Black Holes and Uncle Albert

"Yes, it’s about Albert Einstein’s mythical niece, Gedanken—which means “thoughts” in German—who goes to a black hole and comes back unscathed. She learns a lot about black holes. Another of my favorites is The Universe Ate My Homework by David Zeltser . There are a lot of books about black holes for children, as well as dozens and dozens of video games. In the last five years, over 30 books on black holes were published in English for a popular audience. Isn’t that amazing? It’s a crowded field. No, I don’t think so. I think I would have run across it in my research. Thank you. Yes, I write coffee table books . But as one of my reviewers said, it’s a coffee table book, but it’s scholarly. I took that as a compliment. Yes, but you do have to know something about black holes to appreciate the art because some artists are doing work about a particular aspect of black holes. For example, NASA recorded vibrations coming from inside a black hole, and transferred the vibrations into sound that humans can hear. Two pieces of art have been done on that sonification, and you need to know that to appreciate the art, otherwise the musical aspect of the art would go unnoticed. Yes, exactly—and I cover the key science images too. Because there are many interesting science images. Black holes are invisible, and so how do you represent them? The first science image is from the early 1970s. It’s of a star that’s going at a uniform distance and uniform speed around a black hole, but it curves up because of the warping of the spacetime around the black hole. So it appears to curve up in the science diagram. That’s an example that we see again and again, this image of the accretion disk, which is a disk of gas and dust around a black hole. It’s flat, but it appears to curve up because of the warping of spacetime by the gravity of a black hole. They’re diagrams. There hadn’t been a photograph at that time. Yes, the famous image that your readers will be familiar with—that was released in April 2019—is of an accretion disc. You can’t photograph the black hole, because it’s black. So it’s of the dust and matter around the black hole, and it’s photographed from an angle. The image is taken from a high angle, so you don’t see the warping of the accretion disc, as you would if it had been taken from more of an edge-on angle. If you’re interested, I hope the general public will be interested. I’ve done a book on mathematics and art. I covered Euclid and Pythagoras in antiquity. But I also covered the Renaissance because it was a revival of classicism, of Euclid and Vitruvius and so on. They’re very open to it. They’re real interested in how their work affects the culture. I’ve gone back to their annual conference each year, and each year they have an artist or somebody from the non-scientific world. They once had a writer. They’re real interested in the application of their work to the wider culture. It’s metaphorical. Art is a metaphor for the way we view the world. We view the world in a scientific context, but art is a metaphor for it."