If you’ve ever wondered what it would feel like to be sucked into a black hole, twisted, stretched, confused, and doomed, you might be wondering what it would be like to be sucked into a black hole, twisted, stretched, confused, and doomed. You could do worse than traveling around the world. Travel and Gravitational Waves is a joint book project by Kip Thorne, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, and Leah Halloran, a visual artist and chair of the School of Fine Arts at Chapman University in Orange, California.
Dr. Thorne brings great qualifications to this role. In 2017, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work with the Laser Interferometry Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which discovered the space-time oscillations caused by the collision of two distant black holes. He also served as an executive producer on the film Interstellar. Halloran, who grew up surfing and skateboarding in the Bay Area, fell in love with science after interning at San Francisco’s Exploratorium in high school.
The book consists of illustrations of Dr. Thorne’s preferred “space-time storms” predicted by general relativity, Einstein’s theory of gravity, and explanations of his own physics as they appear in poetry. Many of the illustrations, done in ink on drafting film, depict Mr. Halloran’s wife, Felicia, being whipped, crushed and twisted by the forces of nature.
These depictions include real, cutting-edge science based on research conducted in recent years in a project called Extreme Space-Time Simulation (SXS), led by Dr. Thorne and Dr. Saul Tukolsky at Cornell University. Gravitational waves were expected to stretch or contract space-time orthogonally as they travel, but it turns out that they also slightly warp space-time. When Felicia falls into the black hole, her feet rotate in one direction and her head rotates in the opposite direction. In Mr. Halloran’s drawing, this movement is represented by a spiral that Dr. Thorne calls a whorl.
“Torsion cannot be measured with current technology, but stretching and squeezing can be easily measured,” Dr. Thorne said in an interview. In the case of LIGO’s colliding black holes, that measurable difference is a whopping 4/1000 of a proton’s diameter.
Dr. Thorne and Ms. Halloran have worked together for over 10 years. She received her master’s degree in printmaking from Yale University in 2001 with a project based on Dr. Thorne’s book “Black Holes, Time Warps, and Einstein’s Extraordinary Legacy.” She met him years later at a party in Pasadena, California, and he was “full of life,” she recalled. She invited Dr. Thorne to her own studio and they agreed to collaborate in detailing and celebrating our strange Einsteinian world.
Their first project was a commissioned article for Playboy Magazine in 2010 at the invitation of Dr. Thorne’s former book editor, who was working there at the time. The work, which consisted of 6,000 words and nine pictures, was ultimately rejected because Felicia’s images did not meet the magazine’s standards for female beauty. “I didn’t target women enough,” Halloran said.
Dr. Thorne refused to publish without a collaborator. There they continued to work together in her studio, producing illustrations and text for what they came to call “The Little Book.” During the pandemic, they took a friend’s private jet for an airborne tour of the LIGO antenna in Hanford, Washington.
“It was just a great act of friendship and cooperation,” Halloran said. “Kip would come to my studio. We would talk and my mind would go off trying to piece together all the great things he was saying.” She added, “And I set out to create something that could embody the kind of concepts he was describing,” he added.
At one point, they wanted to see what they had, so they asked a graphic designer friend to create a prototype using a combination of materials. Dr. Thorne was writing in prose, but as an experiment the designer divided the text into stanzas. Dr. Thorne had an idea. “I’m really honing my prose and trying to make it flow well,” he said. “Then I realized that it was really mostly poetry, so I decided to try and turn everything into poetry.”
He drew the line at trying to rhyme. However, some may say that poetry already existed in Einstein’s mathematics.