SCIENCE FOR ARTIES, POETRY FOR TECHIES

WE LAMENT THESE DAYS the chasms of thought between this and that, reds and blues, one thing and another. Occasionally, though, a unifying aspect appears. And so it is with Kip Thorne’s and Lia Halloran’s book The Warped Side of the Universe: An Odyssey Through Black Holes, Wormholes, Time Travel, and Gravitational Waves. 

Kip Thorne, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at Caltech, is the author of the best-selling books Black Holes and Time Warps and The Science of Interstellar. He lives in Pasadena, California. 

Lia Halloran, an award-winning artist who has exhibited widely in galleries and museums, is an associate professor and chair of the art department at Chapman University and represented by the gallery Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. She lives with her wife and two children in Los Angeles, California.

As noted in IndieBound, “Through poetic verse and otherworldly paintings, the authors explicate Thorne’s and colleagues’ astrophysical discoveries and speculations, with an epic narrative that asks: How did the universe begin? Can anything travel backward in time? And what weird and marvelous phenomena inhabit the Warped Side? Featuring more than 100 paintings, including a soaring Stephen Hawking, this one-of-a-kind volume, with its multiple gatefolds, takes us on an Odyssean voyage into and through the Warped Side of Our Universe.”

Here are tidbits gleaned from several reviews, sources as varied as AAAS Science magazine, AP News, and The New York Times. 

Andrew Demillo writes in AP News, October 30, 2023, “Black holes, wormholes and other mysteries of the universe are so firmly embedded in popular culture—from Carl Sagan’s ‘Contact’ to Christopher Nolan’s ‘Interstellar’—that readers with no scientific background have some images in mind when the concepts are mentioned. But in The Warped Side of Our Universe: An Odyssey Through Black Holes, Wormholes, Time Travel, and Gravitational Waves, physicist Kip Thorne and artist Lia Halloran find a novel approach to exploring these topics in startling detail.”

“The collaboration between the two is just as fascinating as the book itself,” Demillo says. “Written in verse form, Thorne’s writing is perfectly complemented by Halloran’s vivid illustrations in explaining how that research has pierced a universe that is ‘varied and vast.’ ”

Demillo recounts, “The paintings portray a swirling universe of wonders, explaining a black hole’s characteristics with images of Halloran’s wife being bent by its warped spacetime.”

Image by Lia Halloran from Dennis Overbye’s review in The New York Times.

“If you have ever wondered,” writes Dennis Overbye in The New York Times, November 7, 2023, “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.”

Multiple worm holes. Image by Lia Halloran from liahalloran.com.

Fantastical Phenomena, Illustrated. David Kaiser writes in Science magazine, October 20, 2023, “These days, black holes seem not only possible but plentiful. Yet being ubiquitous has not made them mundane. In The Warped Side of Our Universe, physicist Kip Thorne and artist Lia Halloran blend evocative imagery with prose-poem narration to share some of the wilder implications of exotic gravitational phenomena with nonspecialist readers.”

Image by Lia Halloran from Science. 

Kaiser recounts, “Thorne and Halloran worked on this book over the course of 13 years, a period that included the stunning first results from LIGO and the Event Horizon Telescope and that set the stage for NANOGrav. The authors’ process, as recounted in a brief preface, was every bit as looping and nonlinear as Einstein’s equations—informal discussions led to sketches and short drafts of prose; refined drawings inspired updated wording, and vice versa. Midway through their efforts, Thorne decided to transform his sparse written contributions into verse, to better complement the swirling, ocean-like eddies emerging in Halloran’s paintings.”

“The result,” Kaiser writes, “is an ambitious art-science artifact inviting readers to ponder black holes, wormhole-like tunnels through spacetime itself, and the gravitational-wave signals emanating from such strange cosmic constituents. The material is grounded in cutting-edge research. In some places, Thorne draws on novel vocabulary that he and his graduate students coined only a few years ago to help make sense of their sophisticated numerical simulations, while Halloran’s engrossing images convey a visceral sense of stormy spacetime ruptures.”

Lia and Kip have a YouTube describing their work.

What a amiable collaboration of art and science! ds 

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2023