The best books on Black Holes

Could you start by telling me briefly what black holes are? How do you explain them to people who don’t know anything about them?

Black holes are an area of spacetime where the gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape them.

And they’re named after a prison in Calcutta?

Yes, it was a prison from which no prisoner escaped, so it was called ‘the Black Hole of Calcutta.’ Isn’t that grim?

Light travels the fastest in the universe. So if light can’t escape from a black hole, then nothing can escape.

How did you get interested in them?

I’ve written a lot on art and science, and because of that, I was invited to give a lecture at an annual conference of people that study black holes. They’re scientists—physicists, astronomers, mathematicians.  I thought, ‘I should show art about black holes.’

I was astounded at how many artists there around the world who do art about black holes. And that’s where my book began.

Black holes are maybe quite difficult to understand if you’re not an astrophysicist. Does art have a big role to play in bringing them to the general public?

Artists understand a little bit about them. Nobody really understands them. No scientist really understands them completely. But many themes in black holes resonate with the larger community, like inescapability, void, blackness, nothing on the inside sees anything on the outside (or vice versa), an infinite density, the laws of physics break down in a black hole and so on. Those are the things that artists pick up on. The science of black holes is technical, as you say, but artists understand the major themes, and that’s what they’re attracted to.

So what were you trying to do with your book, would you say?

I was trying to interest artists in science and scientists in art. It has a dual audience. It’s also for the general educated public to see how artists express their worldview.

The book has photography – are these images of actual black holes?

The book has scientific photography, like the image of M87* made by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). That was the first image of a black hole that was released in April 2019. The EHT also made an image of Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

Then there are artists who do photographs, like Fabian Oefner. He takes photographs that represent a black hole by putting paint on a drill bit. When it spins, the centrifugal force makes the paint spray out, and then he photographs it with a high-speed camera. So that’s a metaphor for an accretion disc, the disc of dust and gas that’s around a black hole.

Let’s look at some of the books you’ve recommended. First up is Black Holes: The Key to Understanding the Universe by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw, who are both physics professors here in the UK. Is this the best science book to read if you want to understand black holes?

Yes. It’s very concise, and it’s good for getting a scientific view of black holes. It’s a little technical. It has some formulas in it, but it’s good. If you’re a general reader, you can skip over the technical parts.

In terms of difficulty levels, how does it compare to Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time?

I think it’s more difficult. A Brief History of Time was more for a popular audience.

You’re also recommending Light in the Darkness: Black Holes, the Universe, and Us by Heino Falcke, a professor of astrophysics in the Netherlands. What does this book focus on?

This is a book for people that are interested in how the first image of a black hole was made. The first image was released in April 2019. Heino Falcke gives a first-hand view, because he was part of the Event Horizon Telescope team.

Do you have a background in science or art or both?

I’m all self-taught in science. My background is exclusively in art history. I do have a degree in philosophy from one of my tours through the university, but I have an MA and a doctorate in art history.

Your book, Conjuring the Void, gives a very clear exposition of black holes and how they were discovered. Did you learn all that through reading books like the ones you recommend?

Yes, and I do have science readers. Two science readers read the book to make sure I wasn’t making any obvious mistakes. I have an art reader as well, but mainly it’s about getting the science correct. I’ve had science and math readers for all my books that I’ve published on art and science.

Because I don’t have any background in science, I write in plain English for a non-scientific audience.

Next up, you’ve suggested reading a PhD thesis. It’s entitled “The Event Horizon as a Vanishing Point: a History of the First Image of a Black Hole Shadow from Observation” and it’s by Emilie Skulberg.

It’s just excellent. She’s Dutch but the thesis is in English—she went to a British university. She spent time with the people who imaged black holes. It’s about all the science images of black holes, and it’s very, very clear.

And you’ve included some of those images in your book?

Yes, definitely. I learned about them from her, from this thesis. It’s very, very good. I would recommend it over the other two books that are published. It’s not published, so it might be harder to get hold of.

Did you have a pre-existing interest in black holes before attending the conference on them?

