Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy

by Thorne, Kip; Hawking, Stephen W.

• ISBN13: 9780393312768
• ISBN10: 0393312763
• Edition: 00
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1995-01-17
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Summary

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, the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics 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.

Author Biography

Kip S. Thorne is the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology and the author of three other books, including (with John Wheeler and Charles Misner) Gravitation. He is the 1994 recipient of the American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award.

Table of Contents

Foreword	11	(2)
Stephen Hawking
Introduction	13	(4)
Frederick Seitz
Preface	17	(6)
Prologue: A Voyage among the Holes	23	(36)
The Relativity of Space and Time	59	(28)
The Warping of Space and Time	87	(34)
Black Holes Discovered and Rejected	121	(19)
The Mystery of the White Dwarfs	140	(24)
Implosion Is Compulsory	164	(45)
Implosion to What?	209	(49)
The Golden Age	258	(42)
The Search	300	(22)
Serendipity	322	(35)
Ripples of Curvature	357	(40)
What Is Reality?	397	(15)
Black Holes Evaporate	412	(37)
Inside Black Holes	449	(34)
Wormholes and Time Machines	483	(40)
Epilogue	523	(6)
Acknowledgments	529	(2)
Characters	531	(6)
Chronology	537	(10)
Glossary	547	(14)
Notes	561	(24)
Bibliography	585	(16)
People Index	601	(12)
Subject Index	613