Black Holes and Time Warps

[Leafmachine3]

This book by Kip Thorne is incredibly informative and fun to read. It has lots of good examples and stories that make this non-fiction book about astrophysics hard to put down and walk away from. It really gets you pulled in to be even more interested in the subject matter than you may have been to start with. It makes what would normally seem like a boring and dry subject into a fun field trip back to school where you have questions answered that you didn't even know you had until they were articulated for you in an appealing way. It talks about some of the history of the people in the physics community, especially in the later half of the 20th century when black hole research was really getting underway. And it is written from the point of view of a scientist who not only was actually there working with some of the now well known top physicists of that time such as Stephen Hawking, but who himself played an integral role in much of the study and therefore has an intimate knowledge of the science within the "horizon" of astrophysics. The author's brother was even involved in World War 2, a war which is well known for having had an intense scientific intervention in the way of the atom bomb, whose creation was made possible by Albert Einstein because of his famous equation E=mc^2, which describes how mass is converted into energy. Albert Einstein also developed Relativity Theory, which plays a huge role in astrophysics and is talked about articulately and coherently in Kip Thorne's book, 'Black Holes and Time Warps'. It is a must read for everyone. If you think science is boring, this book will change that forever.