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If you have ever wondered what it might feel like to be sucked into a black hole \u2014 twisted, stretched, confused, doomed \u2014 you could do worse than trip through \u201cThe Warped Side of Our Universe, An Odyssey Through Black Holes, Wormholes, Time Travel and Gravitational Waves,\u201d a collaborative book project by Kip Thorne, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, and Lia Halloran, a visual artist and chair of the art department at Chapman University in Orange, Calif.<\/p>\n
Dr. Thorne brings impressive credentials to the task. In 2017 he won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the Laser Interferometry Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, which discovered space-time vibrations resulting from the collision of two distant black holes. He was also the executive producer of the movie \u201cInterstellar.\u201d Ms. Halloran, who grew up surfing and skateboarding in the Bay Area, became obsessed with science after a high school internship at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.<\/p>\n
The book consists of illustrations of what Dr. Thorne likes to call the \u201cspace-time storms\u201d predicted by general relativity, Einstein\u2019s theory of gravity, alternating with his own explanations of the physics, which appear in verse. Many of the illustrations, which are in ink on drafting film, portray Ms. Halloran\u2019s wife, Felicia, being whipped around, crushed and twisted by the forces of nature.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
These portrayals include real, cutting-edge science based on work carried out in recent years and led by Dr. Thorne and Saul Teukolsky at Cornell University, in a project called Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes, or SXS. Gravitational waves were expected to stretch and squeeze space-time in orthogonal directions as they travel, but it turns out that they also twist space-time by a tiny amount. As Felicia falls into a black hole, her feet spin in one direction while her head rotates in the other; in Ms. Halloran\u2019s drawings this motion is represented by spirals that Dr. Thorne calls vortenses.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe twisting has not been something that current technology is able to measure,\u201d Dr. Thorne said in an interview, \u201cwhereas the stretching and squeezing is easy to measure.\u201d In the case of LIGO\u2019s colliding black holes, that measurable difference is a whopping four one-thousandths of the diameter of a proton.<\/p>\n
Dr. Thorne and Ms. Halloran have been collaborating for more than a decade. She got her M.F.A. in printmaking from Yale in 2001 with a project based on Dr. Thorne\u2019s book \u201cBlack Holes & Time Warps, Einstein\u2019s Outrageous Legacy.\u201d She met him years later at a party in Pasadena, Calif., and was \u201cgushing,\u201d she recalled. She invited Dr. Thorne to her studio, and they agreed to collaborate on elaborating on and celebrating our strange, Einsteinian universe.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Their first project was an article commissioned for Playboy Magazine in 2010, at the invitation of Dr. Thorne\u2019s former book editor, who worked there at the time. The piece, consisting of 6,000 words and nine paintings, was ultimately rejected because the images of Felicia did not meet the magazine\u2019s standards for female beauty. \u201cI hadn\u2019t objectified the women enough,\u201d Ms. Halloran said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Dr. Thorne refused to publish without his collaborator. So the two soldiered on, working side-by-side in her studio, producing illustrations and text for what they began to call their \u201clittle book.\u201d During the pandemic, they were treated to an airborne tour of the LIGO antenna in Hanford, Wash., in a friend\u2019s private jet.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was just a fine act of friendship and collaboration,\u201d Ms. Halloran said. \u201cKip would come to my studio. We\u2019d talk and my head would get fuzzy after trying to wrap it around all the fantastic things he was saying.\u201d She added, \u201cAnd then I would try to create something that could tangibly embody the kinds of concepts that he was describing.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
At one point, curious to see what they had, they asked a graphic designer friend to put together a prototype of their combined material. Dr. Thorne had been writing in prose, but as an experiment the designer broke the text up into stanzas. Dr. Thorne had an epiphany. \u201cI really do polish the prose and I work at trying to make it flow nicely,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I realized that it really was almost verse, and so I decided to attempt to turn it all into verse.\u201d<\/p>\n
He drew the line at trying to make it rhyme. But some would say that the poetry was already there, in Einstein\u2019s math.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n