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"Ever since Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity burst upon the world in 1915 some of the most brilliant minds of our century have sought to decipher the mysteries bequeathed by that theory, a legacy so unthinkable in some respects that even Einstein himself rejected them." "Which of these bizarre phenomena, if any, can really exist in our universe? Black holes, down which anything can fall but from which nothing can return; wormholes, short spacewarps connecting regions of the cosmos; singularities, where space and time are so violently warped that time ceases to exist and space becomes a kind of foam; gravitational waves, which carry symphonic accounts of collisions of black holes billions of years ago; and time machines, for traveling backward and forward in time." "Kip Thorne, along with fellow theorists Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, a cadre of Russians, and earlier scientists such as Oppenheimer, Wheeler and Chandrasekhar, has been in the thick of the quest to secure answers. In this masterfully written and brilliantly informed work of scientific history and explanation, Dr. Thorne, the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech, leads his readers through an elegant, always human, tapestry of interlocking themes, coming finally to a uniquely informed answer to the great question: what principles control our universe and why do physicists think they know the things they think they know?" "Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time has been one of the greatest best-sellers in publishing history. Anyone who struggled with that book will find here a more slowly paced but equally mind-stretching experience, with the added fascination of a rich historical and human component."--Jacket.… (more)
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Black Holes and Time Warps is more technical than Clifford Will's "Was Einstein Right?", and more personal. Thorne does not shy away from presenting fairly solid physics, and some readers may struggle with concepts such as Finkelstein’s reference frame for a star collapsing to a black hole, in which observers near the star are in free fall. But even those who skim over such details cannot help but come away with a greater understanding of black hole dynamics, and readers who have some grounding in physics will find their understanding consolidated and enhanced. Thorne has devoted much of the latter part of his career to experimental techniques for detecting gravitational waves, and the theoretical possibility of wormholes and time machines, and gives a good introduction to both topics. Even if – like me – you find it a little hard to swallow the idea of holding a wormhole open by stringing together just the right amount of exotic matter with a negative energy density, this line of research is invaluable for probing the limits of just what does happen when spacetime curvature becomes extreme.
Many readers will enjoy the personal glimpses Thorne offers of his own research efforts, and of colleagues such as Wheeler (to whom the book is dedicated), Chandrasekhar, Hawking, Penrose, and their Russian counterparts such as Vladimir Braginsky, Lev Landau, Igor Novikov, and Yakov Zel’dovich. Thorne describes his own stunned reaction on first hearing Novikov lecture at a 1965 conference, and realising the breadth and power of what was happening in Cold War Russia. He subsequently developed strong collaborative links with Novikov and other Soviet physicists, and draws some interesting contrasts between the US and USSR during this period.
Having said all this, I was disappointed by a lot of the book and remain extremely unconvinced by the final chapters.
Like every pop GR
* GR in no way requires this assumption of spacetime
* GR in no way generates solutions with this property
* The simplest assumption is that it doesn't exist and finally
* If it did exist, the observational properties would be blah blah blah.
An easy read even if science wasn't your favorite subject.
2)An excellent bibliography, and 3) very well done illustrations. I have lost count
I watched the first images of that black hole in 2019 (*) in awe wondering how many cosmic phenomena are there yet to discover, but then I grew up in the shadow of the moon
Give me an unassuming Einstein who, for all his many human failings, strove through hard work he didn’t need to advertise every day, to raise all our understanding so we could all get something out of it and not just feel small and stupid next to him.
NB: I can't speak for anyone else's sense of wonder in relation to Sagittarius A*'s image, but I found it fascinating. I know there is something in the middle, and I have a fairly good grasp of what it is. That's a pretty bloody astonishing thing. To see an actual image of it, with the light cutting off at the event horizon, and that fucking whopping monster of a thing being flat out invisible in the middle of that firestorm. If you aren't amazed by it, you probably haven't got a clue what it represents. Although it is pretty “crappy” image quality (this image is a result of using data from eight radio telescopes sited on Earth and the black hole is 55m light years away from Earth, so we cannot really complain about “crappy” images). It'd look a lot more impressive from one light year away. If you could survive, which you probably couldn't.