Episode Details

Dr. Sten Odenwald discusses The Essential Book of Black Holes. See my review of the new book below.

But first, watch this video in which I interview Dr. Odenwald about his book!

Timeline

00:00 Intro

2:15 Math & Black Holes

5:00 Holographic universe

5:50 Hypernova

9:05 White holes

14:45 Is our universe in a black hole?

17:50 Gravity is NOT a force

25:45 Galactic Power Plant

Book Review of The Essential Book of Black Holes

At 159 pages and 12 chapters, The Essential Book of Black Holes is a literary black hole: deceptively small, absurdly dense, and liable to warp your sense of time until “I’ll just read a few pages” becomes “where did my evening go?”

If you’ve ever wanted a NASA astronomer to sit you down and explain black holes without making your brain perform quantum tunneling, this is it.

Sten Odenwald walks you through gravity, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, and even the holographic principle in bite-sized chunks that hit harder than a collapsing star. The language is accessible, which is impressive given the subject matter and slightly suspicious given how much you suddenly think you understand.

The format helps with the illusion of safety: 12 short chapters, full color, pretty illustrations, and a neat foil-stamped hardback in the print edition—like a friendly brochure for the end of spacetime. Each chapter is compact enough to read on a commute, but information-dense enough that your neurons may demand hazard pay. It’s marketed as a “pocket volume,” which is appropriate, because it will happily consume every spare pocket of free time you have.

As an introduction, it’s almost suspiciously good: clear explanations, focused scope, and just enough cosmological mind-bending to make you question reality without needing a support group. If you’re black-hole-curious and want a fun, manageable plunge into the abyss, this is a stellar gateway drug to modern astrophysics—compact, colourful, and with a gravitational pull that far exceeds its modest 159 pages.

VERDICT: 9 out of 10 stars!

About Sten Odenwald

Sten Odenwald is an American astronomer, author, NASA scientist-educator, and science communicator.

He earned his Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard University in 1982, focusing on accretion disks around supermassive black holes and the far-infrared properties of the Milky Way’s Galactic Center.

Career

Odenwald worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Naval Research Laboratory’s Space Sciences Division from 1982 to 1990, contributing to the NASA Cosmic Background Explorer and Diffuse Infrared Background Experiment. Later roles included positions at Sachs Freeman Associates, BDM International, Applied Research Corporation, and Raytheon, with a focus on education outreach for missions like IMAGE and COBE. Since 2005, his research has centered on space weather impacts, such as solar storms on satellites, and he retired from NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center while serving as Director of STEM Resource Development and part of the Heliophysics Education Consortium until 2025.

Publications

He has authored books like The Astronomy Cafe, The 23rd Cycle, Patterns in the Void, and Back to the Astronomy Cafe, and published over 100 papers, including recent ones on geomagnetic storms, time, and DIY magnetometers.

Odenwald runs The Astronomy Cafe, an online resource, and has appeared on me