Book Review: Gravity’s Engines — How Bubble-Blowing Black Holes Rule Galaxies, Stars, and Life in the Cosmos
1. Genre
Gravity’s Engines — How Bubble-Blowing Black Holes Rule Galaxies, Stars, and Life in the Cosmos is a popular science book discussing the astrophysics of black holes. Kip Thorne’s classic Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy is similar in genre.
2. Who Should Read Gravity’s Engines
There are plenty of popular science books that discuss black holes. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, Cycles of Time by Roger Penrose, and The Riddle of Gravitation by Peter Bergmann are just a few examples, each exploring the subject from an angle that fits the book’s general narrative, which incidentally, is not about black holes.
These books focus on the theoretical framework of black holes rather than their astrophysics. There is no shortage of publications explaining General Relativity, the Schwarzschield solutions of the Einstein field equations that lead to black holes, the geometry of spacetime around black holes, and other fascinating physics concepts of these astronomical objects.
However, few works in popular science other than Gravity’s Engines explore the physical properties of black holes, their environments, dynamics, and their impact on the evolution of galaxies, stars, and planets in the cosmos.
Caleb Scharf, the director of the Columbia Astrobiology Centre, wanted to describe black holes as one could see them with telescopes (although we must use a wide range of telescopes from microwaves to visible light and Gamma and X-rays to grasp the whole picture).
If you are in a rush and want to read one book about black holes, it would be Gravity’s Engines. If you have more time, you might want to check both Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy and Gravity’s Engines.
3. Contents of Gravity’s Engines
The central themes of Gravity’s Engines are the following:
4. Writing Style
Scharf’s writing style is smooth-flowing; you will have no trouble understanding most of the ideas and concepts described.
What I liked most were the metaphors Scharf used, especially the figures, numbers, and ratios he provided, as these would help the reader enormously in picturing the objects and the stories in the book.
There is a bit of repetition in the main ideas across the book, but it’s minimal and would not come in the way of enjoying the book.
5. Author’s Biography
Caleb Scharf is a British-American astronomer and science communicator who has made significant contributions to astrobiology and exoplanetary science. He is currently the senior scientist for astrobiology at the NASA Ames Research Center in California, having previously served as the director of the multidisciplinary Columbia Astrobiology Center at Columbia University in New York.