BLACK HOLES AND TIME WARPS; EINSTEIN'S OUTRAGEOUS LEGACY. The Commonwealth Fund Book Program series.

Thorne, Kip [Kip Stephen Thorne]. Robert L. Livingston, Jr. (past owner).

ISBN 10: 0393035050 / ISBN 13: 9780393035056

Published by New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994., 1994

Second printing (per publisher's number line upon copyright page) INSCRIBED, DATED, AND SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR. [2], 619 pages. Hardcover: H 24cm x L 16cm. No dust jacket (i.e. lacking). Blue cloth spine bumped at ends with small stain near head; spine's silver stamping still bright; blue boards; slender abrasion at rear board's bottom edge. Author's four-line ink inscription "To Bob Livingston - | We all know that LIGO would not | be where it is today without you. | Thank you! Kip S Thorne 28 June 1995" at top of title page. Top fore-edge corner of pages 377-378 creased from past fold-down (page 378 being the initiation of text section regarding LIGO, i.e. the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory); interior pages are otherwise clean. Binding remains fairly crisp. Laid-in at the front endpapers is a folded sheet of United States Representative Robert L. Livingston's congressional office stationery further evidencing the book's provenance. Republican Bob Livingston served as U.S. Representative from Louisiana's 1st District from 1977 to 1999 and chaired the House Appropriations Committee from 1995 to 1999 as well as being House Speaker-designate before his resignation from office. Kip Thorne, Ronald Drever, Rainer Weiss co-founded the LIGO Project in 1984 with an initial research and development proposal achieving funding in 1988. However, technical and organizational efforts stalled through the early 1990s with only political lobbying succeeding in keeping the project alive until the National Science Foundation, impressed with a heavily revised proposal, funded LIGO in 1994 at which point it became largest single investment in NSF history. Construction of the project's two gravitational wave detector sites began in Hanford, Washington in 1994 and in Livingston, Louisiana (a town named in honor of Edward Livingston, an ancestor of inscribee Congressman Livingston) in 1995, the latter being the same year as Thorne's inscription. In 2017 Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish, and Kip Thorne were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work at the LIGO laboratories with the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences specifically citing their "decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves." Please note that this book has an approximate shipping weight of 3.5 pounds (1.58 kg) and may require additional postage for any postal class other than domestic Media Mail. ISBN 0393035050. Seller Inventory # CVA-00159

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

Bibliographic Details

Title: BLACK HOLES AND TIME WARPS; EINSTEIN'S ...
Publisher: New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994.
Publication Date: 1994
Binding: Hardcover
Signed: Signed by Author(s)