Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space

by Janna Levin

The authoritative story of Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish, and Kip Thorne’s Nobel Prize–winning discovery of gravitational waves—by an eminent theoretical astrophysicist and award-winning writer.

In 1916, Einstein predicted the presence of gravitational waves. One century later, we are recording the first sounds from space, evidence of the waves’ existence caused by the collision of two black holes. An authoritative account of the headline-making discovery by theoretical astrophysicist and award-winning writer Janna Levin, Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space recounts the fascinating story of the obsessions, aspirations, and trials of the scientists who embarked on an arduous fifty-year endeavor to capture these elusive waves

Five decades after the experiment was dreamed up, the team races to intercept a wisp of sound with two colossal machines, hoping to succeed in time for the centenary of Einstein’s most radical idea. With unprecendented access to the surprises, disappointments, achievements, and risks in this remarkable story, Janna Levin’s absorbing account offers a portrait of modern science that is unlike anything we’ve seen before.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Physics, Astronomy, History, Space, Audiobook

231 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 29, 2016

About the author

Janna Levin, a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University, holds a BA in Physics and Astronomy with a concentration in Philosophy from Barnard College of Columbia University, and a PhD in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her scientific research mainly centers around the Early Universe, Chaos, and Black Holes.

Dr. Levin's first book, "How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space," is a widely popular science book following her personal recollections, as well as scientific studies, in letter format. Her second book, "A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines" (Knopf, 2006), won the PEN/Bingham Fellowship for writers that "honors an exceptionally talented fiction writer whose debut work... represents distinguished literary achievement..."

Dr. Levin also has written a series of essays to accompany exhibitions at galleries in England and been featured on several radio and television programs.

Reviews

[Fiona · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was in Glasgow a couple of months back, and a friend invited me along to a Skeptics in the Pub night - they regularly have interesting people along, at the front of a room beneath a pub, to talk about whatever sciencey or philosophical or what-have-you thing it is they work on. This time, they had a couple of people from the gravitational research group at Glasgow University - and they came along to talk about LIGO. This being about May-ish time 2016, the room was packed and consisted about 50% of physicists. (Many beards. Many pre-formulated questions.)

LIGO stands for Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, and I have been low-key obsessed by it since the news came out in February that in September last year, physicists discovered that gravitational waves are a thing that exist in real life, rather than just the realms of theoretical physics. This book is about that discovery, less from the physics end (although Janna Levin is a professor of physics in her own right) than a whole lot of interdepartmental politics. Honestly, I will never complain about trying to get funding for a project again; this stuff is incredible. By the time the story had got as far as the mid-90s, I was breaking out in a cold sweat every other paragraph. It's a fascinating story: interestingly, it looks like it was written largely before the breakthrough in September 2015, because the actual discovery is an epilogue, and the book came out at the end of March. I'm not sure how I feel about that: sure, ride the coattails of the announcement, there's no better time to do that - but I might have preferred a bit more fleshing out of that final chapter, even if it took a few more months for the book to get printed.

The thing that stopped it getting All The Stars (because really, if there's anything going to catch my attention, astrophysics and advanced project management are high on that list) is that it didn't really feel like a book. It's written... almost like an overgrown Vice article? which I'm sure is doing it a disservice, what I mean is that it's obviously long-form journalism. It's like an investigative article, but 180 pages of it, with chapters. So this is purely a matter of taste: that either works for you or it doesn't, and I'm afraid it doesn't really for me.

Still, there's a shoo-in for the Nobel prize this year, and quite frankly several members of the project sound like they'd be strong contenders for the peace prize too.

[Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a rather fascinating personality-centric accounting of post-WWII science that lead to the facilities that currently detect Gravity Waves. The science is there at the core, from the postulations to the amazingly hard-fought politics and accounting that made the whole thing happen.

And believe me, it almost didn't happen so many times. Fortunately, it did and a few years ago we had confirmation of real-life Black Holes to celebrate over.

Truly, I couldn't be happier. Science needs these kinds of astronomical wins. It was astronomical in the way they pulled it off, too.

But wow, the rest of the story reads like a great novel full of difficult personalities, boundless hope, disappointment, and heroism. Kinda like most science. But then, it is a calling. These men and women are truly devoted to the cause despite not always agreeing on the best direction or means to the goal.

So did this read like a soap opera full of departmental squabbles, politics, money-wrangling, and even a little madness thrown in?

Yep.

But that's what makes it so interesting. They did it despite all that. And the project is very healthy now. :) :) Fun read!

[Jamie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting (and timely) subject, intriguing history, but the chatty, almost gossipy way the book is written does it a disservice. The writing is downright peculiar, overly poetic or nonsensical at times, full of interjections from the author, less like credible journalism and more like a he-said-she-said oral history with whole paragraphs of rambling, unedited quotes and a baffling structure. There are a few reviews saying the physics are on point but the storytelling isn’t; however, I found even the physics were told like a pop culture piece assembled for clickbait instead of a published book on scientific discovery.

