Black Holes & Time Warps

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.

Winner of the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science.

Winner of Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science 1994

“"This excellent mixture of history, science, and opinion introduces the reader to general relativity and its consequences, with emphasis on black holes. Little is omitted in discussing the concepts and personalities involved. Thorne's passion for the subject comes through in an accessible writing style rare among research scientists."”

"Deeply satisfying.... [An] engrossing blend of theory, history, and anecdote." -- Wall Street Journal
"Among the best of [its] genre to appear in recent years." -- Malcolm W. Browne - New York Times Book Review
"Readers seeking to go beyond today's headlines will not find a higher authority (or a better storyteller) to discuss the cosmo's most bizarre features…Masterful and intriguing." -- Marcia Bartusiak - Washington Post
"Superb. It is what many other books about their subject ought to have been and were not.... I think the book itself will be a strong force." -- Carl Sagan
"Black Holes & Time Warps reveals the scientific enterprise as very few books do; it richly overflows with history, modern physics, the excitement of discovery, and rare, firsthand scientific styles and temperaments." -- Alan Lightman

Kip Thorne, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at Caltech, is the author of the bestselling books Black Holes and Time Warps and The Science of Interstellar. Thorne was an executive producer for the 2014 film Interstellar. For “bridging the worlds of science and the humanities,” Thorne received Rockefeller University’s Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science. He lives in Pasadena, California. Stephen W. Hawking is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a lifetime member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and in 2009 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States.

Ever since Einstein's general theory of relativity burst upon the world in 1915, some of the most brilliant minds of our century have sought to decipher its mysteries. Some of them-like black holes and time machines-are so unthinkable that Einstein himself rejected them. The renowned physicist Kip S. Thorne has been in the thick of the quest. Now in this compelling account he describes these phenomena and explains what they tell us about the universe.

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