The Warped Side of Our Universe: An Odyssey through Black Holes, Wormholes, Time Travel, and Gravitational Waves (Hardcover)
Epic verse and pulsating paintings merge to shed light on time travel, black holes, gravitational waves and the birth of the universe.
Nearly two decades in the making, The Warped Side of Our Universe marks the historic collaboration of Nobel Laureate Kip Thorne and award-winning artist Lia Halloran. It brings to vivid life the wonders and wildness of our universe’s “Warped Side”—objects and phenomena made from warped space and time, from colliding black holes and collapsing wormholes to twisting space vortices and down-cascading time. 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.
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.
— Andrew DeMillo - Associated Press
These cosmic wonders come alive.... A labor-of-love collaboration between artist Lia Halloran and physicist Kip Thorne, more than a decade in the making, rendering the science of spacetime in an epic poem of playful free verse and breathtaking art.... does for the science of space what Erasmus Darwin did for the science of Earth when he popularized a new branch of botany with his 1791 epic poem The Botanic Garden.... What emerges from these luscious pages is something in the spirit of mathematician Lillian Lieber’s free verse about science that so enchanted Einstein, yet entirely original — verses partway between Shel Silverstein and Interstellar (on which Kip served as chief scientific advisor), anchored in Lia’s blue dreamscapes of wonder.... A testament to Nobel-winning poet Wislawa Szymborska’s lovely observation that “whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know,’” which is also the crucible of science.
— Maria Popova - The Marginalian
Evocative . . . an ambitious art-science artifact . . . grounded in cutting-edge research.
— David Kaiser - Science
[D]emanding and innovative . . . Thorne and Halloran succeed in creating a portal onto our universe's perplexing ‘warped side’ with its dramatic space storms, colliding stars, and twisting, stretching, squeezing, and entwining vortices and tendices. A vivid and illuminating union of science and art.
— Donna Seaman - Booklist
This is a lavish, vivid book dominated by Halloran’s dazzling, more or less representational paintings, accompanied by Thorne’s commentary, often in free verse…. Beautiful art in the service of cutting-edge astrophysics.
— Kirkus Reviews
Nobel Prize–winning physicist Thorne (The Science of Interstellar) joins with Halloran, the art department chair at Chapman University, for an imaginative and gorgeously illustrated tour of some of the universe’s oddest features . . . the stylish images are a treat.
— Publishers Weekly
What a beautiful alchemy of science and art! Full of playful exuberance, witty and wise, sweeping across the whole universe, yet lovingly tethered to Earth and the heart of what makes us human, this shape-shifting pageant of art, science and poetry lures one deep beneath its spellbinding waves, while time evaporates.
— Diane Ackerman
The cosmic forces at play in this singular work pull poetry from physicist Kip Thorne and push artist Lia Halloran to paint the invisible. Through the wormhole of their shared imagination, an armchair space cadet can journey to the Warped Side to be wowed.
— Dava Sobel