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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.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

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