Kip Thorne Black Holes And Time Warps.pdf
Kayleigh Telega
I first heard the name Kip Thorne during my third year working on an undergraduate degree in physics, when my friend Dan gave me a beat-up paperback copy of Thorne's book, "Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy." Neither Dan nor I can recall if it was intended as a gift or just a loan, but I still have it; it's sitting on my desk, not so much for technical reference but as a reminder of why I do what I do.
When Dan gave me the book we were both neck-deep in thermodynamics, stellar spectra, Brownian motion and all the things we had to cram into our heads to earn our degrees. It was a tough year, and a tough following year, and I think even then I had the sneaking suspicion that research wasn't where I belonged. I was feeling out of my place (and out of my league) among many of my peers, and I feared science would inevitably slip out of my life. [Black Holes and Time Warps: A Conversation with Kip Thorne]
"Black Holes and Time Warps" is a book about the history and science of black holes. It dives into what scientists know about power of gravity, the nature of space-time and the possibility of worm holes; it touches on Einstein's theory of special relativity and some particle physics, among other things. There's not a lot of math in the book, but it's still heavy on the science and it is not what I would describe as a "light read." I think it presents a fantastically in-depth but manageable answer to the question "What is a black hole?"
Leading the reader on this awesome journey is theoretical astrophysicist Kip Thorne, who during his career was considered a world authority on black holes and other strange topics in astrophysics. I can't imagine having a better teacher on this subject than Thorne. He's a master of the scientific minutia and thoughtful about the big picture. I always got the impression that while he clearly knew more about black holes than I ever would, we shared the same fundamental curiosity about the universe, and on that level we could be equals.
And of course, there's the awesome fact that Thorne loves weird science. For example, he published scientific papers on the physical possibility of time travel, which wasn't always considered a serious avenue of investigation. (By the way: Backward time travel is probably impossible, and things are still murky when it comes to forward time travel, but scientists know for sure that time moves differently for different observers, so in that sense we are all traveling in time relative to each other).
Thorne's book was a breath of fresh air for me. There's such a hearty amount of science that I felt satiated but not overwhelmed. But what also set this book apart was that Thorne takes the reader down the path of discovery by talking about the people who made these discoveries, the challenges they faced, and their scientific process. It's the story of science, and it's a story I'm still in love with. ['Interstellar' Science: Is Wormhole Travel Possible?]
Thorne also showed me (and, I hope, many people) that writing for a general, non-scientific audience was not beneath one of the greatest astrophysicists in the world. There is an idea held by some people in the physics community that a scientist who engages with the public produces inferior science (and data points like Thorne, Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Carl Sagan, Lisa Randall, Sean Carroll and the many, many other highly talented scientists engaging the public in new and exciting ways, are apparently not enough to eliminate this notion). It's an idea that is not only harmful to those who would like to engage the public, but to the entire community, for many reasons. Thorne set the example that engaging the public is a worthwhile activity for a scientist.
I didn't know it at the time, but this book was planting the idea in my mind that telling stories like this one was exactly what I wanted to do. By the time graduation rolled around, I'd found science writing and was relieved and excited to know that science was going to be a part of my life after all.
Last year, for the 20th anniversary of "Black Holes and Time Warps," (and not quite a decade after Dan handed me that paper tome), I had the opportunity to interview Thorne about the book. It took some personal restraint not to completely nerd-out on him.
Looking back at the way Thorne's book affected me, this intention is so incredibly clear. I didn't end up becoming a scientist, but in part, because of this book, I kept science in my life. There will always be young people who need their love of science awakened. There need to be scientists from this generation who take up the torch that Gamow and Thorne carried.
"It's partly an issue of trying to generate interest among young people in science, so that at least some of the most brilliant young people still turn to science, when they might otherwise go into the financial world, for example.
"It's also a deep feeling that it's terribly important for the general public to understand science, to understand not necessarily the details of science and how black holes work, but rather the scientific method; the difference between well-established scientific fact, which includes climate change and evolution, and things which are speculative. And an appreciation for the power of science to deal with the problems that society faces, such as climate change, such as the Ebola virus and other viruses which evolve over time and you have to deal with the science of evolution in order to deal with them in the long haul.
"We have huge problems that face the human race, particularly when you think in time scales of decades and centuries. And science really is an extremely powerful force for solving them. And I would hope that the books that I've written may have some role in educating the public about the power of science for dealing with these kinds of things."
Black Holes & Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy is a 1994 popular science book by physicist Kip Thorne. It provides an illustrated overview of the history and development of black hole theory, from its roots in Newtonian mechanics until the early 1990s.[1]
Proceeding separately from theoretical research into relativity, and with the refinement of radio astronomy, astrophysics began to produce unusual observations of extremely intense radio sources, which were apparently located outside of the Milky Way. In consultation with theoretical physicists, it became apparent that the only sensible explanation for these sources were extremely large black holes residing in the cores of galaxies, producing intense radiation as they fed and, in the case of quasars, blasting out incredibly powerful jets of material in opposite directions, heating the surrounding galactic gas until it glowed in radio frequencies.[1]
Thorne describes the much less mature search for gravitational waves, phenomena predicted to result from supernovae and black hole collisions, but as yet unobserved in 1993 (and, indeed, not directly observed until 2015, a discovery that led to Thorne being awarded a share of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics).[2]
Toward the end of the text, Thorne deals with the much more speculative question of the nature of the core of a black hole; the so-called gravitational singularity predicted by Einstein's field equations. By introducing quantum behavior to curved spacetime, several physicists have suggested that black holes do not possess a true mathematical singularity, but rather a region of chaotic space, in which time does not exist. The behavior of this space and the material which approaches it are not well understood, with a complete marriage of relativity and quantum physics yet to be achieved. In the final chapter, Thorne delves into even more speculative matters relating to black hole physics, including the existence and nature of wormholes and time machines.[1]
The book features a foreword by Stephen Hawking and an introduction by Frederick Seitz. In addition to the main text, the book provides biographical summaries of the major scientists in the text, a chronology of key events in the history of black hole physics, a glossary of technical terms, twenty-three pages of notes, a bibliography, and alphabetical indices of subjects and people referred to in the text.[1]
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, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus 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.
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to announce Lia Halloran: Warped Side, a new series of paintings exploring the curiosities of warped space-time, on view from November 4 through December 22, 2023. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, November 4, from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m.
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