No. I had heard of them—everybody’s heard of them—but I wasn’t interested in black holes until I had to study them for the lecture. I worked on them for a couple of months, and by the time I gave the lecture, I was blown away by black holes.

The lecture was well received, so I proposed a book on it. That was the beginning.

As you said at the beginning, they really seem to capture the imagination in popular culture, don’t they? On that note, tell me about the manga you’re recommending, Inuyasha by Rumiko Takahashi.

It’s about a Japanese myth. It goes on and on, but one character’s grandfather had a black hole implanted in his palm. And every male descendant has a black hole in his palm. The character is called Miroku and he’s a Buddhist monk. He turns the black hole from a curse into a weapon. He sucks things like monsters into his black hole, and he uses it for good. That was a character that I was real interested in.

I found a lot of children’s books on black holes. One I didn’t include was by a physicist—whose name will go unmentioned—who tells children that if they visit a black hole, they’ll never come home. I thought that was grim.

The book you do recommend is Black Holes and Uncle Albert by British physicist Russell Stannard.

Yes, it’s about Albert Einstein’s mythical niece, Gedanken—which means “thoughts” in German—who goes to a black hole and comes back unscathed. She learns a lot about black holes.

Another of my favorites is The Universe Ate My Homework by David Zeltser. There are a lot of books about black holes for children, as well as dozens and dozens of video games.

In the last five years, over 30 books on black holes were published in English for a popular audience. Isn’t that amazing? It’s a crowded field.

But nobody had looked at black holes and art like you did?

No, I don’t think so. I think I would have run across it in my research.

Well you’ve done a beautiful job.

Thank you.

It’s a coffee table book, isn’t it?

Yes, I write coffee table books. But as one of my reviewers said, it’s a coffee table book, but it’s scholarly. I took that as a compliment.

I’ve got a very non-scientific brain, so seeing these images and artists’ representations of black holes is a good way for me to think about them.

Yes, but you do have to know something about black holes to appreciate the art because some artists are doing work about a particular aspect of black holes. For example, NASA recorded vibrations coming from inside a black hole, and transferred the vibrations into sound that humans can hear. Two pieces of art have been done on that sonification, and you need to know that to appreciate the art, otherwise the musical aspect of the art would go unnoticed.

That’s your role, basically, to explain to the general public what these art images are about?

Yes, exactly—and I cover the key science images too. Because there are many interesting science images. Black holes are invisible, and so how do you represent them?

Can you give me an example?

The first science image is from the early 1970s. It’s of a star that’s going at a uniform distance and uniform speed around a black hole, but it curves up because of the warping of the spacetime around the black hole. So it appears to curve up in the science diagram.

That’s an example that we see again and again, this image of the accretion disk, which is a disk of gas and dust around a black hole. It’s flat, but it appears to curve up because of the warping of spacetime by the gravity of a black hole.

And those are photographs, or those are diagrams?

They’re diagrams. There hadn’t been a photograph at that time.

So the first photo was also of an accretion disk?

Yes, the famous image that your readers will be familiar with—that was released in April 2019—is of an accretion disc. You can’t photograph the black hole, because it’s black. So it’s of the dust and matter around the black hole, and it’s photographed from an angle. The image is taken from a high angle, so you don’t see the warping of the accretion disc, as you would if it had been taken from more of an edge-on angle.

It’s very interesting.

If you’re interested, I hope the general public will be interested.

So have you ever written about, say, Renaissance art? Or have you always focused on science?

I’ve done a book on mathematics and art. I covered Euclid and Pythagoras in antiquity. But I also covered the Renaissance because it was a revival of classicism, of Euclid and Vitruvius and so on.

I’m interested that you were invited to this conference on black holes. Are scientists quite open to hearing about art?

They’re very open to it. They’re real interested in how their work affects the culture.  I’ve gone back to their annual conference each year, and each year they have an artist or somebody from the non-scientific world. They once had a writer. They’re real interested in the application of their work to the wider culture.

I suppose what they’re studying is a bit mystical, almost, so you need art or something ineffable…I don’t really know what I’m getting at here.

It’s metaphorical. Art is a metaphor for the way we view the world. We view the world in a scientific context, but art is a metaphor for it.