Black Holes & Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy

Some of the most brilliant minds of our century have been trying to unravel the riddles left by Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity ever since it erupted in 1915. In some ways, Einstein himself rejected the theories that this theory left behind.

If any of these strange occurrences are possible in our universe, which ones? Gravitational waves, which carry symphonic accounts of black hole collisions billions of years ago; singularities, where space and time are so violently warped that time ceases to exist and space becomes a kind of foam; wormholes, short spacewarps connecting regions of the cosmos; and time machines, for traveling backward and forward in time.

In the middle of the hunt for solutions, Kip Thorne has been joined by fellow theorists Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, a group of Russians, and former scientists like Oppenheimer, Wheeler, and Chandrasekhar. Dr. Thorne, the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech, guides readers through an elegant, always human, tapestry of interlocking themes in this masterfully written and brilliantly informed work of scientific history and explanation. Ultimately, he arrives at 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? A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking is among the best-selling books in publishing history. For those who found that book difficult, this one is even more mentally taxing, although at a slower pace, and it has the fascinating bonus of a deep historical and human component.