Reddit Reddit reviews Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy (Commonwealth Fund Book Program)

We found 20 Reddit comments about Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy (Commonwealth Fund Book Program). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

Science & Math
Books
Astronomy & Space Science
Astrophysics & Space Science
Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy (Commonwealth Fund Book Program)
W W Norton Company
Check price on Amazon

20 Reddit comments about Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy (Commonwealth Fund Book Program):

u/[deleted] · 372 pointsr/AskScienceDiscussion

>First of all don't worry about cosmology and the big bang and black holes and all that

This piece of advice should be ignored. These are absolutely fascinating topics and you should study them in more depth if you want to. In order to get a popularized taste for it, I recommend beginning with:

-Kip Thorne: Black Holes and Time Warps

and

-Neil deGrasse Tyson, Origins

After you have satisfied your taste by reading more digestable, popular accounts, you can decide if you want to read more detailed and mathematically involved accounts. The downside is that the accessibility of the mathematically rigorous formulations are behind a mass of very detailed and very complicated physics. You basically have to be trained in physics.

u/ChrisAdami · 163 pointsr/science

It is true, we don't know what's behind the event horizon. If the black hole would be sufficiently massive (like, really supermassive) then if you are far enough from the center you would not be able to tell that you are inside of a black hole. After all, galaxies are moving around in the universe, and for all we know they could be orbiting the center of a black hole. However, this is all speculation. A good book for a beginner is perhaps Kip Thorne's book http://www.amazon.com/Black-Holes-Time-Warps-Commonwealth/dp/0393312763

u/Sima_Hui · 9 pointsr/explainlikeimfive

A little more than ELI5 but worth the effort, Kip Thorne, the physicist who consulted on the film, wrote a fantastic book that covers this question in depth.

You can read it here.

I recommend reading the entire Prologue since it's relatively short and pretty fascinating, and will give you the background to why it must be a very large black hole, but the part directly relevant to your question is the section entitled Gargantua on page 41. (Also relevant is the establishing of the problem on pp. 34-35)

If you like his writing, buy his book Black Holes and Time Warps. The link above is just some random PDF I found on a search.

To sum him up though, a super-massive black hole will have negligible tidal forces at its "surface" (event horizon). You therefore could hover just above it and not be spaghettified. Once you cross the horizon, you'd still be okay for a while, but now no amount of force could keep you from falling ever closer to the center. As you approached the center, tidal forces would increase exponentially until eventually you would be pulled apart. So yes, it would be gentle. At first. But once you go inside, spaghettification is inevitable, though not necessarily immediate.


TL:DR A big size to make it more gentle? Yes. Possible to enter without spaghettification? Temporarily yes, ultimately no.

u/HollowImage · 6 pointsr/Physics

Thats honestly why I dont like neil tyson either. he makes more about being a "that kid" prickly guy to generate tension than to actually educate people nowadays.

anyway, that aside, a really good read is Kip S. Thorne's Black Holes and Time Warps

http://www.amazon.com/Black-Holes-Time-Warps-Commonwealth/dp/0393312763/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1374695711&sr=1-2

it is real physics slightly diluted to help understand, but he doesnt shy away from hard concepts, like Chandrasekhar limit.

u/ImAWizardYo · 6 pointsr/EmDrive

>Can you point out a place where I've been substantively wrong?

Let's start with your understanding of the word "arrogance"

>I assume the opposite.

Thrilled this wasn't stated as fact.

>Perhaps you should open a physics book.

Whenever I get the chance. Other than my HS books and college level Physics, I started with this one over 20 years ago while still in HS. It's actually not that hard of a read despite what some will say. Some of the math is a little advanced but not required to follow along as context and diagrams are provided.

u/drzowie · 5 pointsr/AskScienceDiscussion

/u/SwedishBoatlover has the right idea. FTL travel is the same as time travel, because events separated by a spacelike interval (such as departure and arrival using an FTL craft) don't have a definite before/after order. That's why we have limericks like that one about the Lady named Bright.

Seriously, FTL travel would screw up physics very badly. Like, "Ghostbusters crossing the streams" badly. Classical mechanics (the physics of baseballs, planets, and such) would cease to work. Quantum mechanical feedback through the closed path (from the exit back to the entrance) might make the entire Universe implode.

