White Holes
Inside the Horizon
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
A BOOK OF THE YEAR ACCORDING TO THE FINANCIAL TIMES * SUNDAY TELEGRAPH * NEW STATESMAN * NEW SCIENTIST
'A miniature masterpiece by one of the most entertaining scientists on the planet' Evening Standard
‘Everyone’s talking about White Holes’ Daily Mail
A mesmerizing trip to the strange new world of white holes, from Carlo Rovelli, the bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
Let us journey into the heart of a black hole. Let us slip beyond its boundary, the horizon, and tumble - on and on - down this crack in the universe. As we plunge, we'll see geometry fold, we'll feel the equations draw tight around us. Eventually, we'll pass it: the remains of a star, deep and dense and falling further far. And then - the bottom. Where time and space end, and the white hole is born . . .
With lightness and magic, here Carlo Rovelli traces the ongoing adventure of his own cutting-edge research, of the uncertainty and joy of going where we've not yet been. Guiding us to the edge of theory and experiment, he invites us to go beyond, to experience the fever and the disquiet of science. Here is the extraordinary life of a white hole.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This mind-bending outing by physicist Rovelli (Anaximander) explores the possibility of the existence of white holes, the hypothesized inverse of black holes. He explains that black holes were first proposed as a consequence of Einstein's equations on general relativity, but because the equations "do not specify a direction for time," it's possible to run them with "the sign of the time variable flipped," meaning that there may a point at which a black hole "rebounds and retraces its previous route in time, like a basketball bouncing." After a black hole passes such a point, it becomes a white hole. If humans were able to survive inside a black hole, Rovelli suggests, they could reach the bottom and then "cross through and emerge into a white hole where time is reversed," spending no more than a few seconds inside but emerging billions of years later due to the dilation of time. Rovelli does a solid job of making the underlying science accessible, even if some of the finer points may go over general readers' heads, such as his explanation of why "you can only enter a black hole, and you can only exit a white hole." Still, those with a background in physics will be sucked in. Photos.
