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Prologue: a voyage among the holes, in which the reader, in a science fiction tale, encounters black holes and all their strange properties as best we understand them in the 1990s -- The relativity of space and time, in which Einstein destroys Newton's conceptions of space and time as absolute -- The warping of space and time, in which Hermann Minkowski unifies space and time, and Einstein warps them -- Black holes discoverd and rejected, in which Einstein's laws of warped spacetime predict black holes, and Einstein rejects the prediction -- The mystery of the white dwarfs, in which Eddington and Chandrasekhar do battle over the death of massive stars; must they shrink when they die, creating black holes? or will quantum mechanics save them? -- Implosion is compulsory, in which even the muclear force, supposedly the strongest of all forces, cannot resist the crush of gravity -- Implosion to what? in which all the armaments of theoretical physics cannot ward off the conclusion: implosion produces black holes -- The golden age, in which black holes are found to spin and pulsate, store energy and release it, and have no hair -- The search, in which a method to search for black holes in the sky is proposed and pursued and succeeds (probably) -- Serendipity, in which astronomers are forced to conclude, without any prior predictions, that black holes a millionfold heavier than the Sun, inhabit the cores of galaxies (probably) -- Ripples of curvature, in which gravitational waves carry to Earth encoded symphonies of black holes colliding and physicists devise instruments to moniter the waves and decipher their symphonies -- What is reality? in which spacetime is viewed as curved on Sundays and flat on Mondays and horizons are made from vacuum on Sundays and charge on Monday, but Sunday's experiments and Monday's experiments agree in all details -- Black holes evaporate, in which a black hole horizon is chothed in an atmosphere of radiation and hot particles that slowly evaporate, and the hole shrinks and then explodes -- Inside black holes, in which physicists, wrestling with Einstein;s equation, seek the secret of what is inside a black hole: a route into another universe? a singularity with infinite tidal gravity? the end of time and gravity, and birth of quantum foam? -- Wormholes and time machines, in which the author seeks insight into physical laws by asking can highly advanced civilizations build wormholes through hyperspace for rapid interstellar travel and machines for traveling backward in time? -- Epilogue: an overview of Einstein's legacy, past and future, and an update on several central characters. |