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
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...
Post a Comment
Read more