traverse the flow of spacetime on your one-way journey past the event horizon. Alice, the one you left behind, sends you love letters encoded into the constant speed of light, fragments of a wishbone, split yellow-blue quantum particles of the colour green, messages that fast-forward at the uninterpretable pace as you get further away. There is a war going on, between "defenders of general relativity" and "avengers of quantum mechanics", a war that will define the outcome of your existence, since you are a thought experiment and they are trying to establish the supremacy over what a black hole is and how it behaves. Regardless, the only thing it will change is what happens to matter formerly known as you post-annihilation, whether Alice might be able to recognize & decode every bit of you emanating outwards with Hawking radiation or not.
Alice dies, you cease to be, black holes stay zero divided by zero. It is as fantastical and rich and all-consuming and tragic as any story ever written. It is exciting and way more appealing than any sci-fi book I have read in a long while. In the closing paragraph of this guide Janna Levin reveals the truth we, heroes on a journey to find the key to the Universe that is about to be swallowed whole should have already known: Ultimately, there only ever was information. This story of our beginning, our evolution, our ambitions to know, our presence here will be strewn into an unreadable form no longer registering time, our history effectively erased.
In the end, there is no surviving black holes.
I am an old fatalist, I find the idea that cosmos is vast, unknowable, and fundamentally - uncaring - romantic and deeply comforting. So, apparently, does Janna Levin, since she wrote an extensive love letter to a phenomenon known as "black hole" - an area of space with a gravitational field so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. How can one survive it? A black hole is a paradox, it's nothing that exists. A thorn in every scientist's side, the ultimate bearer of existential terror, some-no-thing that is impossible to know empirically and, therefore, a source of endless rumination and inspiration.
Poetic waxing aside, Black Hole Survival Guide taken at face value succeeds at delivering complex theoretical notions in the most accessible and engaging manner, and if Janna Levin were my teacher, I would have ended up loving physics. Shuddering.
Yet I have said that this book is an Epic and I have meant it literally. It's a twisted Odyssey of sorts where you, a hero, traverse the flow of spacetime on your one-way journey past the event horizon. Alice, the one you left behind, sends you love letters encoded into the constant speed of light, fragments of a wishbone, split yellow-blue quantum particles of the colour green, messages that fast-forward at the uninterpretable pace as you get further away. There is a war going on, between "defenders of general relativity" and "avengers of quantum mechanics", a war that will define the outcome of your existence, since you are a thought experiment and they are trying to establish the supremacy over what a black hole is and how it behaves. Regardless, the only thing it will change is what happens to matter formerly known as you post-annihilation, whether Alice might be able to recognize & decode every bit of you emanating outwards with Hawking radiation or not.
Alice dies, you cease to be, black holes stay zero divided by zero. It is as fantastical and rich and all-consuming and tragic as any story ever written. It is exciting and way more appealing than any sci-fi book I have read in a long while. In the closing paragraph of this guide Janna Levin reveals the truth we, heroes on a journey to find the key to the Universe that is about to be swallowed whole should have already known: Ultimately, there only ever was information. This story of our beginning, our evolution, our ambitions to know, our presence here will be strewn into an unreadable form no longer registering time, our history effectively erased.
In the end, there is no surviving black holes.
April 15, 2023
Published November 1, 2020, so should be up to date. Here's the best review I saw online:
https://uulibraryblog.wordpress.com/2...
Excerpt:
"Finally, the handy guide you’ve been waiting for! Black Hole Survival Guide by Janna Levin is an engaging, entertaining, and thought-provoking read. . . . Levin’s use of language is witty and accurate: at once no-nonsense and clever. . . . This is one of the clearest and most easy to follow explanations of such brain-bending topics that I have read to date. Clocking in at only 143 (very small) pages, this is a book that could be completed in a weekend, or maybe even a day."
Progress report 3/29/23: She writes extraordinarily well. The Singularity stuff: extraordinarily confusing. Singularities shouldn't exist! A sign that the underlying theory has serious problems, and the physics here is way over my head (and perhaps hers too).
White Holes! An alternate speculation, a favorite of SF writers, but Levin is careful to point out that, for the unfortunate space-traveler who falls in, it's a one-way trip, even if your macerated remnants get recycled elsewhere and/or elsewhen. But see her later speculations, in the last 3 chapters....
@p. 79 (hc ed): "Let's make a black hole factory. What could go wrong?" Not much, she argues, pretty convincingly, despite some public hysteria at the LHC Collider a few years ago. No micro black holes were produced, and the LHC is too weak by many orders of magnitude to do so.
Here's the first actual photo (2019) of a real black hole, the supermassive monster at the core of the M-87 galaxy, a fairly near neighbor of our Milky Way home: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
M87* has a mass estimated at around 6.5 billion solar masses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier...*
Levin talks about this one, and Sag A*, the smaller one at the core of our galaxy, at length in her book. Her tip: Stay away! *Especially* from M87*'s plasma jet! (see lede photo @Wiki)
These latter-day galactic nuclei are comparatively benign. Not so at the dawn of universal time, not long after the Big Bang, when Active Galactic Nuclei aka Quasars cored many (most?) early galaxies. Truly dreadful beasts, still clearly visible in our telescopes many billions of years later. The earliest known date to a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, and range up to 1.6 billion solar masses. Levin describes them as "black hole-powered ray guns" that could "blow craters in neighboring galaxies"! She advises travelers to stay far, far away from these.
