Heavy-duty popular science not for the faint of heart.
The bestselling author and theoretical physicist looks at “the elusive younger siblings of black holes.”
Since white holes may be an inevitable consequence of black holes, Rovelli, the author of Seven Brief Lessons in Physics and Reality Is Not What It Seems, begins with an explanation, noting that white holes are essentially the reverse of a black hole. Since the 18th century, scientists knew that, as a universal force, gravity from an extremely massive star should slow its light’s speed to zero. That concept made little sense until Einstein showed that light never slows but that gravity distorts space, so light near a massive body appears to curve. The more massive the body, the greater the curve until the light doubles back. Einstein insisted that no such body existed, but his equations permit it, and they eventually turned up. All stars eventually run out of fuel and collapse. Average stars like our sun end up as tiny, immensely dense dwarfs. The largest stars, however, continue to collapse, ultimately to an infinitely tiny, infinitely dense point. Their light doubles back, resulting in a black hole, from which nothing that enters can leave. Even time stops dead at its edge, or “event horizon.” Mathematics, Einstein’s included, doesn’t work when dimensions are infinitely small or large, so physicists don’t know what happens when a black hole forms. That hasn’t stopped them from speculating, and Rovelli leads one school favoring the production of white holes, a bizarre concept that is still purely theoretical. Calling on quantum mechanics, which deals with minuscule phenomena, he explains that the collapsing star never becomes infinitely small but “bounces,” leading to a white hole. There, matter can leave but never enter; “a white hole is a black hole with time reversed.” Rovelli works hard, sometimes successfully, to explain matters, but he is dealing with phenomena so complex that he often gives readers permission to skip ahead.
Heavy-duty popular science not for the faint of heart.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780593545447
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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