Table of Contents

How to Calculate a Black Hole's Mass. The Black Hole's Event Horizon Circumference. Black-Hole Tidal Forces. A Black Hole's Gravitational Lens. A Black Hole's Gravitational Blueshift. Gravitational Time Dilation. Anatomical Dissection of Black Holes. Embedding Diagrams for Warped Space-Time. Gravitational Wave Recoil. Optical Appearance of a Collapsing Star. Gravitational Distension Near a Black Hole's Heart. Quantum Foam. Black-Hole Recreations. Mathematical Black Holes. Black Holes Evaporate. Wormholes, Cosmological Doughnuts, and Parallel Universes. Postscripts. Author's Musings. Smorgasbord for Computer Junkies. Notes. Further Reading. Index.

About the Author

CLIFFORD A. PICKOVER, Ph.D., is the author of numerous popular science and mathematics books, including Keys to Infinity, Chaos in Wonderland, and Mazes for the Mind. He is also the lead columnist for the "Brain Boggler" section in Discover magazine. He is a researcher at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, and his work in computer science has been featured in numerous magazines and newspapers, including the Washington Post, Wired, the Christian Science Monitor, Omni, and Science News. For his work in computer graphics, he received first prize in the 1990 Beauty of Physics Competition.

Reviews

Black holes. They're exotic, violent, mysterious-a paradoxical phenomenon not easily understood. Acclaimed author and computer artist Pickover (Mazes for the Mind, LJ 12/92) has succeeded in presenting a skillful and entertaining explanation. Through a lively dialog between imaginary space explorers, he invites the reader to participate in experiments, puzzles, and computer programs that investigate and reveal the properties of black holes. Unfortunately, to travel this realm you need a science degree for a passport. Though filled with thought-provoking literary quotations and amusing real-life analogies designed to make science accessible to the lay reader, this text is loaded with mathematical formulas and weighty topics like gravitational time dilation, blueshift, and wave recoil. Despite its good intentions, it is way over the general reader's head, but it could become a cult classic for computer junkies and the scientifically literate. Highly recommended for academic and large public libraries.-Valerie Vaughan, Hatfield P.L., Mass.