Hawking radiation: Levin has the novelist's eye for explosive plot devices. "If you . . . conceive of a way to implode your entire space station, the resultant black hole -- smaller than a proton -- would erupt with the energy of a nuclear bomb." SF writers, take note!
The last three chapters are a tour de force of astronomical and quantum speculative weirdness, that you will need to read for yourself to appreciate. No spoilers follow, but you will encounter black hole-ograms & monogamy vs. polygamy in quantum entanglement. Yes, that same old "spooky action at a distance" that put Einstein off quantum-mechanics a century ago! And maybe the Event Horizon of a black hole is really a literal Firewall? Like, it would burn an errant space-traveler to quantum ash to cross it??
"Truthfully, there is little love for firewalls, and theorists are hard at work to banish them...."
This is the same deep sense of strangeness I get from reading really good hard-SF, and I commend it to your attention. Bravo!
To sum up: Levin's black-hole book is light-hearted but not light weight. Meaty subject matter, and I spent more time digesting it than the book's size might suggest. Digestion continues.
Minuses: no index! And I didn't find the drawings, by an (apparently) well-known illustrator, to be very helpful. Plain drawings and some photos would have done the job better, I think. You saw some linked here already. Overall, I'm giving the book 4.5 stars, and rounding up. A very accomplished scientist-writer! Highly recommended. And blessedly short!
==============
Coda: a runaway supermassive Black Hole!
"What’s invisible, weighs 20 million suns and zooms through space at more than 1,500 kilometers per second, leaving a long starry trail in its wake?"
https://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...
[put here because, if I make it a Note, I can't link the article. Wake UP, GR!]
https://uulibraryblog.wordpress.com/2...
Excerpt:
"Finally, the handy guide you’ve been waiting for! Black Hole Survival Guide by Janna Levin is an engaging, entertaining, and thought-provoking read. . . . Levin’s use of language is witty and accurate: at once no-nonsense and clever. . . . This is one of the clearest and most easy to follow explanations of such brain-bending topics that I have read to date. Clocking in at only 143 (very small) pages, this is a book that could be completed in a weekend, or maybe even a day."
Progress report 3/29/23: She writes extraordinarily well. The Singularity stuff: extraordinarily confusing. Singularities shouldn't exist! A sign that the underlying theory has serious problems, and the physics here is way over my head (and perhaps hers too).
White Holes! An alternate speculation, a favorite of SF writers, but Levin is careful to point out that, for the unfortunate space-traveler who falls in, it's a one-way trip, even if your macerated remnants get recycled elsewhere and/or elsewhen. But see her later speculations, in the last 3 chapters....
@p. 79 (hc ed): "Let's make a black hole factory. What could go wrong?" Not much, she argues, pretty convincingly, despite some public hysteria at the LHC Collider a few years ago. No micro black holes were produced, and the LHC is too weak by many orders of magnitude to do so.
Here's the first actual photo (2019) of a real black hole, the supermassive monster at the core of the M-87 galaxy, a fairly near neighbor of our Milky Way home: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
M87* has a mass estimated at around 6.5 billion solar masses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier...*
Levin talks about this one, and Sag A*, the smaller one at the core of our galaxy, at length in her book. Her tip: Stay away! *Especially* from M87*'s plasma jet! (see lede photo @Wiki)
These latter-day galactic nuclei are comparatively benign. Not so at the dawn of universal time, not long after the Big Bang, when Active Galactic Nuclei aka Quasars cored many (most?) early galaxies. Truly dreadful beasts, still clearly visible in our telescopes many billions of years later. The earliest known date to a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, and range up to 1.6 billion solar masses. Levin describes them as "black hole-powered ray guns" that could "blow craters in neighboring galaxies"! She advises travelers to stay far, far away from these.
Hawking radiation: Levin has the novelist's eye for explosive plot devices. "If you . . . conceive of a way to implode your entire space station, the resultant black hole -- smaller than a proton -- would erupt with the energy of a nuclear bomb." SF writers, take note!
The last three chapters are a tour de force of astronomical and quantum speculative weirdness, that you will need to read for yourself to appreciate. No spoilers follow, but you will encounter black hole-ograms & monogamy vs. polygamy in quantum entanglement. Yes, that same old "spooky action at a distance" that put Einstein off quantum-mechanics a century ago! And maybe the Event Horizon of a black hole is really a literal Firewall? Like, it would burn an errant space-traveler to quantum ash to cross it??
"Truthfully, there is little love for firewalls, and theorists are hard at work to banish them...."
This is the same deep sense of strangeness I get from reading really good hard-SF, and I commend it to your attention. Bravo!
To sum up: Levin's black-hole book is light-hearted but not light weight. Meaty subject matter, and I spent more time digesting it than the book's size might suggest. Digestion continues.
Minuses: no index! And I didn't find the drawings, by an (apparently) well-known illustrator, to be very helpful. Plain drawings and some photos would have done the job better, I think. You saw some linked here already. Overall, I'm giving the book 4.5 stars, and rounding up. A very accomplished scientist-writer! Highly recommended. And blessedly short!
==============
Coda: a runaway supermassive Black Hole!
