Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Unlike the other reviewers, I am a (retired) theoretical physicist (Ph.D Yale 1959). This probably accounts for the fact that my reaction to this book is considerably less enthusiastic than the others. There is no question that Thorne writes well and the book has been carefully edited. Moreover, his personal anecdotes and portraits of many famous physicists are very interesting. You get the impression that Thorne was very sociable and popular with his peers. This plus the fact that he had powerful mentors and supporters probably explains why he has had such a succeesful career despite his apparent lack of any particular achievements let alone breakthroughs. The General Theory of Relativity was formulated in 1915. Despite its reputation for being very difficult, it is actually fairly easy to understand provided that you have an undergraduate education in physics and mathematics. The easiest technical book to read is D.F. Lawdens's "Introduction to Tensor Calculus, Relativity and Cosmology". The theory of black holes was deduced from Einstein's field equation by Schwarzschild in 1916. So here we have a theory that is brilliant and as far as we know true. But it is after all nearly 90 years old and most of the important consequences were worked out in the first few years. So what have people like Thorne done with it since? The answer I am afraid is much less that the general public appears to believe. Books like this contain a lot of jazzy stuff about time-travel and similar exotica. But Thorne is not as bad as Hawking and others who have also made careers of thrilling the public with popularizations of arcane theories that have nothing to do with physics since they can never be tested. Einstein was a true genius who made a real breakthrough in our understanding of the universe. Unfortunately there are no more Einsteins today, only academic poseurs who bask in his reflected glory. Physics today is a science in decline; its widely touted "discoveries" often have little relation to the real world. Unfortunately, an increasingly scientifically illiterate public can no longer tell the difference between real physics and largely irrelevant speculations such as are on display in this book.