Let us journey, with beloved physicist Carlo Rovelli, into the heart of a black hole. We slip beyond its horizon and tumble down this crack in the universe. As we plunge, we see geometry fold. Time and space pull and stretch. And finally, at the black hole's core, space and time dissolve, and a white hole is born. Rovelli has dedicated his career to uniting the time-warping ideas of general relativity and the perplexing uncertainties of quantum mechanics. In White Holes, he reveals the mind of a scientist at work. He traces the ongoing adventure of his own cutting-edge research, investigating whether all black holes could eventually turn into white holes, equally compact objects in which the arrow of time is reversed.
Going beyond that horizon towards a new understanding of space, time and black holes is the principal goal of physicist Carlo Rovelli's wonderful new book ... White Holes, like Rovelli's other works, is remarkably short — less than 200 pages. But the clarity of his explanations is unparalleled. As a scientist who is also a popularizer, I often find myself marveling at the acuity of his passages. More than just an ability to explain cutting edge ideas in physics, Rovelli's erudition and sensitivity lets him make contact with the broadest human yearnings for making sense of the world ... taking the journey with Rovelli is more than worth the price of the book. Dante gave us his tour of the underworld. We could not do better than having Rovelli as a guide into the dark world of black holes.
Rovelli is an accomplished theoretical physicist, prolific author and lyrical science communicator. White Holes is a small book – Rovelli’s briefest yet – and smashes through a lot of material at breakneck speed, pretty much the entire content of A Brief History of Time in a couple of short chapters by way of overview and introduction. Reading it is more akin to the final psychedelic sequence in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey: you’re not sure where you’re heading but it feels bloody exciting. In fewer pages than it would take some authors to describe how they would prepare an omelette, Rovelli drags you into the heart of a black hole and then – somehow – out the other side. What he suggests is that, as the star forming a black hole continues to collapse, it eventually becomes so compact and tiny that the laws of general relativity have to give way to the laws of quantum mechanics ... this is a book for the layperson and Rovelli understands this limitation, glossing over finer detail in pursuit of an impression of the wonder that lies at the heart of the cosmos and his theorising. And in his hands it’s an effective technique ... One of the things I most loved about White Holes was the glimpse Rovelli gives you into the mind of a physicist working at the edges of the known universe, and the fundamental insecurity of creating groundbreaking theories and then putting them out there like clay pigeons launched from a trap ... if you’re a final year undergraduate looking for revision notes to accompany your module in high energy astrophysics, this volume may disappoint. But if you want to remember why you once fell in love with the idea of the cosmos, or want to fall in love with that idea for the first time, then this book is for you. For my part, I found myself following Rovelli into a weird and wonderful new universe and I was very content to be there.
Through history we have had great guides to understanding science from Anaximander, to Einstein and Bohr – moving through Aristotle, Galileo, Newton and Darwin on the way. It is like the conversations between Dante and his guides through the Divine Comedy – a work he infuses with new magic. Now we are moving beyond Einstein’s equations on cosmology and physics into a new unknown. We must be certain about uncertainty and explore the new. I would give this book to anyone, young and old, interested in thinking, science and literature. His reflections on how Shakespeare and Dante considered first and last things are a joy. His book is a work of literature itself.