"What’s invisible, weighs 20 million suns and zooms through space at more than 1,500 kilometers per second, leaving a long starry trail in its wake?"
https://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...
[put here because, if I make it a Note, I can't link the article. Wake UP, GR!]
September 17, 2020
Black holes are complicated, largely because what we think we know is mostly extremely long distance observation, mixed with debatable quantum mechanics and a lot of plain old conjecture. Janna Levin, professor of Physics at Columbia, manages to explain it rationally, clearly and even excitingly in her microbook The Black Hole Survival Guide. Spoiler alert: there is no surviving a black hole.
Levin uses everyday objects to make understanding the process and the thing easy to follow. First of all, black holes are actually nothing. It takes her some time to get readers to understand that, but black holes contain nothing and are nothing. Yet they are fearsomely massive and dense. The old cliché is that they’re so dense even light cannot escape from them. But just because we can’t see light beyond the event horizon doesn’t mean black holes are dark on the other side. All the thrashing and smashing and tearing apart could well mean it is extremely bright on the other side as energy is released. We just can’t see it from our side. Plus, the event horizon is a hologram, not a window, she says. It contains all the information from everything that passes through, while the interior holds nothing. This kind of explanation makes the book a real page turner for me, and for sci-fi and astrophysics fans in general I would imagine.
First up for explanation is gravity. Gravitation is curved spacetime. The distortion of space means gravity fields around various bodies. Free-fall paths are curves in space, not straight lines. They trace an arc, much like throwing something across the room. Therefore the earth does not pull on the moon. Rather, it bends space and the moon falls freely along it, a very different concept. Levin says this was Einstein’s greatest finding.
A black hole, as everybody knows, is massively dense. A black hole with the same mass as our sun would be just six kilometers wide, if that puts it in perspective. It consumes everything that ventures near, and destroys it, instantly shredding it to its subatomic components. It destroys the information, the history that it carried with it for eons. Destroyed matter can reappear as flares, fairly vomited from the black hole, bearing no relation whatsoever to what came in through the event horizon.
A black hole warps time so much it basically stands still at the event horizon. Levin uses the example of two women in a mothership far from the black hole. If one leaves and ventures towards the black hole, her voyage would seem normal to her. But the woman in the mothership would die of old age watching her. The last moment, crossing the event horizon, would appear to take forever. From the event horizon looking out, the universe would advance billions of years in moments.
Meanwhile, back at wrapping your brain around incredible concepts, the black hole singularity that we naively think of as the center of a sphere within the black hole is really at a future point in time and not a point in space at all. She says light can no more travel toward you from the singularity than light can travel into the past. This is a further good reason why a black hole seems dark and no light escapes. It’s all in the past from our side of the event horizon.
There are contradictions to deal with as well. My favorite is that relativity’s prediction of the singularity means it cannot be.
Levin also has the best explanations through analogy of quantum mechanics that I have seen. She says as with a musical chord vs a single note, a quantum particle cannot be in a precise place and simultaneously have a precise motion. If a particle is in a precise location, it is in a superposition of motions. If it is moving at a precise speed, it is in a superposition of locations. Position and velocity are complementary observables in physics talk. Saying particles have precise motion and location is as silly as saying a note is the same as a chord in Levin’s description.
This comes closer to explaining it in plain English than anything I have yet reviewed, which is about ten other books on quantum mechanics now.
Bottom line: keep away from black holes. No great worry there, as the nearest one would take numerous lifetimes to reach, even at the speed of light. It’s a voyage that would end badly, unlike this fun little book.
David Wineberg
Levin uses everyday objects to make understanding the process and the thing easy to follow. First of all, black holes are actually nothing. It takes her some time to get readers to understand that, but black holes contain nothing and are nothing. Yet they are fearsomely massive and dense. The old cliché is that they’re so dense even light cannot escape from them. But just because we can’t see light beyond the event horizon doesn’t mean black holes are dark on the other side. All the thrashing and smashing and tearing apart could well mean it is extremely bright on the other side as energy is released. We just can’t see it from our side. Plus, the event horizon is a hologram, not a window, she says. It contains all the information from everything that passes through, while the interior holds nothing. This kind of explanation makes the book a real page turner for me, and for sci-fi and astrophysics fans in general I would imagine.
First up for explanation is gravity. Gravitation is curved spacetime. The distortion of space means gravity fields around various bodies. Free-fall paths are curves in space, not straight lines. They trace an arc, much like throwing something across the room. Therefore the earth does not pull on the moon. Rather, it bends space and the moon falls freely along it, a very different concept. Levin says this was Einstein’s greatest finding.
A black hole, as everybody knows, is massively dense. A black hole with the same mass as our sun would be just six kilometers wide, if that puts it in perspective. It consumes everything that ventures near, and destroys it, instantly shredding it to its subatomic components. It destroys the information, the history that it carried with it for eons. Destroyed matter can reappear as flares, fairly vomited from the black hole, bearing no relation whatsoever to what came in through the event horizon.
A black hole warps time so much it basically stands still at the event horizon. Levin uses the example of two women in a mothership far from the black hole. If one leaves and ventures towards the black hole, her voyage would seem normal to her. But the woman in the mothership would die of old age watching her. The last moment, crossing the event horizon, would appear to take forever. From the event horizon looking out, the universe would advance billions of years in moments.
