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Watch out for some inconsistency in this book however, as Thorne sometimes gets into too much sentimental detail about the scientists' social lives (including his own), while the middle of the book sags as it digresses into the mechanical specs of radio telescopes and gravitational wave detectors. Also, beware of Thorne's suspiciously enthusiastic endorsements of gravitational wave research in chapter 10, as this is his own field of research, and I suspect he's trying to promote the need for funding. There's also a little intellectual arrogance here, as several times Thorne proclaims that the laws of quantum mechanics, as they are currently understood (which isn't much), are "indisputable" or "incontrovertible." Scientists used to say the same thing about Newton's laws until they were weakened by Einstein. Then the theories of Einstein (worshipped by every physicist in this book) were weakened by quantum mechanics. You never know, the knowledge presented in this book may someday be overthrown as well. But in the meantime, Thorne does a great job of explaining it to those of us who are interested but don't have multiple PhD's.
Professor Thorne wonderfully combined the history development of Black Holes, along with enough ancedotes to satisfy science seekers. There are tons of diagrams, background stories, and enough to keep the reader going.
However, it may be too complex of a book for the layman. It is very hardcore, and may be a little slow for casual readers, with enough details to confuse a reader the first time through.
The book also demonstrates the futuristic predictions and applications of Black Holes, from being a power plant, to wormholes in space. It was easily understood.
Bottom Line: If you're into physics, or have a lot of time, go out and buy this book, because it's worth every penny. This gives a good background history on the slow progress of Black Holes, and includes ancedotes from Hawkings to Landau. It is highly recommended if you want to learn more than just "What is a Black Hole?" As others have suggested, "Gravitation" by Thorne, Wheeler and Misner would be a more complex book if you have the background for it.
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Space prohibits a thorough review, so I will instead highlight the parts of the book that I found particularly exceptional: 1. The example of how coordinate singularities arise: the "cells of the egg crate" squashed to zero volume. 2. The beautiful illustration of the Roll-Krotkov-Dicke experiment. 3. The "physics demo" of a local inertial frame of reference (it is not very difficult to construct this demonstration for actual use in a classroom). 4. The presentation of a 2-form as a honeycomb of tubes with a sense of circulation. Such an explanation is lacking in the general mathematical literature. 5. The flying ring demonstration illustrating Faraday stresses. This demonstration is done very often in physics classes, and is simple to set up. 6. The excellent discussion (with illustrations) of the covariant derivative and the Schild ladder construction. 7. The presentation of parallel transport around a closed curve. 8. The treatment of Riemann normal coordinates. These are typically presented in a purely formal way in most texts on general relativity, ignoring their status as providing a local inertial frame in curved spacetime. 9. The (philosophical) discussion on the principal of general covariance in the context of Newtonian gravity in tensorial form. 10. The illustration, with accompanying discussion, on a situation where two events can be connected by more than one geodesic. The authors mention the relation of this example to the Morse theory of critical points. 11. The discussion of the Bianchi identities and the topological result on the boundary of a boundary being empty. 12. The discussion on the gravity gradiometer. 13. The exceptional discussion on six routes to the Einstein field equation. 14. The variational principle and the initial value problem in the Einstein equation. 15. The connection between the Gauss-Weingarten equations and extrinsic curvature. 16. The ADm formulation of the dynamics of geometry. 17. The discussion on Mach's principle. 18. The radial oscillations of a Newtonian star. 19. The Hamilton-Jacobi description of motion and its employment in analyzing the central force problem. 20. The effect of the value of the cosmological constant on cosmological models and evolution of the universe. 21. The cosmological redshift and its explanation via the expansion of the universe. 22. The mathematics of the Mixmaster cosmology. 23. The dynamics of the Schwarzschild geometry. 24. The discussion on the global properties of spacetime and singularity theorems. 25. The short biographies of Hawking and Penrose. 26. The quadrupole nature of gravitational radiation. 27. The experimental justification of general relativity, particularly the description of Pound-Rebka experiment on the gravitational redshift.
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Hawking and Thorne, grasp it: Time-travel is physically IMPOSSIBLE.
The five essays in The Future of Spacetime were first presented as talks for a celebration of the 60th birthday of Kip Thorne, a leading theoretical physicist. Three of them, plus a brief introduction by physicist Richard Price, deal with relativity, and especially with the possibility and implications of "closed timelike curves" in spacetime--time travel for short. In addition, Tim Ferris writes insightfully about why it is so important for scientists and science writers to do a better job of informing people about scientific theories and discoveries, but even more importantly clueing them in about how science works. He points out that it may take 1,000 years for a concept to penetrate to the core of society. Since modern science is at best 500 years old, there's lots left to be accomplished. Alan Lightman, who is both a physicist and a novelist, beautifully describes the creative process that lies at the heart of both science and creative writing. Scientists and novelists, he argues, are simply seeking different kinds of truths.
The three physics essays are gems. Each sheds at least some light on the nature of spacetime, on the possibility (or impossibility, or improbability) of time machines and time travel, and on intimately related issues such as causality and free will. Novikov, for example, concludes that the future can influence the past, but not in such a way as to erase or change an event that has already happened. Hawking argues that time travel is happening all the time at the quantum level, but that nature would protect against an attempt to use a time machine to send a macroscopic object, such as a human being, back in time. I was particularly impressed by Kip Thorne's essay, in which he makes a series of predictions concerning what physicists and cosmologists will discover in the next thirty years. He explains the importance of the gravity-wave detectors that are now starting to come on line. They promise to let us read the gravitational signals of such primordal events as the collision of black holes and even the big bang itself. It is as fascinating to get to piggyback on how these great minds think as it is to read their conclusions.
In short, The Future of Spacetime is a bit of a salad, but an extremely delicious and satisfying one.
Robert E. Adler, author of Science Firsts: From the Creation of Science to the Science of Creation (Wiley & Sons, 2002).
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