Brian Cox (1) (1968–)

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.… (more)

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!… (more)