Meanwhile, back at wrapping your brain around incredible concepts, the black hole singularity that we naively think of as the center of a sphere within the black hole is really at a future point in time and not a point in space at all. She says light can no more travel toward you from the singularity than light can travel into the past. This is a further good reason why a black hole seems dark and no light escapes. It’s all in the past from our side of the event horizon.
There are contradictions to deal with as well. My favorite is that relativity’s prediction of the singularity means it cannot be.
Levin also has the best explanations through analogy of quantum mechanics that I have seen. She says as with a musical chord vs a single note, a quantum particle cannot be in a precise place and simultaneously have a precise motion. If a particle is in a precise location, it is in a superposition of motions. If it is moving at a precise speed, it is in a superposition of locations. Position and velocity are complementary observables in physics talk. Saying particles have precise motion and location is as silly as saying a note is the same as a chord in Levin’s description.
This comes closer to explaining it in plain English than anything I have yet reviewed, which is about ten other books on quantum mechanics now.
Bottom line: keep away from black holes. No great worry there, as the nearest one would take numerous lifetimes to reach, even at the speed of light. It’s a voyage that would end badly, unlike this fun little book.
David Wineberg
March 23, 2021
Thoroughly enjoyed this book. I listened to the audio version, narrated by the author.
It's humorous, informative, told in layman's style but not dumbed down, and just plain interesting.
I had to rewind it often because the visuals put into my head while listening took my mind off to explore a theory, then when my ears came back to the book, I'd lost my place. LOL.
I have a hard time keeping up with physics. I find the theories a bit abstract and I lose the thread often. But Janna Levin is a true teacher. She makes the theories understandable and fun.
If you are at all interested in Space and particularly Black Holes, this is a book to pick up. I will pick up the printed version to read one day because I hear that the graphics are wonderful.
It's humorous, informative, told in layman's style but not dumbed down, and just plain interesting.
I had to rewind it often because the visuals put into my head while listening took my mind off to explore a theory, then when my ears came back to the book, I'd lost my place. LOL.
I have a hard time keeping up with physics. I find the theories a bit abstract and I lose the thread often. But Janna Levin is a true teacher. She makes the theories understandable and fun.
If you are at all interested in Space and particularly Black Holes, this is a book to pick up. I will pick up the printed version to read one day because I hear that the graphics are wonderful.
February 4, 2021
Cool book. I am still hella confused about black holes. I think I need to reread and ponder some more because even though she dumbs it down for me...the struggle is real. Haha
May 29, 2021
A friend takes me out in New York to discuss the essentials to include in a black hole survival guide. An accomplished science writer, he asks me to clarify: "Don't I already know everything about black holes?"
"Do you know they are nothing?"
Reading this slim book was like having Janna over for tea. And I say this not as an exaggeration. Anyone who has listened to her interviews will get the same feeling. She writes as she talks. It's as if someone asked her about her views on the black holes and let her speak uninterrupted for an hour or two. This is unlike her other book, Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space, which was primarily a historical account on gravitational wave detection. Here Janna lets herself go and passionately discusses the oddity that is a black hole. In thirteen brief chapters she condenses the essence of what black holes are and are not.
I would say this book is a crash course on black holes, but that would be misleading to a complete novice. It discusses things like: relativity of spacetime, black hole evaporation via Hawking radiation, the information-loss paradox, the quantum entanglement etc. There is beauty in how Janna describes these concepts. It feels like she is sharing a personal outlook on something universally known. And I believe I enjoyed it more because of my recent dalliance with other books on the topic. It was pure happenstance that I did the heavy lifting with Kip's book before picking up this one. And I am glad it turned out that way, otherwise the ideas crunched within the short chapters would have flummoxed me for sure. Don't mistake this for a list of dos and don'ts to mind in the vicinity of a black hole. This is more like a Get-To-Know-A-Black-Hole book.
The book turned out to be a 3.5 star read for me. It is not a must read. But if you like Janna, DO pick it up.
March 3, 2024
Not using my usual rating system as this is non fiction. Super cool book with a lot of good info and pretty good writing that explained some of the concepts in a fairly clever way.
July 26, 2021
I have always loved Janna Levin’s writing style. She is verbose and uses a large scientific vocabulary, but it so seamless and graspable. I do recommend having a basic knowledge of the physics of black holes before you read. There are a lot of good docs on streaming platforms. The illustrations are abstract representations of her scientific explanations, and I love them! They captivate you to stop and reflect on what you just read.
Read
January 14, 2023I will admit...I did not finish this. I truly tired, but I was SO BORED. There were parts that I enjoyed and found really interesting, but I feel like I would have had a better time just skimming a wikipedia article on black holes.
This book has a pretty good rating though, so I think this is just a me issue.
This book has a pretty good rating though, so I think this is just a me issue.
January 3, 2021
Let's not kid ourselves. She's basically a black hole apologist.
Her excuse is that you can get way closer to a black hole than a star like the sun before you perish*.
The title is fake news. She obviously doesn't care about all the black hole victims (past and future). Like a shark conservationist. These people focus not on the danger, but what the danger source might know, what it might tell us about the world or ourselves. Danger sources always have information, you see! Or maybe not. We're not sure. Not even Stephen Hawking knew.
Read if you want to know what Hawking radiation is. That stuff will blow your socks off. What time is the event horizon? Read to find out.
