The Story of Collapsing Stars

Pankaj S Joshi Oxford University Press £14.99 PB

Black holes are surely the most fascinating objects the Universe has to offer. These superdense points of concentrated mass, surrounded by event horizons from which not even light can escape, have haunted our imaginations for decades.

The Story of Collapsing Stars is not just another introduction to black holes. Author Pankaj Joshi is one of a growing number of scientists arguing that longstanding ideas about these cosmic monsters may be wrong – or, at least, considerably oversimplified.

And so Joshi sets out to introduce, as painlessly as possible, the concept of naked singularities. These are regions where the distortion of space-time around the dense singularity point (as predicted by general relativity) can remain exposed to view rather than sealed away behind an event horizon. Such objects, Joshi shows, could be formed during the deaths of certain types of massive stars. What’s more, if they could be observed, they would provide a powerful demonstration of ‘quantum gravity’, the hypothetical theory that unites gravity with the other fundamental forces binding matter on smaller scales.

The author approaches this daunting subject in a meticulous fashion, unfolding the story from first principles over 10 well-organised chapters, valiantly avoiding mathematical equations throughout, and raising many intriguing questions from the frontiers of physics and cosmology.

However, the book sadly falters in terms of readability, due mainly to an academic and overly repetitive writing style. Getting to grips with such a complex topic was always going to be a tall order, but a little more copy editing could really have helped this book fulfil its potential.

GILES SPARROW is a science writer and a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society