A fresh, fascinating, up-to-the-moment appraisal of black holes—the massive astronomical objects with a gravitational pull so strong that nothing can escape them, not even light—situating them at the center of our understanding of our place on Earth and in the universeHumanity’s relationship with black holes began in 1783 in a small English village, when clergyman John Michell posed a startling question: What if there are objects in space that are so large and heav...