“A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.”

— Terry Pratchett , book Guards! Guards!

Source: Guards! Guards!

Last update Sept. 29, 2023. History

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Terry Pratchett 796

English author 1948–2015

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“It's good to know how to read, but it's dangerous to know how to read and not how to interpret what you're reading.”

Mike Tyson (1966) American boxer

Miscellaneous
Source: https://books.google.ca/books?id=ww3ikzftnNsC&pg=PA82&dq=it%27s+dangerous+to+know+how+to+read+and+not+how+to+interpret+what+you%27re+reading&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjOssCd-cr0AhWSHc0KHTQvDuQQ6AF6BAgCEAI#v=onepage&q=it's%20dangerous%20to%20know%20how%20to%20read%20and%20not%20how%20to%20interpret%20what%20you're%20reading&f=false Ebony September 1995

“Libraries really are wonderful. They're better than bookshops, even. I mean bookshops make a profit on selling you books, but libraries just sit there lending you books quietly out of the goodness of their hearts.”

Jo Walton book Among Others

Source: Among Others

“I don't browse in bookshops, I browse in libraries, where you can take a book home and read it, and if you like it you go to a bookshop and buy it.”

Helene Hanff book 84, Charing Cross Road

Source: 84, Charing Cross Road

“Is the reader feeling confused about the status of the black hole information paradox and black holes in general? So am I!”

John Moffat book Reinventing Gravity

Source: Reinventing Gravity (2008), Chapter 5, Conventional Black Holes, p. 87

“It's just that… I just think that some things are meant to be broken. Imperfect. Chaotic. It's the universe's way of providing contrast, you know? There have to be a few holes in the road. It's how life is.”

Sarah Dessen book The Truth About Forever

Source: The Truth About Forever

“We show that it is natural to introduce the concept of black-hole entropy as the measure of information about a black-hole interior which is inaccessible to an exterior observer. Considerations of simplicity and consistency, and dimensional arguments indicate that the black-hole entropy is equal to the ratio of the black-hole area to the square of the Planck length times a dimensionless constant of order unity. A different approach making use of the specific properties of Kerr black holes and of concepts from information theory leads to the same conclusion, and suggests a definite value for the constant.”

Jacob Bekenstein (1947–2015) Mexican-Israeli physicist

[Black Holes and Entropy, Phys. Rev. D, 7, 8, 2333–2346, 15 April 1973, 10.1103/PhysRevD.7.2333]

“I'm sorry to disappoint science fiction fans, but if information is preserved, there is no possibility of using black holes to travel to other universes. If you jump into a black hole, your mass energy will be returned to our universe but in a mangled form which contains the information about what you were like but in a state where it can not be easily recognized. It is like burning an encyclopedia. Information is not lost, if one keeps the smoke and the ashes. But it is difficult to read. In practice, it would be too difficult to re-build a macroscopic object like an encyclopedia that fell inside a black hole from information in the radiation, but the information preserving result is important for microscopic processes involving virtual black holes.”

Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author

"Information Loss in Black Holes" http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0507171 (July 2005)

“Black holes are where God divided by zero.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

“A black hole is the ultimate manifestation of a region of strong gravity. The pull of gravity in a black hole is so strong that even light cannot escape from it and time stands still.”

Jayant Narlikar (1938) Indian physicist

Source: Jayant Narlikar Black Holes http://books.google.com/books?id=8qi55iSSeiwC, National Book Trust, India, 1 January 2006

“There is not much good spending twelve hours a day in a black hole in the ground all your life long if there’s nothing there, no secret, no treasure, nothing hidden.”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

“The Stars Below” p. 212 (originally published in Orbit 14, edited by Damon Knight)
Short fiction, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975)

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