Black Holes The Reith Lectures

Stephen Hawking's two BBC Reith Lectures on black holes appear here in print, compressing decades of theoretical physics into a short, spoken-style text. The lectures explain how stars collapse, what an event horizon means for anything that crosses it, and why the question of what happens to information falling inward troubled physicists for so long. Hawking keeps the mathematics out of sight and the jokes in, and the printed edition adds explanatory material so readers without a physics background can follow the argument. Format and scope: • A short book based on two broadcast lectures • Covers event horizons, collapse and the information problem • Explanatory notes added for non-specialist readers • Brief enough to finish in a single sitting A good entry point for readers curious about cosmology, for students meeting the subject early, and for anyone who wants Hawking's argument at its most concise, available from Boipoka.