Black Holes And Time Warps [Paperback]

We read about the life story of Einstein, and how he worked hard and long hours in between babysitting his children so as to come up with his masterpieces on relativity. We then read about Chandrasekhar, the young student from India, who with nothing more than his own brain and a crude mechanical calculator achieved what is perhaps one of the greatest theoretical discoveries of the 20th centuries: black holes. It would be years before astronomers concur and document the existence of these beasts, years in which Chandrasekhar had to suffer rejection and alienation from his peers in the scientific community. We read about the wonderful experiments physicists set up to understand the world: from massive arrays of radio telescopes for listening to the furthest reaches of the universe, to cosmic ray detectors to measure the minute remnants of supernova explosions. We read about the atomic and H-bombs, about Oppenheimer and his own personal feelings about his creation. Here, the attitude of the author - himself a leading scientist and contributor to human knowledge - is far from passive acceptance of all that science brings. He understands perhaps more than anyone else that science can be applied for evil purposes as well as beneficial purposes, and he does not shy away from discussing these ethical dilemmas he and his peers had to confront at some points in their lives.

Coming closer towards the end of the 20th century, Thorne discusses the complexities black hole research has led us into: apparent paradoxes and strange objects defying understanding - "singularities" in scientific lingo. We read eagerly about the competition between leading scientists such as Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose to expand our limits of knowledge on black holes. We read also about the role of the cold war in advancing - or suppressing - scientific knowledge.

This wonderful book is augmented by an enormous number of simple illustrations explaining the concepts discussed, as well as photographs of the various people involved in this unending quest for knowledge. The book also boasts of a useful glossary at the end, as well as a timeline, a bibliography, a good set of notes, and a people as well as a subject index. It is definitely a book worth reading, one of the few books on science that admit that science is more than just numbers, but is also about people and is an integral part of the human story. I give it a 4 because I thought the book is too long, and tends to get wordy at times. A concise edition would be a useful contribution. The bibliography also suffers from bloatedness - it is so bulky and with no comments such that the interested reader will have difficulty deciding what to read next.

There is no question that Thorne writes well and the book has been carefully edited. Moreover, his personal anecdotes and portraits of many famous physicists are very interesting. You get the impression that Thorne was very sociable and popular with his peers. This plus the fact that he had powerful mentors and supporters probably explains why he has had such a succeesful career despite his apparent lack of any particular achievements let alone breakthroughs.

The General Theory of Relativity was formulated in 1915. Despite its reputation for being very difficult, it is actually fairly easy to understand provided that you have an undergraduate education in physics and mathematics. The easiest technical book to read is D.F. Lawdens's "Introduction to Tensor Calculus, Relativity and Cosmology". The theory of black holes was deduced from Einstein's field equation by Schwarzschild in 1916.

So here we have a theory that is brilliant and as far as we know true. But it is after all nearly 90 years old and most of the important consequences were worked out in the first few years. So what have people like Thorne done with it since? The answer I am afraid is much less that the general public appears to believe.

Books like this contain a lot of jazzy stuff about time-travel and similar exotica. But Thorne is not as bad as Hawking and others who have also made careers of thrilling the public with popularizations of arcane theories that have nothing to do with physics since they can never be tested.

Einstein was a true genius who made a real breakthrough in our understanding of the universe. Unfortunately there are no more Einsteins today, only academic poseurs who bask in his reflected glory. Physics today is a science in decline; its widely touted "discoveries" often have little relation to the real world. Unfortunately, an increasingly scientifically illiterate public can no longer tell the difference between real physics and largely irrelevant speculations such as are on display in this book.