White Holes
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- USD 4.99
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- USD 4.99
Descripción editorial
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.
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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.
