Felt the need to mark important things in this book, so...
"A singularity is what you end up with when a giant star is compressed to an unimaginably small point."
"A 'naked' singularity is a theoretical scenario in which a star collapses but an event horizon does not form around it - so the singularity would be visible."
"Quasars are the brightest objects in the universe, and possibly the most distant detected so far."
"Entropy means the tendency for anything that has order to become more disordered as time passes, for example, a well-shuffled pack of cards has higher entropy than an unshuffled one and therefore its description requires far more explanation, or information"
"The uncertainty principle, states that we can never locate or predict the precise position of the smallest particles. So, at what is called the quantum scale, there is a fuzziness in nature, very unlike the precisely ordered universe described by Isaac Newton."
"When a black hole is created by gravitational collapse, it rapidly settles down to a stationary state, which is characterized by only three parameters: the mass, the angular momentum(state of rotation) and the electric charge.
Apart from these three, it preserves no other details of the object that has collapsed.
If information is lost, which is apparently what is happening in a black hole, there should be some release of energy - but that flies in the face of the theory that nothing comes out of black holes. A paradox."
Or so we thought...
"Black holes seems to emit particles at a steady rate.
Quantum mechanics implies that the whole space is filled with pairs of virtual particles and antiparticles, which are constantly materializing in pairs, separating, and then coming together again and annihilating each other.
Now, in the presence of a black hole, one member of a pair of virtual particles may fall into the hole, leaving the other member without the partner necessary for mutual annihilation. The forsaken particle or antiparticle may fall into the black hole after its partner, but it may also escape to infinity, where it appears to be radiation emitted by the black hole."
known as Hawking radiation.
"The more accurately you know the positions of particles, the less accurately you can know their speeds, and vice versa"
"Although one can't predict the positions and speeds separately, one can predict what is called the 'quantum state'. This is something from which both positions and speeds can be calculated to a certain degree of accuracy."