In Black Holes and warped spacetime you'll discover a world of science fact stranger than science fiction.

In this masterfully written and brilliantly informed work, Dr. Rhorne, the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech, leads readers through an elegant, always human, tapestry of interlocking themes, answering the great question: what principles control our universe and why do physicists think they know what they know? Features an introduction by Stephen Hawking.

The authoritative story of the headline-making discovery of gravitational waves—by an eminent theoretical astrophysicist and award-winning writer. From the author of How the Universe Got Its Spots and A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, the epic story of the scientific campaign to record the soundtrack of our universe. Black holes are dark. That is their essence. When black holes collide, they will do so unilluminated. Yet the black hole collision is an event more powerful than any since the origin of the universe. The profusion of energy will emanate as waves in the shape of spacetime: gravitational waves. No telescope will ever record the event; instead, the only evidence would be the sound of spacetime ringing. In 1916, Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves, his top priority after he proposed his theory of curved spacetime. One century later, we are recording the first sounds from space, the soundtrack to accompany astronomy’s silent movie. In Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space, Janna Levin recounts the fascinating story of the obsessions, the aspirations, and the trials of the scientists who embarked on an arduous, fifty-year endeavor to capture these elusive waves. An experimental ambition that began as an amusing thought experiment, a mad idea, became the object of fixation for the original architects—Rai Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Ron Drever. Striving to make the ambition a reality, the original three gradually accumulated an international team of hundreds. As this book was written, two massive instruments of remarkably delicate sensitivity were brought to advanced capability. As the book draws to a close, five decades after the experimental ambition began, the team races to intercept a wisp of a sound with two colossal machines, hoping to succeed in time for the centenary of Einstein’s most radical idea. Janna Levin’s absorbing account of the surprises, disappointments, achievements, and risks in this unfolding story offers a portrait of modern science that is unlike anything we’ve seen before.

A journey through the otherworldly science behind Christopher Nolan’s award-winning film, Interstellar, from executive producer and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Kip Thorne. Interstellar, from acclaimed filmmaker Christopher Nolan, takes us on a fantastic voyage far beyond our solar system. Yet in The Science of Interstellar, Kip Thorne, the Nobel prize-winning physicist who assisted Nolan on the scientific aspects of Interstellar, shows us that the movie’s jaw-dropping events and stunning, never-before-attempted visuals are grounded in real science. Thorne shares his experiences working as the science adviser on the film and then moves on to the science itself. In chapters on wormholes, black holes, interstellar travel, and much more, Thorne’s scientific insights—many of them triggered during the actual scripting and shooting of Interstellar—describe the physical laws that govern our universe and the truly astounding phenomena that those laws make possible. Interstellar and all related characters and elements are trademarks of and © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. (s14).

Epic verse and pulsating paintings merge to shed light on time travel, black holes, gravitational waves and the birth of the universe. Nearly two decades in the making, The Warped Side of Our Universe marks the historic collaboration of Nobel Laureate Kip Thorne and award-winning artist Lia Halloran. It brings to vivid life the wonders and wildness of our universe’s “Warped Side”—objects and phenomena made from warped space and time, from colliding black holes and collapsing wormholes to twisting space vortices and down-cascading time. Through poetic verse and otherworldly paintings, the authors explicate Thorne’s and colleagues’ astrophysical discoveries and speculations, with an epic narrative that asks: How did the universe begin? Can anything travel backward in time? And what weird and marvelous phenomena inhabit the Warped Side? Featuring more than 100 paintings, including a soaring Stephen Hawking, this one-of-a-kind volume, with its multiple gatefolds, takes us on an Odyssean voyage into and through the Warped Side of Our Universe.

This primer brilliantly exposes concepts related to special and general relativity for the absolute beginner. It can be used either as an introduction to the subject at a high school level or as a useful compass for undergraduates who want to move the first steps towards Einstein's theories. The book is enhanced throughout with many useful exercises and beautiful illustrations to aid understanding. The topics covered include: Lorentz transformations, length contraction and time dilation, the twin paradox (and other paradoxes), Minkowski spacetime, the Einstein equivalence principle, curvature of space and spacetime, geodesics, parallel transport, Einstein’s equations of general relativity, black holes, wormholes, cosmology, gravitational waves, time machines, and much more.