4 stars because the first 3/4 of the book really set the bar high for clarity, and that level wasn't maintained in the last 1/4 (when it came to holograms and firewalls). A little more elaboration in the last couple of chapters would have been perfect.
Black Hole sUN
Black Hole sUN
*if the black hole has the same mass as the sun
Her excuse is that you can get way closer to a black hole than a star like the sun before you perish*.
The title is fake news. She obviously doesn't care about all the black hole victims (past and future). Like a shark conservationist. These people focus not on the danger, but what the danger source might know, what it might tell us about the world or ourselves. Danger sources always have information, you see! Or maybe not. We're not sure. Not even Stephen Hawking knew.
Read if you want to know what Hawking radiation is. That stuff will blow your socks off. What time is the event horizon? Read to find out.
4 stars because the first 3/4 of the book really set the bar high for clarity, and that level wasn't maintained in the last 1/4 (when it came to holograms and firewalls). A little more elaboration in the last couple of chapters would have been perfect.
Black Hole sUN
Black Hole sUN
*if the black hole has the same mass as the sun
April 4, 2021
If for 80% of the book I could follow, sometimes with a second pass, the last 20% were just to much for my luggage.
This does not mean it is not extremely well written. In a way that those 80% helped me a lot in understanding Black Holes dynamics better and even giving an hand to my understanding of space and time.
Great writer. Will read more from her. I already loved Janna from her lectures and from her appearances on Star Talk, now my respect for her has risen even more.
This does not mean it is not extremely well written. In a way that those 80% helped me a lot in understanding Black Holes dynamics better and even giving an hand to my understanding of space and time.
Great writer. Will read more from her. I already loved Janna from her lectures and from her appearances on Star Talk, now my respect for her has risen even more.
June 24, 2024
A great book that I want to read again.
May 16, 2022
An sich lesenswert, vor allem wenn man einen leichten, Interesse weckenden Einstieg ins Thema sucht.
Die (zugegeben, schwer zu findende) Balance zwischen zugänglichen, anschaulichen Erklärungen und dem tiefgehenden Aufgreifen komplexer Sachverhalte war für mich nicht ganz optimal getroffen
- der 'Humor' hat sich teils etwas gezogen, viele Erklärungen waren zwar gut zu verstehen, haben sich jedoch unnötig wiederholt;
die Illustrationen hingegen könnten ruhig funktioneller sein und mehr zum Verständnis beitragen.
Andererseits hat das Buch genau das erreicht, was ich mir eigentlich von pop science wünsche: Eine mühelose, spannende Auseinandersetzung mit einem komplexen Thema, das zum Weiterlesen angeregt.
... Ein kleiner Einblick in das, was wir (glauben zu) wissen, wonach einem erst klar wird, wie viel wir eigentlich überhaupt nicht wissen.
Die (zugegeben, schwer zu findende) Balance zwischen zugänglichen, anschaulichen Erklärungen und dem tiefgehenden Aufgreifen komplexer Sachverhalte war für mich nicht ganz optimal getroffen
- der 'Humor' hat sich teils etwas gezogen, viele Erklärungen waren zwar gut zu verstehen, haben sich jedoch unnötig wiederholt;
die Illustrationen hingegen könnten ruhig funktioneller sein und mehr zum Verständnis beitragen.
Andererseits hat das Buch genau das erreicht, was ich mir eigentlich von pop science wünsche: Eine mühelose, spannende Auseinandersetzung mit einem komplexen Thema, das zum Weiterlesen angeregt.
... Ein kleiner Einblick in das, was wir (glauben zu) wissen, wonach einem erst klar wird, wie viel wir eigentlich überhaupt nicht wissen.
February 2, 2024
This book was honestly scary. Black Holes are not scary, I embrace them, but any mention of gravity and "falling" through the universe made me have a few existential crises.
Regardless of that, I loved the information provided, and the formatting of how the information was given.
Janna Levin I like you.
Regardless of that, I loved the information provided, and the formatting of how the information was given.
Janna Levin I like you.
January 20, 2021
Phenomenal. A perfect book to transition into a new year. Reset the clock while we ponder the nature of reality, time and space through science. Janna Levin is a master communicator. She blends the science constructs together with the curiosity we all bear within us as we look up at the night sky and recognize it's ineffable nature. Much like black holes. Can't recommend this enough.
September 8, 2021
I celebrated a birthday last week. And by “celebrated” I mean I was sitting at work and got some texts. I first I was freaked out, thinking something else was going wrong (life is pain, try to enjoy the peace, the happy, and the good when you can), but no, it was just some random well wishes for my advancing age.
I’ll occasionally do some back-of-the-envelope math to see about how many books I have left in me to read before I die. If I keep up an okay pace (about the one I’m on for this year), and I make it about as long as my grandmother did (the 1 out of 4 natural grandparents that was even alive for my birth), then I have another 1200 books or so in me.
And that’s assuming I don’t have some severe cognitive decline (like that one long-lived grandmother suffered from) that cuts a few hundred from that grand total.
1200 books. What do I want to spend them on? Given my mood of late, not reading shit, that’s for sure. I’ve really got to stop sticking with middling or shit-filled things that I have to finish because my need to complete stuff freaks me out. I’m way better than I used to be, but it’s an ongoing battle.
