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

Kip Thorne, Lia Halloran (By (artist))

$50.00

Publication Date: October 31st, 2023

Publisher:

Liveright

ISBN:

9781631498541

Pages:

240

Usually Ships in 1 to 5 Days

Description

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.

About the Author

Kip Thorne, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist and the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at Caltech, is the author of the best-selling books Black Holes and Time Warps and The Science of Interstellar. He lives in Pasadena, California.

Lia Halloran, an award-winning artist who has exhibited widely in galleries and museums, is an associate professor and chair of the art department at Chapman University and represented by the gallery Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. She lives with her wife and two children in Los Angeles, California.

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

Physicist Kip Thorne and artist Lia Halloran find a novel approach to exploring these topics in startling detail. The collaboration between the two is just as fascinating as the book itself... Written in verse form, Thorne’s writing is perfectly complemented by Halloran’s vivid illustrations in explaining how that research has pierced a universe that is ‘varied and vast.’ The paintings portray a swirling universe of wonders, explaining a black hole’s characteristics with images of Halloran’s wife being bent by its warped spacetime.
— Andrew DeMillo - Associated Press

These cosmic wonders come alive.... A labor-of-love collaboration between artist Lia Halloran and physicist Kip Thorne, more than a decade in the making, rendering the science of spacetime in an epic poem of playful free verse and breathtaking art.... does for the science of space what Erasmus Darwin did for the science of Earth when he popularized a new branch of botany with his 1791 epic poem The Botanic Garden.... What emerges from these luscious pages is something in the spirit of mathematician Lillian Lieber’s free verse about science that so enchanted Einstein, yet entirely original — verses partway between Shel Silverstein and Interstellar (on which Kip served as chief scientific advisor), anchored in Lia’s blue dreamscapes of wonder.... A testament to Nobel-winning poet Wislawa Szymborska’s lovely observation that “whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know,’” which is also the crucible of science.

— Maria Popova - The Marginalian

Evocative . . . an ambitious art-science artifact . . . grounded in cutting-edge research.
— David Kaiser - Science

[D]emanding and innovative . . . Thorne and Halloran succeed in creating a portal onto our universe's perplexing ‘warped side’ with its dramatic space storms, colliding stars, and twisting, stretching, squeezing, and entwining vortices and tendices. A vivid and illuminating union of science and art.
— Donna Seaman - Booklist

This is a lavish, vivid book dominated by Halloran’s dazzling, more or less representational paintings, accompanied by Thorne’s commentary, often in free verse…. Beautiful art in the service of cutting-edge astrophysics.
— Kirkus Reviews

Nobel Prize–winning physicist Thorne (The Science of Interstellar) joins with Halloran, the art department chair at Chapman University, for an imaginative and gorgeously illustrated tour of some of the universe’s oddest features . . . the stylish images are a treat.

— Publishers Weekly

What a beautiful alchemy of science and art! Full of playful exuberance, witty and wise, sweeping across the whole universe, yet lovingly tethered to Earth and the heart of what makes us human, this shape-shifting pageant of art, science and poetry lures one deep beneath its spellbinding waves, while time evaporates.
— Diane Ackerman

The cosmic forces at play in this singular work pull poetry from physicist Kip Thorne and push artist Lia Halloran to paint the invisible. Through the wormhole of their shared imagination, an armchair space cadet can journey to the Warped Side to be wowed.
— Dava Sobel