Black holes : a traveler's guide

Black holes are the much publicized 'vacuum cleaners' of space that have such a strong gravitational pull that they suck in everything that comes too near to them, and from which nothing can escape.

Even light rays are unable to pass through them which is why they appear black.

Black holes are not solid objects, they are areas in space of extremely high gravity.

Astrophysicists have recently theorized that black holes may actually serve as tunnels in space through which - if we could travel through them - we could enter other universes that exist parallel to our own.Clifford Pickover creates two fictional "Scientists of the Future" who travel to a black hole and perform a series of experiments designed to reveal all of the intriguing properties of black holes, such as experiments to see how close an object can get to a black hole without being sucked in, to show what would happen to an object that did get sucked in, and to see whether it would be possible to travel through a black hole.

This introduction to the remarkable physics of black holes explains exactly what they are, at a level accessible to the popular science audience.