But look, I’m still curious about the world I live in, there is a lot I don’t know about that I really want to. And one of those burning things I need answers to has to do with black holes.
Since this is a survival guide, I’ll give you a quick synopsis of how to survive one: Don’t get near one.
The longer answer, don’t be anywhere near one.
But if you get in too close, and the black hole is kindly, you can survive for a while, as long as you are in some sort of super-ship that protects you from the myriad of things that would definitely kill you if you were in a normal, human-built ship. But given that, you could, if you had those means, pass over the event horizon, set up your super-telescope, and watch the history of the universe unfold before you.
Something about that sounds nice, peaceful even, you can see all, unable to interact, and as an impartial observer, watch the universe flower, and die… before you get torn up and stripped down to, well, whatever become of matter at the heart of a black hole.
Because one of the things this book does take a stab at is something that I have wondered at for a long time. Does the material that collapse into a black hole reach a new stable configuration, or does it continue collapsing into infinity, just collapsing and collapsing and collapsing without end?
I think Dr Levin’s take is the latter. I have follow up questions about whether their can be more than one kind of black hole, one where the escape velocity is still greater than the speed of light, but where something degenerate, super-strings, quarks, something, still has enough stability to prevent that collapse towards infinity. But until any of the real experts I’ve emailed and tried to question in my personal life feel like discussing with me, I’m starting to think I may not find those types of answers in a pop-science book. I’ll occasionally trawl the internet to see if something comes up, but as of now. I just have to shrug and go with what I’m told.
Another thing the book didn’t address, but I’ve heard Dr Levin discuss off-the-cuff, is merging event horizons. To me it’s a paradox, to experts, I’m an idiot. Let me explain.
Everything I’ve ever learned about General Relativity to date tells me that if I were to toss something into a black hole then the object that was tossed would appear to me to never actually cross that event horizon, but slow down further and further until it appears to me to simply stop, frozen in time, and get dimmer as the eons carry on (This is how if I jumped into a black hole I could watch the history of the cosmos play out before my eyes, outsiders would see me frozen in time while I saw the lives of stars come and go like fireflies on a summer’s night).
So how can we be seeing all these black hole mergers from places like LIGO? I read books about that too, the problem is never mentioned. Two event horizons should never meet, right? They just get to the brink of merging before slowing down to an apparent stop. Dr Levin casually mentions in the interview I mentioned that it doesn’t work that way for black holes, that their event horizons just merge.
Um, what?
I need more. You know, just writing about it puts me in a sour mood. I’ll google it again after I post this, see if I learn something new.
Anyway, the book was fine.
I’ll occasionally do some back-of-the-envelope math to see about how many books I have left in me to read before I die. If I keep up an okay pace (about the one I’m on for this year), and I make it about as long as my grandmother did (the 1 out of 4 natural grandparents that was even alive for my birth), then I have another 1200 books or so in me.
And that’s assuming I don’t have some severe cognitive decline (like that one long-lived grandmother suffered from) that cuts a few hundred from that grand total.
1200 books. What do I want to spend them on? Given my mood of late, not reading shit, that’s for sure. I’ve really got to stop sticking with middling or shit-filled things that I have to finish because my need to complete stuff freaks me out. I’m way better than I used to be, but it’s an ongoing battle.
But look, I’m still curious about the world I live in, there is a lot I don’t know about that I really want to. And one of those burning things I need answers to has to do with black holes.
Since this is a survival guide, I’ll give you a quick synopsis of how to survive one: Don’t get near one.
The longer answer, don’t be anywhere near one.
But if you get in too close, and the black hole is kindly, you can survive for a while, as long as you are in some sort of super-ship that protects you from the myriad of things that would definitely kill you if you were in a normal, human-built ship. But given that, you could, if you had those means, pass over the event horizon, set up your super-telescope, and watch the history of the universe unfold before you.
Something about that sounds nice, peaceful even, you can see all, unable to interact, and as an impartial observer, watch the universe flower, and die… before you get torn up and stripped down to, well, whatever become of matter at the heart of a black hole.
Because one of the things this book does take a stab at is something that I have wondered at for a long time. Does the material that collapse into a black hole reach a new stable configuration, or does it continue collapsing into infinity, just collapsing and collapsing and collapsing without end?
I think Dr Levin’s take is the latter. I have follow up questions about whether their can be more than one kind of black hole, one where the escape velocity is still greater than the speed of light, but where something degenerate, super-strings, quarks, something, still has enough stability to prevent that collapse towards infinity. But until any of the real experts I’ve emailed and tried to question in my personal life feel like discussing with me, I’m starting to think I may not find those types of answers in a pop-science book. I’ll occasionally trawl the internet to see if something comes up, but as of now. I just have to shrug and go with what I’m told.
Another thing the book didn’t address, but I’ve heard Dr Levin discuss off-the-cuff, is merging event horizons. To me it’s a paradox, to experts, I’m an idiot. Let me explain.
Everything I’ve ever learned about General Relativity to date tells me that if I were to toss something into a black hole then the object that was tossed would appear to me to never actually cross that event horizon, but slow down further and further until it appears to me to simply stop, frozen in time, and get dimmer as the eons carry on (This is how if I jumped into a black hole I could watch the history of the cosmos play out before my eyes, outsiders would see me frozen in time while I saw the lives of stars come and go like fireflies on a summer’s night).
