Black Holes and Time Warps

Last month for book club we read Black Holes and Time Warps by Kip Thorne. It was a behometh of a book. 500+ pages. I confess I didn't make it to the "time warps" part. I got to about page 400.
It was an excellent book in the sense that it gave a more than comprehensive history of black hole research. The book also included a pre-history as it were of astrophysics, a detailed description of the world-wide scientific community, it's complexities, and tendencies during the 1920's right up through the 1990's. It discussed Einstein, the Cold War, the Soviet versus American race to make the biggest most destructive bomb ever, and vignettes into the lives of scientists like Robert Oppenheimer, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Stephen Hawking, , Karl Schwarzchild, and Borisovich Zel'dovich.
The historical accounts were easy to read, and very interesting. The parts that actually delved into the  physics of black holes and neutron stars etc. was a little bit more difficult to get through. That being said, it's not on account of the math on which most of the subject is based. In fact, that may be the greatest triumph of this book! For as mathematical as the subject is, there were very few equations in the book. Awesome!
That being said, the concepts (on which the math is based) were pretty...out there. No pun intended. Any time you are dealing with relativity, space, time, space-time, and all that, things get pretty weird.
I can't explain everything in the book, but I'd like to relate a few anecdotes that I think every one should know about black holes. Ha ha...

Black holes and breakfast at the Cafe!

One of the most surprising things to me was that the idea of a black hole didn't come about from people looking out into space. It seems like they would have been discovered by astronomers, but that was not the case. The first inkling of a black hole actually came from calculations done by physicists in the early part of the 20th century when they mathematically tried to describe what would happen to a large star once it exhausted its fuel and began to collapse. Their calculations were telling them that  a star above a certain mass, would collapse in on itself, and then keep collapsing down to a super small, super massive point that would curve the space around it so much that it would cease to exist in the observable universe!
At the time, most physicists figured that their calculations were wrong. But as time passed it became more and more clear that it wasn't the math that was wrong. Eventually technology caught up to the equations and optical, X-ray and gamma-ray telescopes coroberated the existence of black holes.
The second, and last thing, I will try to explain is the relationship a few of the cool things concerning mass, space and time. E=mc2. But what does that mean? It means that anything that has mass (i.e. you , me, a chair, the earth, the galaxy) can be described as energy. Mass and energy are sort of two different expressions of the same thing. I'm simplifying this a bit (because of the c (which is the speed of light) squared) but that's pretty much the gist of it. How weird and cool is that?
And that the larger the mass of an object the more it can literally distort time! Black holes swallow up everything in their path, and shove it all down to a thing called a singularity. And that super massive teeny-tiny point creates a almost infinitely deep and narrow pucker in space-time that does some really freaky things. The one I will mention is that it bends space-time in such a way that if you had two people observing it, one outside the hole and one (unfortunate soul) descending into it this is how it would play out:

Space, seen from my patio.

To the person going into the hole, they would approach it, pass through the event horizon, and be strung out atom by atom into the singularity. BUT from the perspective of the person outside, it would look like they approached the event horizon, and then froze just on the edge of it forever (well, almost forever)! From the perspective of the outsider, in a less curved part of space, time moves so fast that they cannot detect even the slightest movement from their counterpart. Again, I am so...baffled by that I don't even know if I could ever hope to explain it any better than I just have.
If you find this interesting then I would highly suggest you read this book to get a more inclusive and scientific account of all the things I'm saying. If you don't, well then, know that I am NOT making this stuff up. Black holes are real, they happen, there is one at the center of our galaxy, and it warps space and time. Bwaa-haa-haa. Cool.