Book Reviewed: The Warped Side of Our Universe: An Odyssey through Black Holes, Wormholes, Time Travel, and Gravitational Waves by Kip Thorne

Spacetime storms This is a sort of children's picture story for adults. Author Kip Thorne's verse encourages readers to read and understand impressionistically than they might if he explained in densely formatted prose with math formulas. It is a neat way for someone to describe the gravitational force, the bending of spacetime around matter, work without physics and math. But in this book he illustrates the physics of gravity with verse and paintings. The goal being not the high level of accuracy but to convey the essence of the science to connect with the reality of the cosmos we live in. This book is a representation of artwork featuring more than one hundred paintings. The painting (illustrations) of gravitational effects does not fully take over but helps in some instances to mentally visualize the effects of spacetime bending. Co-author Halloran’s wife, Felicia Halloran is a frequent character in the book that includes her ghostly figure stretched and squeezed through a spinning black hole. The gravitational waves stretch and squeeze spacetime in orthogonal directions as they travel but it also twists space-time. As Felicia falls into a black hole, her feet spin in one direction while her head rotates in the other. In the paintings this motion is represented by spirals which are referred to as vortenses. Some of the illustrations are unappealing. I question the appropriateness of including Felicia Halloran in this work when her contribution to this book is minimal. The Playboy magazine turned down this painting years ago when the authors were considered for a publication in their journal, but fell through because the sex appeal of her image did not meet the bar of the magazine. The stretching and squeezing of spacetime is measured by the gravitational waves reaching the planet Earth from colliding black holes or neutron stars. The measurable difference is small, four one-thousandths of the diameter of a proton, but this is measured by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) at Hanford, Washington State, and Livingston, Louisiana. This is not the first time Kip Thorne has attempted to do an artistic approach to describing the black hole and its gravitational force, the 2014 film “Interstellar” starring Matthew McConaughey focuses on the black hole where NASA pilot Nolan (McConaughey) careens into the black hole (Gargantua). The movie and the book by Kip Thorne about this movie had numerous inaccuracies, for example, the depiction of the black hole is not accurate according to recent discoveries by the James Webb Telescope. In one painting the author shows how a human being is spaghettified right away if the black hole is young. What if the black hole is large and old, wouldn’t that get her spaghettified right away? If not, why not? In the last chapter, one of the paintings depicts the black hole as strings with the title, Quantum gravity, the physics holy gravity. This image is too fictious because quantum gravity may not exist at all. Attempts to reconcile classical gravity with quantum physics fail because the physical reality we observe is only partial and incomplete. The observable universe is only five percent, and the rest (95 percent) of it is made of dark matter (gravity) and dark energy (anti-gravitational energy). The laws of physics fail inside black holes where the light (photons) is completely controlled by the gravity, and the light speed is not constant. All physics formulas that have “c” the speed of light is inapplicable. The reality as we know outside the black holes will be quite different inside. The so called “spaghettification” is at best a guess work, certainly by string theory and quantum mechanics. The Kip Thorne’s part of this work, the physics in a poetic manner is interesting, but I did not think that the paintings would make this book any more interesting. The illustrations that show how gravitational waves are generated are helpful but most of the paintings are not helpful. In the Wi-Fi world there are numerous artistic sketches about the impact of gravitational force. Images of James Web Telescope, NASA images and illustrations, Space.com, and numerous blogs and web-based newspapers are always giving us the best illustrations of the gravitational waves and gravity.