‘Vortenses’ and the storms of space-time

If you’ve ever wondered what it feels like to be sucked into a black hole – twisted, stretched, confused, doomed – you could do worse than by reading ‘The Warped Side of Our Universe, An Odyssey Through Black Holes, Wormholes, Time’ to travel. Travel and Gravitational Waves,” a joint book project by Kip Thorne, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, and Lia Halloran, a visual artist and chair of the art department at Chapman University in Orange, California.

Dr. Thorne has impressive credentials for this task. In 2017, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the Laser Interferometry Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, which discovered space-time vibrations resulting from the collision of two distant black holes. He was also the executive producer of the movie ‘Interstellar’. Ms. Halloran, who grew up surfing and skateboarding in the Bay Area, became obsessed with science after a high school internship at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.

The book consists of illustrations of what Dr. Thorne likes to mention the “space-time storms” predicted by general relativity, Einstein’s theory of gravity, juxtaposed with his own explanations of physics, which appear in verse. Many of the illustrations, inked on the cartoon, show Mrs. Halloran’s wife, Felicia, being tossed around, crushed and twisted by the forces of nature.

These images include real, groundbreaking science, based on work conducted over the past several years and led by Dr. Thorne and Saul Teukolsky at Cornell University, in a project called Simulated eXtreme Spacetimes, or SXS. Gravitational waves were expected to stretch and compress space-time in orthogonal directions as they travel, but it turns out they also warp space-time slightly. As Felicia falls into a black hole, her feet spin in one direction while her head spins in the other; in Ms. Halloran’s drawings this movement is represented by spirals that Dr. Thorne calls vortensen.

“Turning is not something that current technology can measure,” said Dr. Thorne in an interview, “while the stretching and squeezing are easy to measure.” In the case of LIGO’s colliding black holes, that measurable difference is as much as four-thousandths of the diameter of a proton.

Dr. Thorne and Ms. Halloran have worked together for more than a decade. She received her MFA in printmaking from Yale in 2001 with a project based on Dr. Thorne’s book ‘Black Holes & Time Warps, Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy’. She met him years later at a party in Pasadena, California, and was “gushing,” she recalled. She invited Dr. Thorne in her studio, and they agreed to work together to flesh out and celebrate our strange, Einsteinian universe.

Their first project was a commissioned article for Playboy Magazine in 2010, invited by Dr.’s former book editor. Thorne, who worked there at the time. The piece, consisting of 6,000 words and nine paintings, was ultimately rejected because Felicia’s images did not meet the magazine’s standards for feminine beauty. “I hadn’t objectified the women enough,” Ms. Halloran said.

Dr. Thorne refused to publish without his collaborator. So the two went ahead and worked side by side in her studio, producing illustrations and text for what they came to call their “little book.” During the pandemic, they were treated to a flyby of the LIGO antenna in Hanford, Washington, on a friend’s private jet.

“It was just a beautiful act of friendship and cooperation,” Ms Halloran said. “Kip came to my studio. We talked and my mind became foggy trying to wrap my head around all the wonderful things he was saying.” She added, “And then I tried to create something that could embody in a tangible way the kinds of concepts that he was describing.”

At one point, curious about what they had, they asked a graphic designer friend to put together a prototype of their combined material. Dr. Thorne had written in prose, but as an experiment the designer divided the text into stanzas. Dr. Thorne had an epiphany. “I really polish the prose and I try to make it flow nicely,” he said. “And I realized that it was actually almost a verse, so I decided to try to make it all into one verse.”

He drew the line at trying to make it rhyme. But some would say that the poetry was already there, in Einstein’s mathematics.