In Search of the Edge of Time

The phenomena now known as black holes were described as early as 1783 and dismissed as idle speculation - invisible stars sounded just too implausible to be taken seriously. It was only with the development of radio astronomy, relativity theory and mathematical models of warped spacetime that their true significance became clear. Today, writes John Gribbin, 'virtually all astrophysicists regard black holes as a natural feature of our Universe'. Many believe they can function as tunnels leading to other times and other places and that they contain the key to the Big Bang; Stephen Hawking sees them as 'wormholes' linking mother and baby universes. Details of such theories are set out in this enthralling book, a guided tour through a still emerging cosmos of neutron and X-ray stars, white dwarfs, quasars and pulsars.

John Gribbin trained as an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge before becoming a full-time science writer. His many books include a number of titles in the In Search of . . . series, and his most recent books are The Search for Superstrings, Symmetry, and the Theory of Everything; The Case of the Missing Neutrinos: And Other Curious Phenomena of the Universe; and Richard Feynman: A Life in Science (with Mary Gribbin). He is currently a visiting Fellow in Astronomy at the University of Sussex, England.