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EDITORIAL INFORMATION

With a dazzling display of wit, and knowledge based upon scientific research, acclaimed author Clifford A. Pickover takes you on a fun-filled epic journey through time and space, right into the core of the greatest cosmic enigma - the black hole. As narrator of the tale, you are the captain of a space ship on a mission to discover the mystery of the black hole. With you is Mr. Plex, a trusty student, who is a scolex -a member of a race of creatures with strong diamond bodies (not forgetting the sexy Mrs. Plex too!) He will carry out any experiment for you - but don't let him get too close to the black hole or he'll be sucked in forever...

In an engaging and stimulating style, Pickover poses a wealth of questions about black holes and gives possible speculative answers. Key areas considered include: How to calculate a black hole mass; a black hole's gravitational lens; anatomical dissection of black holes; mathematical black holes; as well as the terrifying possibility that we are all living in a black hole.

(Extracted from the press release).

GENERAL TABLE OF CONTENTS

-Contents.

-Preface.

-Acknowledgments.

-1- How to Calculate a Black Hole's Mass.

-2- The Black Hole's Event Horizon Circunference.

-3- Black-Hole Tidal Forces.

-4- A Black Hole's Gravitational Lens.

-5- A Black Hole's Gravitational Blueshift.

-6- Gravitational Time Dilation.

-7- Anatomical Dissection of Black Holes.

-8- Embedding Diagrams for Warped Space-Time.

-9- Gravitational Wave Recoil.

-10- Optical Appearance of a Collapsing Star.

-11- Gravitational Distension Near a Black Hole's Heart.

-12- Quantum Foam.

-13- Black-Hole Recreations.

-14- Mathematical Black Holes.

-15- Black Holes Evaporate.

-16- Wormholes, Cosmological Doughnuts, and Parallel Universes.

-Postcript 1. Could We Be Living in a Black Hole?

-Postcript 2. The Grand Internet Black-Hole Survey.

-Author's Musings.

-Smorgasbord for Computer Junkies.

-Notes.

-Further Reading.

-Index.

OUR REVIEW

This is the kind of book that really makes a scientific issue of an intrinsic difficulty popular. In actual fact, Pickover belongs to the rare category of science writers/scientists who definitely know how to communicate the great issues of science, no matter how difficult they are, to the great readership interested in that universe. The chapters of his work are brief but contain the essence of everything you need to know about the question. Thus, the text happens to be not only comprehensible but also very pleasant to read, perhaps thanks to the fact that the writer has adopted a style in which the reader feels much more involved in the narrative, full of amusing dialogues with the strange Mr. Plex.

It is highly possible that, once the book is finished, we feel inclined in reading some works which deal with the issue at hand in greater technical and mathematical depth, yet for the most common run of people, with this book all their doubts will be answered (with the logical discretion that must be applied to a physical phenomenon which still has many unknown aspects nowadays). Always trying to please the average reader, Pickover includes the code of a great deal of computer programs perfectly simulating many of the characteristics of the black holes, as well as the compilation of the opinions on the latter via Internet on the part of different personalities in the world of astrophysics. All in all, this is no doubt a very good work written by a very good author, who has likewise originated several other books as well as a column in the Discover magazine.