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 bestselling books Black Holes and Time Warps and The Science of Interstellar. Thorne was an executive producer for the 2014 film Interstellar. For “bridging the worlds of science and the humanities,” Thorne received Rockefeller University’s Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science. He lives in Pasadena, California. Stephen W. Hawking is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a lifetime member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and in 2009 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States.

Reviews

"Deeply satisfying.... [An] engrossing blend of theory, history, and anecdote."
*Wall Street Journal*

"Among the best of [its] genre to appear in recent years."
*Malcolm W. Browne - New York Times Book Review*

"Readers seeking to go beyond today's headlines will not find a higher authority (or a better storyteller) to discuss the cosmo's most bizarre features…Masterful and intriguing."
*Marcia Bartusiak - Washington Post*

"Superb. It is what many other books about their subject ought to have been and were not.... I think the book itself will be a strong force."
*Carl Sagan*

"Black Holes & Time Warps reveals the scientific enterprise as very few books do; it richly overflows with history, modern physics, the excitement of discovery, and rare, firsthand scientific styles and temperaments."
*Alan Lightman*

This book's subtitle explains it all. Virtually all astrophysicists accept the fact that Einstein's theory of general relativity is the best model of physical reality that we have. In other words, it is essentially correct. Yet the model requires the existence of physical phenomena beyond one's wildest imagination. One of the investigators attempting to fathom the depths of the theory, Thorne here describes the people who have done the work and the trails, both false and fruitful, they have followed. He brings us up-to-date on the state of the art in black hole research and the attempts to find definitive proof of their existence. Even with the mathematics removed, his explanations can be pretty heavy going. Nevertheless, the payoff is worth the work. For academic and larger public library science collections.-Harold D. Shane, Baruch Coll., CUNY

"Deeply satisfying.... [An] engrossing blend of theory, history, and anecdote." -- Wall Street Journal
"Among the best of [its] genre to appear in recent years." -- Malcolm W. Browne - New York Times Book Review
"Readers seeking to go beyond today's headlines will not find a higher authority (or a better storyteller) to discuss the cosmo's most bizarre features...Masterful and intriguing." -- Marcia Bartusiak - Washington Post
"Superb. It is what many other books about their subject ought to have been and were not.... I think the book itself will be a strong force." -- Carl Sagan
"Black Holes & Time Warps reveals the scientific enterprise as very few books do; it richly overflows with history, modern physics, the excitement of discovery, and rare, firsthand scientific styles and temperaments." -- Alan Lightman