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

by Kip S. Thorne

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 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.

Genres: Science, Physics, Poetry, Art, Nonfiction, Astronomy

240 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 31, 2023

About the author

Kip Stephen Thorne is an American theoretical physicist and writer known for his contributions in gravitational physics and astrophysics. Along with Rainer Weiss and Barry C. Barish, he was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves.
A longtime friend and colleague of Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan, he was the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) until 2009 and speaks of the astrophysical implications of the general theory of relativity. He continues to do scientific research and scientific consulting, most notably for the Christopher Nolan film Interstellar.

Reviews

[Cherisa B · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is literally a beautiful book, a large hardback with heavy paper that fosters the loveliness of the artwork and the prose that imparts the beauty in the science of the topic.

It's figuratively also beautiful because it makes perceptible to laymen's eyes the glories of our universe hidden to all but the physicists and mathematicians who delve its quantum and warped depths.

Wonderfully done. A real pleasure to read, hold, and linger over.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very artistic book, with Nobel physicist Kip Thorne talking about Big Bang Singularity, Cosmic Strings, Time Warps, Geometrodynamical Storms, Gravitational Waves, Interferometry, LIGO/LISA, Naked Singularity, Quantum Foam, Quantum Gravity Spaghettification, Time Machines, Vacuum Fluctuations, Vortex of Twisting Space, Warped Universes and Wormholes. Whew!

While every page contains swirling art, and the text is spaced on the page like verse, you had better know what most of those terms I just wrote already mean.

Author Kip Thorne was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Rainer Weiss and Barry C. Barish "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves".

LIGO is the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory that is an L-shaped set of long tunnels that can detect the minute stretching and squeezing of space caused by gravitational waves produced by colliding black holes.

The Good:
- Some very strong physics topics are written with a ‘friendly’ tone.
- I really like all the swirling art. It looks like instead of using high-tech computer printouts with x,y,z axis and modeling, a beautiful use of blues and blacks convey the exact text written on the page beside it with perfect matching accuracy.
- There are even some fold-out pages that go double-size for images that deserve the expanded view.
- The sections in this book reflect the hottest/latest topics in Astrophysics:
. . . Black Holes
. . . Wormholes and Time Machines
. . . Geometrodynamics: Warped Spacetime in a Storm and Gravitational Waves
. . . Probing the Warped Side with Gravity Waves (my favorite)
. . . . . . First Vignette: Neutron Stars Collide

This brutal collision
fused the stars
producing gold and platinum
- enough to fill hundreds of Earths –
and creating a brilliant fireball
that shone with Electromagnetic Waves
of every possible form
radio waves and microwaves
infrared and light
ultraviolet and X-rays
gamma rays and even more.

. . . . . . Second Vignette: A Black Hole Spaghettifies a Star

The tendices bound to the hole
stretch the star along their lengths
like a corset pinch its sides.
As the star and the hole draw near
the stretching and pinching intensify
- and spaghettify the star!

. . . . . . Third Vignette: LISA: The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna

To feel these waves and decode them,
my physicist friends are planning
spacecraft orbiting ‘round the Sun
linked by million-kilometer-long
infrared laser beams:
LISA.
The Laser Interferometer
Space Antenna.

. . . . . . Fourth Vignette: Mapping Black Holes with LISA

Vortices and tendices entwined,
together encoding a portrait of
the star’s outlandish orbit
and a map of the hole’s full warped spacetime

. . . . . . Fifth Vignette: Naked Singularities

All that is to know about
the naked singularity
(except its quantum gravity core)
is encoded in the gravity waves
- Not easy to extract, but
for LISA an awesome quest.

. . . . . . Sixth Vignette: The Big-Bang Birth of Our Universe

Portions of the essence of
the big-bang singularity
may survive today
as fossils deep encoded in
Primordial Gravity Waves.

. . . . . . Seventh Vignette: Cosmic Strings

These cosmic strings
- if they did form –
inevitably collided,
creating sharp cusps
at their points of collision,
cusps that then zoomed
along the strings
producing gravity waves.

The not-so-Good
- That friendly writing tone really glosses over the depth truly needed to understand what is being talked about. This is not so good for any newbies to astrophysics.

- Ah – there is an Epilogue of multiple pages that explain “How we know”. These pages218-230 read like a mini-astrophysics book that has paragraphs that explain every 10 or so pages of the book. I needed this explanation earlier in the book during those particular 10 pages. But then the book would lose the verse/artsy layout. Can’t win!

