Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy (Commonwealth Fund Book Program) - Hardcover

Kip S. Thorne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393035050 ISBN 13: 9780393035056

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 1994

Synopsis

Stephen Hawking provides the introduction to a work that examines such bizarre phenomena as black holes, wormholes, singularities, gravitational waves, and time machines, exploring the fundamental principles that control the universe.

About this title

About the Author

Kip S. Thorne is the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology.

Reviews

In what seems an attempt to join the ranks of bestselling science writers like Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking, Thorne (Physics/Caltech) turns out a whopper covering everything from ``The Warping of Time and Space'' to ``Ripples of Curvature'' and ``Wormholes and Time Machines.'' Throughout, he remains resolutely chipper, chirpy, and personably anecdotal. The strange, folksy drawings here contribute to the effect of familiarity, which sometimes does its job and sometimes does not. It is undoubtedly useful to find yourself chatted through a potted history of 20th-century physics in so charming and lucid a manner: the problem, though, is to whom the volume is addressed. Hawking's book had plenty of theory, but it was short and elegantly elliptical, letting you think that you grasped its contents even if you didn't--a delusion that may lie at the heart of many a popular science book's success. Here, however, the reader has to wade through many, many pages of theory and diagrams--obvious to the expert but to difficult for the lay reader. Thorne in fact is strongest for the novice reader when dealing with the history of the physics community, which he presents entertainingly and clearly, allowing its peculiar personalities to emerge living and breathing--perhaps as much as a book of this kind can do within its audience's limiting parameters. Even so, in choosing a compact mini-encyclopedia of 20th- century physics, one could do far worse than this one, with its breadth of information even including exactly how it is that time does hook itself up to a wormhole. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Thorne, the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at CalTech, here offers an accessible, deftly illustrated history of curved spacetime. Covering developments from Einstein to Hawking, he takes his readers to the very edge of theoretical physics: straight through wormholes--and maybe back again--past hyperspace, "hairless" wormholes and quantum foam to the leading questions that drive quantum physics. He even addresses the tabloid taunt that has tantalized him since 1988: Do quantum laws allow time travel? (In his foreword, Hawking suggests, "Maybe someone will come back from the future and tell us the answers.") Thorne is rigorous, modest and, true to the spirit of science, determined that readers move beyond the appeal of exotic answers and grasp the significance of quantum questions. This volume, a model of style, format and illustration, will speak eloquently to the readership, ranging widely in scientific literacy and interest, that such theoretical physics writers as Hawking and Feynman have established.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In the 1920s, famed British physicist Arthur Eddington smugly asserted that only two people then alive understood Einstein's relativity theories: himself and Einstein. But Eddington was wrong, and Einstein, too, for neither admitted that the theories required the existence of black holes. "Implosion Is Compulsory" is the title of one Thorne chapter, and by the time he tells how and why physicists proved it, he has pulled readers into his account as inevitably as if the book itself were a black hole. For it is almost a quantum jump in science writing for laypeople, one that sets a challenge to all interested in the physics of the weird objects by nobly disdaining dumb-down tendencies like eliminating exponents and equations. But words and drawings remain the principal medium through which Thorne propagates the intellectual paths by which physicists attained their understanding of gravity's extremes. Not often can experts descend to popular understanding without being condescending; and Thorne's palpable eagerness to impart the concepts he helped develop as a world-class physicist at Caltech elevates this into a compelling human discovery as well as a revolution in science. Simultaneously demanding and rewarding, this is a landmark book fit to beckon Hawkingphiles. Gilbert Taylor

This book's subtitle explains it all. Virtually all astrophysicists accept the fact that Einstein's theory of general relativity is the best model of physical reality that we have. In other words, it is essentially correct. Yet the model requires the existence of physical phenomena beyond one's wildest imagination. One of the investigators attempting to fathom the depths of the theory, Thorne here describes the people who have done the work and the trails, both false and fruitful, they have followed. He brings us up-to-date on the state of the art in black hole research and the attempts to find definitive proof of their existence. Even with the mathematics removed, his explanations can be pretty heavy going. Nevertheless, the payoff is worth the work. For academic and larger public library science collections.
Harold D. Shane, Baruch Coll., CUNY
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393035050
• ISBN 13: 9780393035056
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 619