Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space by Janna Levin (PDF)

Description

The authoritative story of the headline-making discovery of gravitational waves—by an eminent theoretical astrophysicist and award-winning writer.From the author of How the Universe Got Its Spots and A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, the epic story of the scientific campaign to record the soundtrack of our universe. Black holes are dark. That is their essence. When black holes collide, they will do so unilluminated. Yet the black hole collision is an event more powerful than any since the origin of the universe. The profusion of energy will emanate as waves in the shape of spacetime: gravitational waves. No telescope will ever record the event; instead, the only evidence would be the sound of spacetime ringing. In 1916, Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves, his top priority after he proposed his theory of curved spacetime. One century later, we are recording the first sounds from space, the soundtrack to accompany astronomy’s silent movie. In Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space, Janna Levin recounts the fascinating story of the obsessions, the aspirations, and the trials of the scientists who embarked on an arduous, fifty-year endeavor to capture these elusive waves. An experimental ambition that began as an amusing thought experiment, a mad idea, became the object of fixation for the original architects—Rai Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Ron Drever. Striving to make the ambition a reality, the original three gradually accumulated an international team of hundreds. As this book was written, two massive instruments of remarkably delicate sensitivity were brought to advanced capability. As the book draws to a close, five decades after the experimental ambition began, the team races to intercept a wisp of a sound with two colossal machines, hoping to succeed in time for the centenary of Einstein’s most radical idea. Janna Levin’s absorbing account of the surprises, disappointments, achievements, and risks in this unfolding story offers a portrait of modern science that is unlike anything we’ve seen before.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐A few weeks ago the world of science was rattled – and rattled seems like the right word – by the discovery of gravitational waves, a culmination of Einstein’s general theory of relativity which the great man predicted a hundred years ago. The waves came from the collision of two black holes, an event of woefully cataclysmic magnitude, releasing energy billions of trillions of times that produced by the sun.And yet astonishingly, the collision registered here on earth in the form of a tremor so slight as to defy imagination, a tremor displacing a giant mirror located in desert scrubland by no more than a thousandth of the width of a proton. In this book author and physicist Janna Levin tells us the story of the history of that event, the machinery that went into its almost imperceptible detection and most importantly, the human beings who made this discovery possible.The book shines mainly in two aspects. Firstly, being a physicist herself Levin brings an authoritative touch to explaining the science behind gravitational wave detection. Both the history of the field as well as its present incarnations get due credit. The list of topics Levin touches on encompass such astronomical anomalies as neutrons and pulsars, intense x-rays from outer space and black holes themselves as well as more earthly accomplishments such as laser interferometers, radio telescopes and advanced electronics. Brilliant scientists like John Wheeler, Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer who worked on relativity and black holes make frequent appearances. Both theory and experiment get a nod, and it’s clear that the best science involves both abstract theorizing as well as expert craftsmanship and engineering.It helps a lot that Levin has access to both LIGO (the observatory where the waves were detected) as well as many other institutions like MIT and Caltech which spearheaded the effort, and she visits the labs in these places and gives us a glimpse of the rough hewn, often informal, often necessarily tedious work of actual science done by graduate students and postdocs. There are accounts of walking tours of the installations and stories of encounters with spiders and rats and with bass that showed up out of nowhere in one of the ditches near the equipment. There is mention of all kinds of quirky factors which can derail the extreme sensitivity of the mirrors, from earthquakes in China to the Moon’s gravity. This is science at its string-and-sealing-wax best. I would note however that the scientific history and explanations of the complex machinery involved in gravitational wave detection don’t constitute the strongest part of the book; the details can sometimes be spare and the history doesn’t really go too deep. The writing can also sometimes get a bit stilted.What makes the book unique in my opinion instead – and different from many other popular physics volumes – is the second aspect which gives us an excellent insider’s look at the human aspects of science. This part of the book should dispel any illusions about science being an impersonal, objective, linear and logical endeavor. Instead we meet scientists who are subject to bouts of jealousy, who accuse each other of foot-dragging and egotism, who claim that it was they rather than their colleagues who made a particular discovery or built a particular piece of equipment. And we encounter the haphazard process of scientific discovery itself, full of fits and starts, blind alleys and uncertainty, held hostage to the vagaries of government funding and public relations.Levin especially has unique access to the three main scientists – Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne and Ron Drever – who conceived LIGO, fought for funds and personnel, worked out the theory and experimental techniques and have really stayed with the project for their entire careers. They believed in it long before anyone did, and did not let setbacks of funding and skepticism from other scientists blunt their vision. Levin has extensively interviewed these scientists and the narrative is liberally interspersed with their own quotes and their backgrounds. The quotes are often inspiring and show scientific inquiry at its dogged best, but it also shows us how scientists are human beings; how they can occasionally be petty, impatient and insecure. Sometimes individual scientific styles merge and thrive, and sometimes they can clash and dissipate rather than channel energy. What is admirable however is that one way or another these scientists and others overcome their insecurities, worked together, fought in front of Congress to get hundreds of millions of dollars allocated to their project and saw their vision to completion. What we need to keep in mind are not their shortcomings but their success in spite of these shortcomings.There is also a valuable lesson in the book in the form of the unfortunate story of a physicist named Joe Weber who claimed to have observed gravitational waves using a simple experiment involving aluminum bars way back in the 1960s. Other scientists could not replicate his results and he had to endure much censure and ridicule, but he stuck to his guns and kept on pushing for thirty years until the very end of his life. Although Weber was probably wrong in his science, his espousal of gravitational waves turned many heads and convinced other scientists to work in the field long before it was fashionable. His example shows us that sometimes even wrong science can lead others in the right direction.Levin’s book is thus an admirable showcase of the human side of science, and it’s as much journalism as science. It really shows us how science is really done rather than how it’s portrayed in textbooks and popular sources. And it ultimately convinces us that scientists are inspiring role models, not in spite of their flaws but because of them.

