The Warped Side of Our Universe: An Odyssey through Black Holes, Wormholes, Time Travel, and Gravitational Waves

Nobel Prize–winning physicist Thorne (The Science of Interstellar) joins with Halloran, the art department chair at Chapman University, for an imaginative and gorgeously illustrated tour of some of the universe’s oddest features. Thorne’s spare yet poetic descriptions of wormholes, gravitational waves, and warped spacetime are accompanied by Halloran’s paintings of the phenomena. Halloran depicts, for instance, what it would look like if a human fell feet-first into a black hole, showing that their feet would twist around, spinning at a faster rate than their head, before their entire body was strung out “from head to foot” (the visuals are thankfully somewhat abstract). Other depictions are of more complex events, such as the ways that spacetime distorts around merging black holes. The decision to style the text like verse can sometimes make such mind-bending science difficult to parse (“The newly minted ring/ expanding at the speed of light/ generated tendices/ reversed from those that came before/ squeezing around the ring’s long loop/ stretching around the ring’s short loop”). Still, the stylish images are a treat, and a concluding section of straightforward prose revisiting the science behind the occurrences depicted by Halloran clarifies the oblique verse. It adds up to a clever if at times perplexing addition to the shelf on astrophysics. Illus. (Oct.)