Skip to main content

White Holes - Carlo Rovelli ***

One of the comments on the cover of this book is from fantasy author Alan Garner, who calls Carlo Rovelli 'the poet of physics'. White Holes is probably the most appropriate of Rovelli's books for this accolade, which also makes it one of the most frustrating. There is some really interesting (if totally speculative) cosmology/astrophysics here in the suggestion that as black holes come to their end they (quantum) tunnel into tiny white holes - but there is an awful lot of poetic waffle surrounding it.

Is this really science? Bearing in mind it's highly unlikely there will ever be good, real world evidence to support the theory, I'd suggest it is ascientific (to use Sabine Hossenfelder's term). Not unscientific, but not supported by evidence. Another way of looking at it is hard science fiction - it's based on good current science, but as Rovelli says himself 'I do not know if it is correct. I do not even know if white holes exist.' 

If we are to use Sagan's epithet about extraordinary claims needing extraordinary evidence, our default position should probably be to say that they don't. But that still does not make the ideas behind this book uninteresting, and, were it not for that waffle and one other thing, this would be a five star book. For example, Rovelli's description of a trip into a black hole is genuinely engaging, including things that are obvious when you think about it but rarely mentioned, such as you can see out past the event horizon, and other aspects that are far less obvious. (The one, odd, omission here is there is no mention of spaghettification.)

However, Rovelli does seem to be trying unnecessarily hard to live up to Garner's accolade. Every now and then, for no obvious reason, he goes all e e cummings and writes a whole paragraph with no capital letters. Throughout, he makes tedious references to Dante's Inferno. I've nothing against Inferno - I've even read it in translation - but here the references just look like someone showing off. They don't help understand the science.

Lack of understanding is probably the worst thing. The explanations are very thin and explain very little. Sometimes Rovelli uses examples, but seems to cherry pick them. So, he tells us 'gravitational attraction does not become repulsion by reversing time'. His examples for this are a planet orbiting the Sun and a stone thrown up that then falls back down. But this simply doesn't work if your example is a meteorite crashing into Earth that didn't start here. Later on he tells us plonkingly that 'information cannot vanish' - but there is no supporting argument at all. I know the logic behind his statement, but the way it's phrased it doesn't help someone who is aware that this is exactly what happens when the power is turned off to her computer part way through typing a document.

This is is also a very expensive book given it is a very slim, compact hardback. Overall, it's a bit like a nut with a huge, inedible outer shell. The nut is sweet and tasty, but that shell is highly frustrating.

Hardback:   
Kindle 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...

Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact: Keith Cooper ****

There's something appealing (for a reader like me) about a book that brings together science fiction and science fact. I had assumed that the 'Amazing Worlds' part of the title suggested a general overview of the interaction between the two, but Keith Cooper is being literal. This is an examination of exoplanets (planets that orbit a different star to the Sun) as pictured in science fiction and in our best current science, bearing in mind this is a field that is still in the early phases of development. It becomes obvious early on that Cooper, who is a science journalist in his day job, knows his stuff on the fiction side as well as the current science. Of course he brings in the well-known TV and movie tropes (we get a huge amount on Star Trek ), not to mention the likes of Dune, but his coverage of written science fiction goes into much wider picture. He also has consulted some well-known contemporary SF writers such as Alastair Reynolds and Paul McAuley, not just scient...