So how can we be seeing all these black hole mergers from places like LIGO? I read books about that too, the problem is never mentioned. Two event horizons should never meet, right? They just get to the brink of merging before slowing down to an apparent stop. Dr Levin casually mentions in the interview I mentioned that it doesn’t work that way for black holes, that their event horizons just merge.
Um, what?
I need more. You know, just writing about it puts me in a sour mood. I’ll google it again after I post this, see if I learn something new.
Anyway, the book was fine.
February 24, 2022
A very engaging and informative read! Enjoyable and compelling writing style!
December 8, 2020
It's short, but is it sweet? Can a book about one's inevitable death in the depths of a black hole ever be sweet? I don't know, but I loved the Black Hole Survival Guide!
The book is precisely what the title suggests, offering advice such as: Go for the largest black hole possible for time in which to contemplate your looming death. Along the way, there are some lovely, accessible physics lessons. Dr. Levin also answers many lingering questions, such as: What was the deal with mini black holes and the LHC? And she debunks black hole myths. (They're not as voracious as they're made out to be.)
The icing on the proverbial cake is the author's enthusiasm for her subject matter. It's infectious! Janna Levin must be one hell of a professor, because rarely is learning so much fun.
The book is precisely what the title suggests, offering advice such as: Go for the largest black hole possible for time in which to contemplate your looming death. Along the way, there are some lovely, accessible physics lessons. Dr. Levin also answers many lingering questions, such as: What was the deal with mini black holes and the LHC? And she debunks black hole myths. (They're not as voracious as they're made out to be.)
The icing on the proverbial cake is the author's enthusiasm for her subject matter. It's infectious! Janna Levin must be one hell of a professor, because rarely is learning so much fun.
January 12, 2021
Janna Levin is awesome. I saw her on a couple of shows with Neil deGrasse Tyson and then got hooked on some YouTube videos explaining gravity (yes, there's a lot to know) and from that reading Black Hole Blues, which was a wild ride discussion about the ringing of space time. Loved this and that led me to Black Hole Survival Guide, which is a bit of a rebuild of her Nova Black Hole Apocalypse episode, which if you haven't watched and have read this book but want the full visual - go there next. Great book for non-science readers to really take in the marvel of physics - both quantum and astro and to see them applied in real terms as you try to survive the black hole.
April 26, 2024
I think I actually understand black holes less than I did before reading this book. Using metaphors to describe complex concepts is great, if the metaphors make sense. These didn’t. The writing was repetitive without making anything any clearer. The style was also strangely flowery for this type of book.
November 13, 2020
Weirdly good - I expected to snooze through this. Mostly because science was not my strongest subject in high school. The author does a fantastic job breaking it down simply, as is evident by my new fear of falling into a black hole 😂
January 11, 2025
Very poetic, romantic and inspiring with sprinkles of humour that adds to the decoration of the book. I could never imagine how a lover of a Black Hole might look like - not anymore. Looking forward to the author's other books.
December 22, 2021
Well written, lyrical, sweeping, lucid, fatalist.
Black holes present a deep mystery that challenges our best scientific theories—general relativity and quantum mechanics—to their core. Janna Levin's survival guide will not save you from being devoured by the singularity if you veer too close. Her guide is ultimately a ruse to weave the tapestry of principles that form our conflicting theories and frame our current guesses for a solution to the black hole conundrum: What happens to the stuff that falls into a black hole? What happens to the information they contain? Is the horizon simply a place where spacetime is bent too much yet otherwise inconspicuous, or is it blazing with an ever growing accumulation of the information debris of the black hope's victims? These questions and other wonderments keep many a physicist sharpening their mathematical tools and even get into a few battles and wagers over their favorite answers.
Levin is a master of analogies that turn the concepts crystal clear. Her explanation of fundamental symmetries (Nature's lack of preference for one direction to another, for example) is the best I've read. My only complaint is that, at times, she seems to offer descriptions of certain notions that are neither universally accepted nor stand in harmony with other parts of her descriptions. For example, entanglement is presented as a means to receive information by one party faster than the speed of light, a dubious statement, especially as she also spends a good chunk on explaining how no such information is transmitted to the other party. In a similar vain, she describes the process of measuring a quantum superposition as one that somehow forces the quantum state to pick one state to be in, which is, to say the least, a very contested statement.
Despite these complaints, I enjoyed the time I spent in the company of Levin's words and thought experiments. And I hope you will too.
Black holes present a deep mystery that challenges our best scientific theories—general relativity and quantum mechanics—to their core. Janna Levin's survival guide will not save you from being devoured by the singularity if you veer too close. Her guide is ultimately a ruse to weave the tapestry of principles that form our conflicting theories and frame our current guesses for a solution to the black hole conundrum: What happens to the stuff that falls into a black hole? What happens to the information they contain? Is the horizon simply a place where spacetime is bent too much yet otherwise inconspicuous, or is it blazing with an ever growing accumulation of the information debris of the black hope's victims? These questions and other wonderments keep many a physicist sharpening their mathematical tools and even get into a few battles and wagers over their favorite answers.
