The Warped Side of Our Universe
An Odyssey through Black Holes, Wormholes, Time Travel, and Gravitational Waves
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $26.99
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- $26.99
Publisher Description
Epic verse and pulsating paintings merge to shed light on time travel, black holes, gravitational waves and the birth of the universe.
Nearly two decades in the making, The Warped Side of Our Universe marks the historic collaboration of Nobel Laureate Kip Thorne and award-winning artist Lia Halloran. It brings to vivid life the wonders and wildness of our universe’s “Warped Side”—objects and phenomena made from warped space and time, from colliding black holes and collapsing wormholes to twisting space vortices and down-cascading time. Through poetic verse and otherworldly paintings, the authors explicate Thorne’s and colleagues’ astrophysical discoveries and speculations, with an epic narrative that asks: How did the universe begin? Can anything travel backward in time? And what weird and marvelous phenomena inhabit the Warped Side? Featuring more than 100 paintings, including a soaring Stephen Hawking, this one-of-a-kind volume, with its multiple gatefolds, takes us on an Odyssean voyage into and through the Warped Side of Our Universe.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nobel Prize–winning physicist Thorne (The Science of Interstellar) joins with Halloran, the art department chair at Chapman University, for an imaginative and gorgeously illustrated tour of some of the universe's oddest features. Thorne's spare yet poetic descriptions of wormholes, gravitational waves, and warped spacetime are accompanied by Halloran's paintings of the phenomena. Halloran depicts, for instance, what it would look like if a human fell feet-first into a black hole, showing that their feet would twist around, spinning at a faster rate than their head, before their entire body was strung out "from head to foot" (the visuals are thankfully somewhat abstract). Other depictions are of more complex events, such as the ways that spacetime distorts around merging black holes. The decision to style the text like verse can sometimes make such mind-bending science difficult to parse ("The newly minted ring/ expanding at the speed of light/ generated tendices/ reversed from those that came before/ squeezing around the ring's long loop/ stretching around the ring's short loop"). Still, the stylish images are a treat, and a concluding section of straightforward prose revisiting the science behind the occurrences depicted by Halloran clarifies the oblique verse. It adds up to a clever if at times perplexing addition to the shelf on astrophysics. Illus.
