White Holes
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4.4 • 27 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A mesmerizing trip to the strange world of white holes from the bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and The Order of Time
Let us journey, with beloved physicist Carlo Rovelli, into the heart of a black hole. We slip beyond its horizon and tumble down this crack in the universe. As we plunge, we see geometry fold. Time and space pull and stretch. And finally, at the black hole’s core, space and time dissolve, and a white hole is born.
Rovelli has dedicated his career to uniting the time-warping ideas of general relativity and the perplexing uncertainties of quantum mechanics. In White Holes, he reveals the mind of a scientist at work. He traces the ongoing adventure of his own cutting-edge research, investigating whether all black holes could eventually turn into white holes, equally compact objects in which the arrow of time is reversed.
Rovelli writes just as compellingly about the work of a scientist as he does the marvels of the universe. He shares the fear, uncertainty, and frequent disappointment of exploring hypotheses and unknown worlds, and the delight of chasing new ideas to unexpected conclusions. Guiding us beyond the horizon, he invites us to experience the fever and the disquiet of science—and the strange and startling life of a white hole.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
When celebrated Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli, author of the eye-opening Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, invites you to accompany him into a massive cosmological phenomenon, how can you refuse? With the vision of a scientific genius and the soul of a poet, Rovelli walks us through the concept of white holes, the cutting-edge theory that deep inside the unfathomable gravity of a black hole, there’s basically a black hole in reverse—into which nothing can enter. The concepts involved are about as heady as you can get, but as usual, Rovelli’s playful prose makes them feel lighter than air, whether he’s touching on the theory of relativity or digging into quantum physics. As he’s done in the past, Rovelli makes us feel the excitement of scientific discovery and the dangerous thrill of pushing past the limits of human knowledge. It all adds up to the most exciting science lesson you’ll ever have.
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.
Customer Reviews
Excellent subject matter, needs proofreading
This book is currently the best resources for getting a basic understanding of what white holes are and how they theoretically work. The peppered in references to Dante are also interesting.
One issue with the book is frequent typos, the most noticeable being capitalization randomly stopping for a few paragraphs. It doesn’t detract much, but it’s weird.