This festive season put White Holes in your friends’ stockings – make a ladder of them. White Holes is a miniature masterpiece, a small book the size of an old fashioned cigarette packet by one of the most entertaining scientists on the planet, the Italian quantum physicist Carlo Rovelli.
What is a White Hole? Do they really exist? Albert Einstein would have had his doubts – he questioned the mathematics of Black Holes at times. This led to his famous quip about the speculative nature of quantum science: “The Almighty doesn’t play dice.” To which the great Neils Bohr, a top hero for Rovelli, replied, “leave the almighty one to get on with what he does best.”
It all starts with Black Holes, stars that collapse in on themselves to become smaller than a golf ball. Space – time bends and time stops. But is it the end of everything? Not quite, suggests Rovelli after marathon calculations and conversations with his close collaborator and fellow physicist, Hal Haggard.
Based on calculations by the late, great Stephen Hawking, Rovelli and others propose that light leaks from a Black Hole as it ends. Light means energy, and therefore time restarts. The Black Hole becomes a White Hole, particles of light and energy now all around us.
You may want to take time out now, run a bath maybe, and listen to a podcast of Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” Adams would have revelled in Rovelli, this book especially.
We are moving beyond Einstein’s equations on cosmology and physics into a new unknown
“A White Hole is a Black Hole with time reversed,” says Hal, summing up the book’s central theme in a phrase. A lot of physicists disagree. “It’s a real bust-up 'una Bagame', he writes using an underworld term for a punch-up.
The book isn’t about discreet spats between physicists, but the very nature of thinking. He says he writes for two categories, “those knowing nothing of physics, and those who know quite a bit.”
Through history we have had great guides to understanding science from Anaximander, to Einstein and Bohr – moving through Aristotle, Galileo, Newton and Darwin on the way. It is like the conversations between Dante and his guides through the Divine Comedy – a work he infuses with new magic.
Now we are moving beyond Einstein’s equations on cosmology and physics into a new unknown. We must be certain about uncertainty and explore the new. I would give this book to anyone, young and old, interested in thinking, science and literature. His reflections on how Shakespeare and Dante considered first and last things are a joy. His book is a work of literature itself.
Robert Fox is defence correspondent