- The book is a bit hard on your/my eyes to read for a couple of reasons:
… The text is in a small San-Serif font and usually on an artistic background.
… Written in poetic broken line verse-structure, it still reads more like scientific nonfiction that reminds me almost of how Carlo Rovelli writes.

A Chronology in the back of the book starts with the collision of the two black holes (1.3 billion years ago) that sent gravity waves outward. The dates then focus on all the particulars of gravity wave research, specifically culminating with the work Kip Thorne did.

So this Chronology is the third time in this book re-hashing the ~same material:
1. The Verses in the book
2. The Epilogue “How We Know”
3. The detailed paragraph formatted Chronology

I obviously love astrophysics. And while I love the artistic idea of this book, I find it very hard to get scientific summaries here when I really need all three of the pieces that contain corresponding data. E.g. If you want to use this book to look up information on wormholes, you’ll want three little post-it-notes (plus probably a fourth/fifth in the glossary and bibliography).

So, if it’s not a traditional scientific book that an astrophysicist would pull down to reference, then its prime use is for art/poetry.
- The art is truly unique and perfectly matches the text. You don’t even really need to fully understand the physics to still appreciate the art.
- The physics text has definite poetry spacing with constantly varying indentations. It still reads like astrophysics text, albeit in a very friendly tone (and no equations).

I can only go to 4 stars since I have trouble recommending this to any newbies to astro/physics.
So the book works more as a coffee-table art book.

[Nayiri Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredible book with stellar visuals / paintings of the black holes, wormholes, and gravitational waves to go alongside the text. I enjoyed it greatly and felt like I could get a thorough understanding of the information presented. Additionally, the text is written beautifully in a poetic fashion. Such a cool collaboration of various art styles with theoretical and astrophysics.

[Jesse Hassinger · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the book about black holes that you never knew you needed. Originally written as a Playboy Magazine article which was never published (the tale is recounted in the introduction), and gestated over years of communication between Kip Thorne and Lia Halloran, the resulting illustrated book is nothing short of a new way of approaching theoretical physics. There are some dynamic ideas contained within, and nothing short of at least three points that has completely changed my perspective on our relationship with time and gravity. If, at any point in your life, you were interested in black hole, this book is for you.

[Rama Rao · Rating 3 out of 5]

Spacetime storms

This is a sort of children's picture story for adults. Author Kip Thorne's verse encourages readers to read and understand impressionistically than they might if he explained in densely formatted prose with math formulas. It is a neat way for someone to describe the gravitational force, the bending of spacetime around matter, work without physics and math. But in this book he illustrates the physics of gravity with verse and paintings. The goal being not the high level of accuracy but to convey the essence of the science to connect with the reality of the cosmos we live in. This book is a representation of artwork featuring more than one hundred paintings. The painting (illustrations) of gravitational effects does not fully take over but helps in some instances to mentally visualize the effects of spacetime bending.

Co-author Halloran’s wife, Felicia Halloran is a frequent character in the book that includes her ghostly figure stretched and squeezed through a spinning black hole. The gravitational waves stretch and squeeze spacetime in orthogonal directions as they travel but it also twists space-time. As Felicia falls into a black hole, her feet spin in one direction while her head rotates in the other. In the paintings this motion is represented by spirals which are referred to as vortenses. Some of the illustrations are unappealing. I question the appropriateness of including Felicia Halloran in this work when her contribution to this book is minimal. The Playboy magazine turned down this painting years ago when the authors were considered for a publication in their journal, but fell through because the sex appeal of her image did not meet the bar of the magazine.

The stretching and squeezing of spacetime is measured by the gravitational waves reaching the planet Earth from colliding black holes or neutron stars. The measurable difference is small, four one-thousandths of the diameter of a proton, but this is measured by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) at Hanford, Washington State, and Livingston, Louisiana. This is not the first time Kip Thorne has attempted to do an artistic approach to describing the black hole and its gravitational force, the 2014 film “Interstellar” starring Matthew McConaughey focuses on the black hole where NASA pilot Nolan (McConaughey) careens into the black hole (Gargantua). The movie and the book by Kip Thorne about this movie had numerous inaccuracies, for example, the depiction of the black hole is not accurate according to recent discoveries by the James Webb Telescope. In one painting the author shows how a human being is spaghettified right away if the black hole is young. What if the black hole is large and old, wouldn’t that get her spaghettified right away? If not, why not? In the last chapter, one of the paintings depicts the black hole as strings with the title, Quantum gravity, the physics holy gravity. This image is too fictious because quantum gravity may not exist at all. Attempts to reconcile classical gravity with quantum physics fail because the physical reality we observe is only partial and incomplete. The observable universe is only five percent, and the rest (95 percent) of it is made of dark matter (gravity) and dark energy (anti-gravitational energy). The laws of physics fail inside black holes where the light (photons) is completely controlled by the gravity, and the light speed is not constant. All physics formulas that have “c” the speed of light is inapplicable. The reality as we know outside the black holes will be quite different inside. The so called “spaghettification” is at best a guess work, certainly by string theory and quantum mechanics.

