Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Hearts of Darkness
Gravity's Engines: The Other Side of Black Holes
By Caleb Scharf
Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 252pp £20 order from our bookshop
The existence of black holes is one of the universe’s most perplexing truths. The mathematical models which describe these enigmatic celestial omnivores suggest that they are naturally, almost inevitably produced when very large stars collapse at the end of their active lives. But the models also suggest that they are places where space and time become grossly distorted, so that the heart of every hole is a singularity – the physical realisation of what astrobiologist Caleb Scharf describes in Gravity’s Engines as ‘a point at which an algebraic expression provides no meaningful answer, like calculating the value of one divided by zero’.
The literature of black holes has long obsessed over the epistemological riddle this presents for physics. Solve black holes and you might solve cosmology at the same time. This is heady, heavily theoretical stuff that is often utterly divorced from
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553
'The authors do not shrink from spelling out the scale of the killings when the Rhodesians made long-distance raids on guerrilla camps in Mozambique and Zambia.'
Xan Smiley on how Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/what-the-secret-agent-saw