THE WARPED SIDE OF OUR UNIVERSE

Art and verse celebrating extreme cosmological phenomena.

Nobel Prize winner Thorne has been a notable theoretical physicist, author, and media scientist a la Carl Sagan for the past 50 years. Award-winning artist Halloran’s work features images that straddle the worlds of art and science. The result of nearly 20 years of collaboration, this is a lavish, vivid book dominated by Halloran’s dazzling, more or less representational paintings, accompanied by Thorne’s commentary, often in free verse. Although it lacks consistent rhyme and meter, free verse remains verbal music. No discerning reader—nor Thorne himself—would claim to find poetic mastery in his text, which might better be described as prose written with irregular margins. Nonetheless, the author’s descriptions serve their purpose, which is not to provide lessons in popular science but to explore spectacularly weird astrophysical phenomena and illustrate how they might affect a person experiencing them. Readers who skim the text in favor of the illustrations will not regret the experience, but they would do well to slow down later in the text, when Thorne converts to prose, offering a fine history of relativistic phenomena since Einstein pointed them out, along with a sketchy explanation of the science. Since Einstein, writes the author, “we physicists have studied the prediction of [his] laws in depth and have gradually learned that the universe has a rich warped side: its big bang birth, black holes, gravitational waves, and possibly wormholes, time machines, cosmic strings and naked singularities, and almost certainly some huge surprises.” Readers seeking a deeper understanding should consult Thorne’s 1994 book, Black Holes & Time Warps, in which he makes a sincere attempt to explain difficult concepts such as warped space and flexible time as well as bizarre cosmological wonders that definitely exist (black holes, gravity waves) and those that may not (worm holes, time travel).

Beautiful art in the service of cutting-edge astrophysics.