Einstein's Monsters

August 13, 2018
Science writer and astrophysicist Impey (Beyond: Our Future in Space) gives an absorbing and lay-reader-friendly look at the intriguing dead stars called black holes. Impey begins in 1784 with the earliest theoretical description of a massive star with gravity so strong that not even light could escape it. In the early 20th century, Einstein suggested with his general theory of relativity that astronomers could find black holes by looking into how their extreme gravity affects space-time around them. With clarity and enthusiasm, Impey describes the work of scientists such as John Wheeler—who coined the name “black hole”—and visionary theoretical cosmologist Stephen Hawking, as well as his own work. In subjects including the supermassive black holes at the center of every galaxy and primordial black holes, Impey gives readers a good sense of how these phenomena have gone from astronomical curiosity to intellectual touchstones that fascinate and challenge researchers.

September 1, 2018
A lucid tour of "the best known and least understood objects in the universe."A black hole is a region in space where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape, not even light. It's a concept that has long fascinated astronomers and continues to generate a steady stream of popular science books. In his latest, Impey (Astronomy/Univ. of Arizona; Beyond: Our Future in Space, 2015, etc.) delivers an accessible yet definitely not dumbed-down explanation of this spectacular phenomenon. From its inception, most scientists accepted Einstein's 1915 Theory of Relativity, which described gravity as a distortion of space-time by a nearby mass. When his equations revealed that immense gravity would distort space-time so much that light would double back on itself, most scientists, Einstein included, assumed this was a mathematical curiosity. It wasn't. Within the past 100 years, writes Impey, "black holes have evolved from a monstrous idea, one that violates common sense, to a proving ground for the most cherished theories in physics." An ordinary black hole forms when a star ages, runs out of fuel, and collapses. Most shrink into dwarves, but when this happens to the rare star with a mass greater than 20 times that of the sun, no known force can prevent it from collapsing to an infinitely dense point called a singularity, surrounded by a black hole. Stranger still, at the center of every galaxy, including ours, is an immense "supermassive" black hole containing millions or billions of solar masses. A good writer as well as a specialist in black holes, Impey works hard and mostly successfully to illuminate complex phenomena without resorting to the TV documentary magic show (entertainment trumping explanation) and includes plenty of personal anecdotes, imaginative analogies, and useful illustrations.Readers who remember freshman college physics or astronomy will have an easier time, but few will regret encountering such irresistible astrophysical wonders.

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November 1, 2018

Veteran writer Impey (astronomy, Univ. of Arizona;{amp}nbsp;How It Began) examines black holes, which he refers to as "Einstein's Monsters" because they are mysterious, difficult to find, and tend to scare people. Readers do not need a deep understanding of astronomy to comprehend this accessible work, which is divided into two parts: the evidence surrounding black holes and later chapters discussing their past, present, and future. The first section covers the long-standing theory of the existence of black holes as well as 20th-century scientists who made massive strides in their study. Moving on, it relays how black holes are formed, what they do to the matter and material surrounding them, and how astronomers are discovering new black holes and what they are learning about the universe from them. VERDICT Fans of popular science authors such as Neil deGrasse Tyson, Lisa Randall, and Mike Brown will enjoy this wonderful, accessible introduction to black holes.{amp}mdash;Jason L. Steagall, formerly with Gateway Technical Coll. Lib., Elkhorn, WI

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Starred review from October 15, 2018
Astronomer Impey (Beyond: Our Future in Space?, 2015) surveys the research into black holes. Mathematically allowed by Einstein's theory of general relativity, the idea of a point of infinite density within space-time so curved that light cannot escape wasn't accepted by most astrophysicists until the 1960s, when John Wheeler coined the catchy phrase, black hole. Skeptical and empirical, the scientists required proof, and Impey recounts various observations of electromagnetic radiation that piqued curiosity; indeed, radio astronomy found something big and energetic at the center of our Milky Way galaxy as early as the 1930s. As detection technology improved, studies of cosmic sources of X-rays, gamma rays, and gravity waves (a discovery touted in Janna Levin's Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space?, 2016) have dispelled all scientific doubt that black holes are actual objects. Black hole research is now entering a realm of description (that Milky Way radio beacon is a black hole four-million times the mass of the Sun) and of cosmic prediction. Replete with explanatory diagrams, visualizations of black holes, and lively accounts of scientific personalities, Impey's book will wow the general-interest science audience.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)