If you have ever wondered what it might feel like to be sucked into a black hole — twisted, stretched, confused, doomed — you could do worse than trip through “The Warped Side of Our Universe, An Odyssey Through Black Holes, Wormholes, Time Travel and Gravitational Waves,” a collaborative book project by Kip Thorne, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, and Lia Halloran, a visual artist and chair of the art department at Chapman University in Orange, Calif.Dr. Thorne brings impressive credentials to the task.
In 2017 he won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the Laser Interferometry Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, which discovered space-time vibrations resulting from the collision of two distant black holes.
He was also the executive producer of the movie “Interstellar.” Ms. Halloran, who grew up surfing and skateboarding in the Bay Area, became obsessed with science after a high school internship at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.
The book consists of illustrations of what Dr. Thorne likes to call the “space-time storms” predicted by general relativity, Einstein’s theory of gravity, alternating with his own explanations of the physics, which appear in verse.
Many of the illustrations, which are in ink on drafting film, portray Ms. Halloran’s wife, Felicia, being whipped around, crushed and twisted by the forces of nature.
Persons:
Kip Thorne, Lia Halloran, Thorne, Ms, Halloran, Halloran’s, Felicia
Organizations:
California Institute of Technology, Chapman University in
Locations:
Chapman University in Orange, Calif, Bay, San Francisco