This pedagogical introduction to the physics of black holes emphasizes the "membrane paradigm," which translates the mathematics and physics of black holes into a form accessible to readers with little knowledge of general relativity but a solid grounding in nonrelativistic physics. This is accomplished without resort to approximations or loss of content.
Instead of treating a black hole's "event horizon" as a globally defined null surface in four-dimensional space time, the paradigm views it as a two-dimensional membrane in three-dimensional space. Made of viscous fluid, electrically...