⭐”Black Hole Blues” is the story of how LIGO came to be. Levin had almost finished researching and writing this book when LIGO detected gravitational waves from the merger of two black holes in September 2015. Most authors and editors, I believe, would have forced a significant rewrite: – move the climax to Chapter 1 or a Prologue before stepping back to trace the history. Whether due to wisdom or expediency, Levin et al. decided not to mention the 9/15 thunderclap until the very end of the book. Even the cover blurb avoids it. The book remains true to the author’s original (almost Quixotic) purpose: – paying “tribute to a fool’s ambition.”What makes the book exciting is the uncertainty over whether the LIGO bet will pay off. In particle physics, early discoveries were achieved on modest budgets; no one doubted that new results would accrue each time money was spent on larger accelerators. In personal investing, everyone learns that “past performance is no guarantee of future results.” LIGO was different: it demanded decades of effort and hundreds of millions of dollars, with no past results, and no guarantee of future results. I myself was skeptical that LIGO would detect anything in my lifetime. I am delighted that I was wrong.The human stories related in “Black Hole Blues” are at least as interesting as the science. Many authors are good at writing about science. Many authors are good at writing about people. Few authors are good at braiding together the science with the infinitely more complicated human personalities who do the science. John McPhee is a master of this style of writing. In this book, Levin reminded me a little of McPhee.The fact that the LIGO bet did pay off, – just as this book was being readied for the press, – was frosting on the cake. The detection event is appended to the end of the book in a natural way, almost as if Levin had known that it was coming. But of course, if she had started work on her book after 9/15, the detection event would have been on page 1 and the cover jacket. The fact that she didn’t know it was coming, wrote her book anyhow, and then it came, – just in the nick of time, – makes this book succeed in a way that could not have been planned ahead of time. It is as if an author had finished writing a book in May 1944 about the massive preparations for D-Day, not knowing how the June invasion went.

⭐I came across Black Holes Blues rather late, when Kip Thorne mentioned it as somewhere you would discover the difficulties the management of the LIGO gravitational waves detection project went through. It’s slightly weird reading it now, after the first gravitational wave detections, as the book was clearly written before anything had been found (though there’s a rapidly tacked-on afterword to deal with the discovery).Despite the author being a physics professor, this is classic US journalistic popular science writing in the style that was arguably typified by James Gleick’s classic Chaos – like that, Black Hole Blues is a book that is driven entirely by the people involved, based strongly around interviews, visits and fly-on-the-wall descriptions of historical interactions between the main characters. The science itself plays a distinctly supporting cast role to the detail of the people, their background and their psychology.I absolutely loved this approach when I first came across it. I must admit that, by now, (Gleick’s book is a remarkable 30 years old) it feels a little forced and there are occasions when I’m yelling ‘Tell me a less about another origin story, and more about the science.’ Sometimes Janna Levin can be consciously wordy, whether over-stretching the simile when she constantly refers to gravitational waves as sound (they’re not) or when she puts in folksy human observations, some of which I simply don’t understand, such as ‘Part of Rana’s charisma is related to the social power of indifference.’ What?Despite these concerns, though, this is an engaging story of big science – the ups and downs of a billion dollar project, showing the very human frailties of those involved in coming up with the ideas and making them real. Sensibly, Levin spends a fair amount of time on the doomed work of Joe Weber, whose bars proved controversial when no one else could duplicate his work. And we certainly get an impression of the size and complexity of the LIGO setup, even though it was sad that the science and engineering achievements were sometimes obscured by the obsession with the human stories.I have no doubt at all that Levin knows the science behind this stuff backwards, but occasionally the approach seems to demand such hand-waving vagueness that we veer away from accuracy. I’ve already mentioned the description of gravitational waves as sound, repeated over and over in different ways. There’s also an example where we are told that due to the gravitational waves generated by its orbit ‘the Moon will [eventually] spiral into us’ – where in reality what’s happening is dominated by tidal effects, which mean the Moon is moving away from us. Again Levin inevitably knows this, but seemed to prefer the dramatic notion which overwhelms a vague qualifier.Black Hole Blues is a great read and uncovers the human side of scientific work wonderfully. The only let down is, for me, that the art of the writing has overwhelmed the beauty of the science.

⭐Really annoying book. The fundamentals of the physics are never explained so not at all clear what is going on. Eg, no explanation whether gravitational waves are “Newtonian” or some sort of flux in space-time. No explanation of general or special relativity and no distinction drawn between the two. It’s basically an oral history about people who helped build this detector for gravitational waves. But absent context or basic tutorial its beyond meaningless and is deeply frustrating. Irritating book.

⭐This is an excellent read. Very informative, clearly written with lovely insights into the scientists originally involved in developing LIGO, the Observatory which , in 2015, recorded a wave sent out 1.3 billion years ago when two Black Holes collided and merged. This was the first record of that event which was detected by mankind., Actually I got it out from my local library but found it so interesting that I went into Amazon to buy my own copy. The book was in excellent condition and arrived on time.

⭐I normally steer away from writing poor reviews but this is a rare experience for me in that I have given up on a book halfway through as it was so tedious. Sorry but there we are. Now gone for recycling.

⭐Brilliantly told story of one of the most extraordinary results of modern physics. How could Einstein’s equations have been so accurate and the engineering so brilliant? Also the personal accounts of people’s lives who took part. And since the book more results are coming in. Highly recommended.

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