The Kip Thorne’s part of this work, the physics in a poetic manner is interesting, but I did not think that the paintings would make this book any more interesting. The illustrations that show how gravitational waves are generated are helpful but most of the paintings are not helpful. In the Wi-Fi world there are numerous artistic sketches about the impact of gravitational force. Images of James Web Telescope, NASA images and illustrations, Space.com, and numerous blogs and web-based newspapers are always giving us the best illustrations of the gravitational waves and gravity.

[John Sperling · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is good at what it does, which is to explain gravitational waves, black holes, and warped spacetime. Where it fails is in redundancy.

Where the book shines is in the ways the concepts are explained with a combination of poetry and art (the visual element adds profound layers of understanding), in the rabbit holes one goes down following the footnotes (1975 interview with Isaac Asimov, anyone?), and the glossary alone is worth the price of admission, e.g., "Universe: a region of space that is disconnected from all other regions of space, much as an island is disconnected from all other pieces of land"...Do we exist in isolation, or in magnificent interconnection with all reality, which may include many other dimensions and other universes? The search continues for a quantum theory of gravity that will illuminate the origins of our universe and maybe give us answers to other questions we have yet to even ask.

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

An incredible concept that I wanted to work so badly. A Nobel Prize winning physicist writes verse to describe his work, alongside a talented artist’s explanatory paintings? Incredible! I fear, however, that ultimately much of it was over my head. I deeply wanted to understand and be inspired but ultimately couldn’t. Probably more a shortcoming on my part than the authors.

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a “coffee table” book. It’s big. But the concepts it is explains are so very huge. It’s a nice way to explain how gravity waves and black holes and spinning vortexes and art and mathematics were all involved in Einstein’s brain. And furthers the general knowledge about what is known and can’t be known in this realm, and a little bit about the people doing the work. Most excellent. 4.5 ⭐️

[Claire Binkley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful and I think also elegant.

I particularly liked the colour theme. I was about to say I don't know much about this subject but then I took it back since most of the books I have been reading over the years are about it. So, rather, I thought very well of this book.

[Audrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty, poetic, and...black holes?!

Yes, the book of my dreams exists. Science, but art! Nonfiction, but pictures! Quantum physics, but poetry!

I loved this book.

[Roy Kenagy]

DMPL EXAMINED 2024_06_04 "POETRY" AND "ILLUSTRATIONS" COMBINE IN WHAT AMOUNTS TO A COFFEE TABLE BOOK

[Gabriel · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the opening, Thorne explains that the book was originally written as prose and adapted to verse to better suit the art with which it’s paired. I don’t know that the adaptation to poetry was done well, though, of course, I don’t have the original prose to compare. Some attempts to sound more poetic or fit the meter came off as amateurish.
I enjoyed the art for the most part. There were certain spreads and pages that I felt could have made better use of the space or could have been work-shopped to produce a more compelling composition, but generally, I thought the style worked with the subject.

[Tonya Woodbury · Rating 5 out of 5]

I actually bought this book for my husband’s birthday seeing as he’s a physicist and also has an appreciation for art, but I actually ended up reading it before him. This book is a beautiful combination of verse describing Thorne’s research into all the things listed in the title. Thorne has a Nobel in physics for his work on the gravitational wave observatory that spanned three decades from original concept to detecting the first waves. He partners with visual artist Lia Halloran to describe the research and how black holes, wormholes, and gravitational waves are born and propagated throughout the universe. Thorne’s sections are written entirely in verse, which forces him to explain things succinctly and cleary. Halloran’s paintings beautifully expound on the verse and helps the reader visualize the concepts being explained. It was both a beautiful and insightful book, and while I didn’t understand the entirety of what was discussed, I definitely enjoyed the reading experience.