Customer Reviews

Unveiling the Edge of Time: Black Holes, White Holes, Worm Holes

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This is my all time favorite popular book written by a real physicist. In my opinion, it's better than Hawking's "Brief History of Time" because it not only explains the pretty well known areas of physics (black holes and such), but goes beyond this into such abstract ideas as wormholes and several interesting ways that nature might just allow time travel. It plays with your imagination the whole way through.

Written for the "popular audience", this book has no doubt inspired many who have read it to further their studies in science or even to specialize in gravitational physics. The book is easy to follow, and the author injects a lot of history, making the book even more interesting. Examples of this include the Cavendish torsion-balance experiments, the 1670 measurement of the speed of light, and the discussions in 1796 of "dark-stars". And, considering there is no mathematics used in the book, the author does a good job of explaining curvature of spacetime and geodesics. The physics of neutron stars, pulsars, and white dwarfs, is also given adequate explanation, and the author emphasizes the use of computers in determining their dynamics. Penrose diagrams are used effectively to illustrate the properties of black holes, a fairly lengthy discussion, the result of which is to make what use to be the playful fantasies of science fiction writers become accepted science. Wormhole engineering and time machine constructions are unshamedly expounded upon, with careful caution by the author that such ideas are not yet practical......not yet.

This is a very informative and interesting book. It is fun to read and you can learn alot from it. I would definitely suggest buying it.