Levin is a master of analogies that turn the concepts crystal clear. Her explanation of fundamental symmetries (Nature's lack of preference for one direction to another, for example) is the best I've read. My only complaint is that, at times, she seems to offer descriptions of certain notions that are neither universally accepted nor stand in harmony with other parts of her descriptions. For example, entanglement is presented as a means to receive information by one party faster than the speed of light, a dubious statement, especially as she also spends a good chunk on explaining how no such information is transmitted to the other party. In a similar vain, she describes the process of measuring a quantum superposition as one that somehow forces the quantum state to pick one state to be in, which is, to say the least, a very contested statement.
Despite these complaints, I enjoyed the time I spent in the company of Levin's words and thought experiments. And I hope you will too.
April 7, 2021
I've been reading this book on and off with my son looking over my shoulder. He's young but he loves black holes and this book has some amazing artist interpretations* of the concepts discussed. I also dearly loved the book for talking about Hawking radiations in terms I could understand. I feel disadvantaged whenever I pick up a book about quantum mechanics because it's not something I learned at school, and I didn't get interested in it until fairly recently. So it's a hard concept to wrap around a brain that only knows traditional physics (and that too not well). I've come across Hawking radiation in several books and technically know what it is, but it's always been handwaved about. This book - I would have been grateful for having read it just for that one concept if nothing else, but the rest of it is quite amazing also.
* I wonder if they're available to purchase poster size, I'd love to frame one or two of them and put them up in son's room. I would love these!
* I wonder if they're available to purchase poster size, I'd love to frame one or two of them and put them up in son's room. I would love these!
September 2, 2024
3.5
Un manuale breve e basico, che vuole introdurre un vasto target demografico al magico mondo dei buchi neri, ommettendo un piccolo particolare: non si può sopravvivere a un buco nero (ammesso che qualcuno sia così stupido da oltrepassare la zona sicura).
Quindi, più che un manuale di sopravvivenza, è un manuale che vuole decantare le caratteristiche fisiche e quantistiche di questi affascinanti fenomeni universali.
Il fatto che nessuno l’abbia ancora spedito alla Maas mi preoccupa, considerato le cazzate che ha scritto, ma ehi, c’è sempre tempo per acculturarsi.
In ogni caso è un piccolo saggio facile da leggere e apprezzabile anche da chi non ha un background scientifico. L’unica parte davvero tosta a livello di spiegazioni, che virano sul lato professionale, è negli ultimi capitoli, per cui non preoccupatevi se vi verrà il mal di testa. Tutto nella norma! La fisica quantistica rimane sempre un grande mistero per la sottoscritta.
Ottimo per le menti curiose.
Un manuale breve e basico, che vuole introdurre un vasto target demografico al magico mondo dei buchi neri, ommettendo un piccolo particolare: non si può sopravvivere a un buco nero (ammesso che qualcuno sia così stupido da oltrepassare la zona sicura).
Quindi, più che un manuale di sopravvivenza, è un manuale che vuole decantare le caratteristiche fisiche e quantistiche di questi affascinanti fenomeni universali.
Il fatto che nessuno l’abbia ancora spedito alla Maas mi preoccupa, considerato le cazzate che ha scritto, ma ehi, c’è sempre tempo per acculturarsi.
In ogni caso è un piccolo saggio facile da leggere e apprezzabile anche da chi non ha un background scientifico. L’unica parte davvero tosta a livello di spiegazioni, che virano sul lato professionale, è negli ultimi capitoli, per cui non preoccupatevi se vi verrà il mal di testa. Tutto nella norma! La fisica quantistica rimane sempre un grande mistero per la sottoscritta.
Ottimo per le menti curiose.
January 29, 2025
Overall, a decent summary of black holes, physics, and the universe by an expert in their field. I did learn one or two new things about the subject. However, this book lacked a certain depth and gravitational pull - unlike black holes. It felt repetitive, with no real logical flow, and was full of half-cooked analogies attempting to explain complex concepts.
I wish the author toyed more with the idea of making a “survival guide.” This could have involved creative (and even ridiculous) suggestions on what one could do or what to bring with them. Instead we kept encountering our glaringly obvious fate of “there is no escape and you will definitely perish.”
What gives this book a boost from the two-star realm to three, are the brilliant minimalistic illustrations by Lia Horran. They captured the essence of the topics covered better than the narrative itself.
Rating: 2.8/5
I wish the author toyed more with the idea of making a “survival guide.” This could have involved creative (and even ridiculous) suggestions on what one could do or what to bring with them. Instead we kept encountering our glaringly obvious fate of “there is no escape and you will definitely perish.”
What gives this book a boost from the two-star realm to three, are the brilliant minimalistic illustrations by Lia Horran. They captured the essence of the topics covered better than the narrative itself.
Rating: 2.8/5
December 31, 2020
Janna Levin’s ‘Black Hole Survival Guide’ was fun for the most parts. And then Levin started talking about some difficult things like ‘Evaporation’ and ‘Hologram’, which went way above my head, and I read those chapters twice, looked up more information online, and returned to the book with a sense of resignation. Maybe, that is just me. A person, who is more enthusiastic than me, about this dark subject, would find the book even more enjoyable. I loved the illustrations, and all the analogies. The only complaint though is, Levin shouldn’t have thrown all those goats into the black holes for her experiments. Throwing mountains and stars are acceptable. 😋 The book ended on a sad note, and that affected me despite knowing that that’s how things would end. It was even more unnerving to complete reading the book on New Year’s Eve. But it was still a fun book.
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