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

by Kip Thorne, Lia Halloran (Artist)

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Beautiful poetry mixed with vibrant paintings that bring the cosmos to new life, this is a vivid exploration of the universe through multidisciplinary art appealing to a broad audience. It’s an odyssey through space, a celebration of art and a melding of minds, all coming together to form an unforgettable and enriching experience.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631498541
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	10/31/2023
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	62,915
Product dimensions:	8.90(w) x 10.70(h) x 1.30(d)

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.

Editorial Reviews

08/28/2023

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. Thorne’s spare yet poetic descriptions of wormholes, gravitational waves, and warped spacetime are accompanied by Halloran’s paintings of the phenomena. Halloran depicts, for instance, what it would look like if a human fell feet-first into a black hole, showing that their feet would twist around, spinning at a faster rate than their head, before their entire body was strung out “from head to foot” (the visuals are thankfully somewhat abstract). Other depictions are of more complex events, such as the ways that spacetime distorts around merging black holes. The decision to style the text like verse can sometimes make such mind-bending science difficult to parse (“The newly minted ring/ expanding at the speed of light/ generated tendices/ reversed from those that came before/ squeezing around the ring’s long loop/ stretching around the ring’s short loop”). Still, the stylish images are a treat, and a concluding section of straightforward prose revisiting the science behind the occurrences depicted by Halloran clarifies the oblique verse. It adds up to a clever if at times perplexing addition to the shelf on astrophysics. Illus. (Oct.)

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

"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."

Associated Press - Andrew DeMillo

"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

"[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."

Booklist - Donna Seaman

"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."

The Marginalian - Maria Popova

"Evocative . . . an ambitious art-science artifact . . . grounded in cutting-edge research."

Science - David Kaiser

2023-07-18
Art and verse celebrating extreme cosmological phenomena.

Nobel Prize winner Thorne has been a notable theoretical physicist, author, and media scientist a la Carl Sagan for the past 50 years. Award-winning artist Halloran’s work features images that straddle the worlds of art and science. The result of nearly 20 years of collaboration, 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. Although it lacks consistent rhyme and meter, free verse remains verbal music. No discerning reader—nor Thorne himself—would claim to find poetic mastery in his text, which might better be described as prose written with irregular margins. Nonetheless, the author’s descriptions serve their purpose, which is not to provide lessons in popular science but to explore spectacularly weird astrophysical phenomena and illustrate how they might affect a person experiencing them. Readers who skim the text in favor of the illustrations will not regret the experience, but they would do well to slow down later in the text, when Thorne converts to prose, offering a fine history of relativistic phenomena since Einstein pointed them out, along with a sketchy explanation of the science. Since Einstein, writes the author, “we physicists have studied the prediction of [his] laws in depth and have gradually learned that the universe has a rich warped side: its big bang birth, black holes, gravitational waves, and possibly wormholes, time machines, cosmic strings and naked singularities, and almost certainly some huge surprises.” Readers seeking a deeper understanding should consult Thorne’s 1994 book, Black Holes & Time Warps, in which he makes a sincere attempt to explain difficult concepts such as warped space and flexible time as well as bizarre cosmological wonders that definitely exist (black holes, gravity waves) and those that may not (worm holes, time travel).

Beautiful art in the service of cutting-edge astrophysics.

Kirkus Reviews