A CRACK IN EVERYTHING: How Black Holes Came In From the Cold and Took Cosmic Centre Stage, by Marcus Chown

When writing about the complexities of our universe, the astronomer turned author Marcus Chown goes straight to the deep end. His book, “A Crack in Everything,” tells the stories of scientists on the quest to demystify black holes, and it starts with Albert Einstein’s counterintuitive description of gravity.

That gravity is a force — some invisible pull attracting your pencil to the floor — is an illusion, Einstein suggested. What we perceive as gravity is instead the warping of space and time around a massive object, like how plopping a bowling ball onto a soft mattress will curve the sheets surrounding it.

It was a revelation that completely upended the way physicists thought about the universe. But, Chown explains, it also led to a horrifying realization. If that massive object was squeezed small enough, like a star that has run out of fuel and collapsed under its own weight, the warping around it would grow so steep and so powerful that the object would simply cease to exist. Einstein’s new theory of gravity, known as general relativity, gave birth to a monster that he never escaped: the black hole, a cosmic entity with the mass of millions or billions of suns that will devour anything in its wake.

“They are the stuff of physicists’ nightmares,” Chown writes, the afterlives of too-big, burned-out stars swallowed by their own gravity, creating an infinitely dense pit of who-knows-what, because in the belly of a black hole, the laws of physics just stop making sense. As the author concludes, “No wonder Einstein never believed in black holes.”

Chown’s book is primarily a chronicle of the researchers who helped make black holes believable, not just for the Einsteins but for everyone else. He has plumbed the historical record and conducted interviews with pioneers like the New Zealand mathematician Roy Kerr and the British astronomer Paul Murdin, weaving into the stories of their lives and work the uncanny mechanics of the invisible bête noire they helped reveal.