Black Holes and Time Warps
Subtitle: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy
Contributors: Stephen Hawking (Foreword)
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 17/01/1995
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 619
ISBN-13: 9780393312768
Copyright date: 1994
First sentence: Please forgive a father who is so bold as to turn to you, esteemed Herr Professor, in the interest of his son.
Description: Ever since Albert 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 the mysteries bequeathed by that theory, a legacy so unthinkable in some respects that even Einstein himself rejected them.
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.
Table of contents: label: Front Matter
title: PRELIMINARES; label: Foreword
title: Stephen Hawking
pagenum: 11; label: Introduction
title: Frederick Seitz
pagenum: 13; label: Preface
title: What this book is about, and how to read it
pagenum: 17; label: Prologue
title: A Voyage among the Black Holes
pagenum: 23; label: Chapter 1
title: THE RELATIVITY OF SPACE AND TIME
pagenum: 59; title: in which Einstein destroys Newton’s conceptions of space and time as absolute; label: Chapter 2
title: THE WARPING OF SPACE AND TIME
pagenum: 87; title: in which Hermann Minkowski unifies space and time, and Einstein warps them; label: Chapter 3
title: BLACK HOLES DISCOVERED AND REJECTED
pagenum: 121; title: in which Einstein’s laws of warped spacetime predict black holes, and Einstein rejects the prediction; label: Chapter 4
title: THE MYSTERY OF THE WHITE DWARFS
pagenum: 140; title: in which Eddington and Chandrasekhar do battle over the deaths of massive stars, must they shrink when they die, creating black holes or will quantum mechanics save them?; label: Chapter 5
title: IMPLOSION IS COMPULSORY
pagenum: 164; title: in which even the nuclear force, supposedly the strongest of all forces, cannot resist the crush of gravity; label: Chapter 6
title: IMPLOSION TO WHAT?
pagenum: 209; title: in which all the armaments of theoretical physics cannot ward off the conclusion: implosion produces black holes; label: Chapter 7
title: THE GOLDEN AGE
pagenum: 258; title: in which black holes are found to spin and pulsate, store energy and release it, and have no hair; label: Chapter 8
title: THE SEARCH
pagenum: 300; title: in which a method to search for black holes in the sky is proposed and pursued and succeeds (probably); label: Chapter 9
title: SERENDIPITY
pagenum: 322; title: in which astronomers are forced to conclude, without any prior predictions, that black holes inhabit the cores of galaxies (probably); label: Chapter 10
title: RIPPLES OF CURVATURE
pagenum: 357; title: in which gravitational waves carry to Earth encoded symphonies of black holes colliding, and physicists devise instruments to monitor the waves and decipher their symphonies; label: Chapter 11
title: WHAT IS REALITY?
pagenum: 397; title: in which spacetime is curved on Sundays and flat on Mondays, and horizons are made from vacuum on Sundays and charged on Mondays, but Sunday’s experiments agree more or less with Saturday’s; label: Chapter 12
title: BLACK HOLES EVAPORATE
pagenum: 412; title: in which a black-hole horizon is clothed in an atmosphere of radiation and hot particles that slowly evaporate, and the hole shrinks and then explodes; label: Chapter 13
title: INSIDE BLACK HOLES
pagenum: 449; title: in which physicists, wrestling with Einstein’s equations, seek the secret of what is inside a black hole: another universe, a singularity with infinite tidal gravity, the end of space and time, and the birth of quantum foam; label: Chapter 14
title: WORMHOLES AND TIME MACHINES
pagenum: 483; title: in which the author seeks insight into physical laws by asking whether highly advanced civilizations can build wormholes through hyperspace for rapid interstellar travel and machines for traveling backward in time; label: Epilogue
title: EINSTEIN’S LEGACY
pagenum: 523; title: an overview of Einstein’s legacy, past and future, and an update on several central characters; label: Back Matter
title: APÊNDICES; label: Acknowledgments
title: 529; label: Characters
title: 531; label: Chronology
title: 537; label: Glossary
title: 547; label: Notes
title: 561; label: Bibliography
title: 585; label: People Index
title: 601; label: Subject Index
title: 619