Lynn Gamwell's Reading List

"Yes. It’s very concise, and it’s good for getting a scientific view of black holes. It’s a little technical. It has some formulas in it, but it’s good. If you’re a general reader, you can skip over the technical parts. I think it’s more difficult. A Brief History of Time was more for a popular audience."

"This is a book for people that are interested in how the first image of a black hole was made. The first image was released in April 2019. Heino Falcke gives a first-hand view, because he was part of the Event Horizon Telescope team."

"Yes, and I do have science readers. Two science readers read the book to make sure I wasn’t making any obvious mistakes. I have an art reader as well, but mainly it’s about getting the science correct. I’ve had science and math readers for all my books that I’ve published on art and science. Because I don’t have any background in science, I write in plain English for a non-scientific audience."

"It’s just excellent. She’s Dutch but the thesis is in English—she went to a British university. She spent time with the people who imaged black holes. It’s about all the science images of black holes, and it’s very, very clear. Yes, definitely. I learned about them from her, from this thesis. It’s very, very good. I would recommend it over the other two books that are published. It’s not published, so it might be harder to get hold of. No. I had heard of them—everybody’s heard of them—but I wasn’t interested in black holes until I had to study them for the lecture. I worked on them for a couple of months, and by the time I gave the lecture, I was blown away by black holes. The lecture was well received, so I proposed a book on it. That was the beginning."

"It’s about a Japanese myth. It goes on and on, but one character’s grandfather had a black hole implanted in his palm. And every male descendant has a black hole in his palm. The character is called Miroku and he’s a Buddhist monk. He turns the black hole from a curse into a weapon. He sucks things like monsters into his black hole, and he uses it for good. That was a character that I was real interested in. I found a lot of children’s books on black holes. One I didn’t include was by a physicist—whose name will go unmentioned—who tells children that if they visit a black hole, they’ll never come home. I thought that was grim."

"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."