Have you ever wondered how the legendary Stephen Hawking thinks about the universe? He has worked on some of the most mind-boggling physics and cosmology questions, like what’s at the center of a black hole. This video from The Guardian’s Made Simpleseries, animated by Scriberia, explains some of the main ideas of Hawking’s complex theories from his book A Brief History of Time, in just 150 seconds.
Here are some of the highlights from the video.
What actually is at the center of a black hole? A singularity – or tons of matter packed into a tiny space. That high concentration of matter basically creates infinite gravity – that’s why nothing can escape a black hole.
What happens when a black hole disappears? It explodes, and the explosion has a force equivalent to a million nuclear bombs.
Why is Stephen Hawking so well-known? His work suggests that at one point, everything in our universe was squeezed into one of those singularities. Then, it exploded into the universe as we know it now.
Some books are too clever by half. Anthony Trongone’s Trading in the Footsteps of Sherlock Holmes: Balancing Probabilities for Successful Investing (W & A Publishing/Traders Press, 2010) is one of them. The idea—to encourage traders to adopt an analytical mindset and achieve emotional discipline by relying heavily on quotations from Sherlock Holmes novels and stories—sounded promising, even fun. And fun is a rare commodity in trading books. Although the book started off well, as it progressed Holmes became a less and less useful coach and analogies from detecting to trading became increasingly strained. It’s hard, for instance, to invoke Holmes in a discussion of order types.
In 1997 chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov met the Singularity. And the Singularity won.