White holes: Cosmic gushers in the universe

Fórum da Ciência #4

by John Gribbin

Investigates the existence and nature of white holes, cosmic bodies of almost immeasurable explosive energy, and explores some of the questions they pose to astrophysicists, mathematicians, astronomers, and philosophers

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Physics

296 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

John R. Gribbin is a British science writer, an astrophysicist, and a visiting fellow in astronomy at the University of Sussex. His writings include quantum physics, human evolution, climate change, global warming, the origins of the universe, and biographies of famous scientists. He also writes science fiction.

Reviews

[Gendou · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is out of date, and full of lies!!
The central thesis in this book (white holes exist, and the matter they spew out explains some observations of galaxies) is wrong.
The book is missing key discoveries and arguments not available at the time of writing.
This is understandable, but the author's smug tone is laughable.
Here are some facts to keep in mind:

1. The redshift controversy is over, Quasars are distant objects.
2. INFLATION explains the anisotropy (lumpiness) of the universe.
3. Black holes are at the center of galaxies, not cosmic gushers.
4. Big bang is NOT a White Hole, that would violate thermodynamics.
5. Black holes do not "explode", the event horizon will shrink not vanish.
6. Spiral galaxies are NOT the result of disc galaxies spontaneously ejecting child galaxies.
7. The creation myth in The Bible was not inspired by visiting aliens!!!

The author spends lots of time relating science and science-fiction.
This is messy at best, and at times he flagrantly supports silly science fiction ideas which have no physical relevance at all, such as tachyons, psychics, and other mysticism! I mean, come on. Seriously, is this supposed to be a serious book on physics, or not?

[Sam Jokerman · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mostly theories and speculation about unanswered questions on cosmological topics at the time it was written, 1977, like white holes. Unnecessarily brings in theories from science fiction. It’s one of Gribbins’ early books where he does a lot of speculation of far-out ideas and mostly gets things wrong. Not the book to first learn about the universe and cosmology. He gets better, more focused as a writer in time and goes on to write some of the best explanatory science books around.

[rachel · Rating 2 out of 5]

this book is quite out of date and the main idea of this book has been proved otherwise. HOWEVER i did. really enjoy this because it was interesting to see old ideas and views but it was an extremely heavy read :))