To learn more about this topic, try Kip Thorne's awesome book about wormholes and the damage they would cause to the Universe at large. FTL travel of any kind would have similar effects.

u/DarthContinent · 3 pointsr/AskReddit

"A Brief History of Time" by Stephen Hawking is great but maybe not technical enough for you. His colleague Kip Thorne, however, wrote "Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy" which is significantly meatier on the hard science side of things.

u/ebneter · 3 pointsr/scifi

Well, first of all, "Hawkin" (I assume he means Stephen Hawking) didn't create the term "black hole," and it's actually fairly correct, at least in the sense that there's a "rim" (the event horizon) and things can "fall in" to the hole.

But the second paragraph is simply gibberish. There are things called black bodies, and black holes have some relation to them, but certainly not in the simplistic manner described. And black holes are an endpoint of stellar evolution, not the beginning: They* are formed when a massive star undergoes a supernova explosion and the remaining core collapses. About the only true statement in the second paragraph is, "Light bends around all bodies of mass, including stars and planets." In fact, this is a standard prediction of general relativity, first measured during a solar eclipse in 1919.

Kip Thorne, who was the science advisor for Interstellar, wrote a pretty accessible book on black holes if you want more details. He's also written a book on the science behind Interstellar.

* Caveat: This applies to stellar-mass black holes. There are supermassive black holes in the centers of many (most?) galaxies, including our own, and we don't fully understand how they form.

u/TheMrJosh · 3 pointsr/Physics

Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy is a great book. It starts off with a science fiction story and goes on to explain the principles behind it. There's a little history in there too, which is always interesting. One issue, however, is that it's a little old now so may be a bit outdated.

u/stealth_sloth · 3 pointsr/explainlikeimfive

Chris Adami, professor of microbiology and astronomy (I know, odd combination) who has done some work related to black holes, had an AMA in /r/science the other day. I'll just carry over this comment

>It is true, we don't know what's behind the event horizon. If the black hole would be sufficiently massive (like, really supermassive) then if you are far enough from the center you would not be able to tell that you are inside of a black hole. After all, galaxies are moving around in the universe, and for all we know they could be orbiting the center of a black hole. However, this is all speculation. A good book for a beginner is perhaps Kip Thorne's book http://www.amazon.com/Black-Holes-Time-Warps-Commonwealth/dp/0393312763

u/snissn · 2 pointsr/atheism
u/sports__fan · 2 pointsr/books

You can't go wrong with anything by Carl Sagan. Try Cosmos to start with.

Black Holes and Time Warps by Kip S. Thorne is another good one.

u/filladellfea · 2 pointsr/space

The universe is 4-dimensional. X-Y-Z + time. You can distort all four of these things with gravity. You can really distort these things with intense gravity (i.e., a black hole). If you position yourself near a black hole (i.e., right next to the event horizon), time will be so distorted compared to time flow where gravity is not so intense (i.e., away from the event horizon) that "your" time will move super slow and you the rest of the universe will age much much faster.

If you want to learn more about this, I recommend this book. It's one of my favorite reads ever.

u/oro_boris · 2 pointsr/Physics

You might want to read this book, by Kip Thorne:

Black Holes & Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy (Commonwealth Fund Book Program)

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0393312763/

u/GetOffMyLawn_ · 2 pointsr/todayilearned

If you're feeling brave you can try reading his 1994 book on black holes and time warps. I suspect that the book he wrote about the science of Interstellar is more approachable.

u/FoolishChemist · 1 pointr/AskPhysics

I haven't read this, but this is from the Kip Thorns, the science adviser on the film

http://www.amazon.com/The-Science-Interstellar-Kip-Thorne/dp/0393351378

Also if it is half as good as his previous book, you're in for a treat

www.amazon.com/Black-Holes-Time-Warps-Commonwealth/dp/0393312763/

u/tfmaher · 1 pointr/booksuggestions

This book was what pushed me into teaching science for 10 years:

Black Holes and Time Warps by Kip Thorn. Does a great job explaining things in a simple, concise way. Written for people with minimal working knowledge of physics.

u/Kapede · 1 pointr/science
u/dmeltesen1316 · 1 pointr/explainlikeimfive

I read a different idea by Kip S Thorne. In theory if we could create and contain a black/worm hole we could send one of them at (close to) the speed of light. That end would experience time slower than the other end. So in theory passing through each end would be a portal to the past/future.

Edit: Source
Black Holes and Time Warps
https://www.amazon.com/Black-Holes-Time-Warps-Commonwealth/dp/0393312763

This book explains theory only and ideas on how to use exotic matter to keep a wormhole open. It's very easy access with just the right amount of technicality.