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Black Holes - A Traveler's Guide
by Clifford A. Pickover 210 pages Level: popular, high school math Games for people who like to play around with black holes |
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The great difficulty of relativity theory is that it is so foreign to our day-to-day
experience that it is difficult to get an intuitive feeling for its applications.
This is especially true when dealing with the extreme conditions existing in a black hole.
Pickover has done an admirable job by describing a journey into a black hole and proving simple programs and equations that enable us to play with these strange and wonderful objects. "Black Holes - A Traveler's Guide" can be considered a work book for Kip Thorne's "Black Holes & Time Warps". It provides some simple BASIC programs that require no more background than high school algebra to calculate quantities such as the circumference of a black hole and its mass. Other programs are listed to create interesting "pictures" of black holes. There are 11 full color plates that are based on these and other programs, but take advantage of some very powerful graphic software and hardware. Since travelling into a black hole itself is not recommended (look up tidal forces in the index if you don't know why), reading "Black Hole - A Traveler's Guide" is possibly the next best thing. |
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| Review by Ed Ehrlich | |
| Table Of Contents | |
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1. How To Calculate a Black Hole's Mass 2. Chapter The Black Hole's Event Horizon Circumference 3. Black-Hole Tidal Forces 4. A Black Hole's Gravitational Lens 5. A Black Hole's Gravitational Blueshift 6. Gravitational Time Dilation 7. Anatomical Dissection of Black Holes 8. Embedding Diagrams for Warped Space-Time 9. Gravitational Wave Recoil 10. Optical Appearance of a Collapsing Star 11. Gravitational Distension Near a Black Hole's Heart 12. Quantum Foam 13. Black-Hole Recreations 14. Mathematical Black Holes 15. Black Holes Evaporate 16. Wormholes, Cosmological Doughnuts, and Parallel Universes Postscript 1 Could We Be Living in a Black Hole? Postscript 2 The Grand Internet Black-Hole Survey Author's Musings Smorgasbord for Computer Junkies Notes Further Reading Index |
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