Ah, well. I’ll still read more about LIGO, and the fool’s errand aspect of the story is an interesting one, no matter how it’s told.

[John Gribbin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here is a version of a review I wrote fir ther Wall St Journal:

In February this year scientists announced the detection of a burst of gravitational waves from space. The waves, predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, came from a pair of colliding black holes, each with about 30 times the mass of our Sun, in a galaxy more than a billion light years away. The ripple they produced jiggled the Earth by much less than the diameter of an atom. The astonishing story of how science was able to measure such a tiny effect, at a cost of a few hundred million dollars (which seems modest given the achievement) is told by Janna Levin in this superb new book. Levin is able to tell the tale so soon, and so well, because she has had privileged access to the experiment (known as LIGO, from Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) and the experimenters for several years, and knew that the first runs were due in September 2015. Like the experimenters, and everyone in the scientific community, she was stunned by the speed with which LIGO has produced results, but was able to squeeze in a brief mention of the news in an Epilogue.
Levin is herself a scientist, which explains her privileged access; but more than that she is a writer—a writer with a background in science, rather than a scientist who writes. Her book is less about the nuts and bolts of the science and technology, although it contains enough of that to satisfy our interest in how such measurements can be made, and more about the people, personalities and politics involved in getting such an expensive and long-gestating (four decades and counting) project to fruition. She gives due credit to Joseph Weber, a lone pioneer who built a gravitational wave detector in the sixties and thought he had found something, but was later proved wrong. In spite of this false start, Weber’s example encouraged interest in the possibility of detecting such waves, and stimulated others to take up the challenge. It was Weber who “brought Einstein into the lab.”
The contributions and clashes of the three key players in Levin’s story who did take up that challenge are each given comfortable space, and should soon be sharing a Nobel Prize. They are Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne and Ronald Drever, the “troika” who got things moving, both scientifically and politically.
The project grew out of a course on relativity theory that Weiss was teaching at MIT, in the early 1970s. His class were intrigued by the idea of gravitational waves – ripples in space – and to entertain them he devised a purely hypothetical idea (a “thought experiment”) for detecting such waves. The idea involved bouncing beams of light of mirrors to create so-called interference patterns. The passage of a gravitational wave through the experiment would change the interference pattern. Then, Weiss decided to try to turn the thought experiment into reality. He was, he said, “going to try to do the most interesting thing I could think of” even though the project, if it succeeded at all, would take decades. It looked as if the effort would fail for lack of funds. But in 1975 Weiss met Thorne, a leading theorist in the field of relativity, and also a leading light at Caltech, who was seeking a partner to work on the search for gravitational waves. It was a marriage made in heaven. The troika was completed when they headhunted Drever from Glasgow, where he had established a formidable reputation as a hands on physicist who got things done, and was working on his own gravitational wave detector. Drever had been brought up in the sealing wax and string tradition of British scientists such as Ernest Rutherford, and was a genius at cutting corners and making things work – provided he was left to do it his way. This was an asset when the project was young and impoverished, but as Levin details his approach became a problem when the project became a large, well-funded bureaucratic organisation with no room for mavericks.
But the Nobel Committee had better get its skates on; none of these pioneers is in the first flush of youth, and Drever, sadly, now suffers from dementia. Not that Nobel Prizes, and the lust for them, are necessarily always a good thing. In an interview with Levin, Weiss refers to them as “the sin in this field”, causing friends to fall out with each other over claims for priority.
On the scientific side, I was pleased to see Levin giving due emphasis to the importance of the discovery of a system known as the “binary pulsar”, which was seen in the early 1990s to be losing energy in a way which could only be explained by gravitational radiation. This was itself Nobel-winning work, and gave a great boost to the attempt to detect gravitational waves directly. Indeed, it was the binary pulsar that “proved Einstein right”, in so far as that needed proving. The importance of LIGO is that it provides a way to study gravitational waves directly, opening a new window on the Universe, potentially as important as opening up radio or X-ray astronomy. So far, it has detected what people expected it to detect; the real excitement begins when it begins to detect the unexpected.
There are some minor irritations regarding Levin’s style. She is clearly unfamiliar with English places and titles, which won’t bother many of her readers. More annoyingly, when introducing the physicist John Wheeler she cannot resist a parenthetical “difficult not to mention his most famous student, Richard Feynman”. Actually, it is easy. Just leave out that sentence. But this is a small price to pay for the pleasure of Levin’s easy style, which makes the reader feel like they are sitting in on her interviews or watching over her shoulder as she writes.
I am much more uncomfortable about Levin’s telling, in my view too detailed, of the rivalries which led Drever to be pushed out of the project at the end of the 1990s. The other protagonists were interviewed and gave their versions of the truth in detail, but Drever is now unable to tell his side of the story. I am not sure that we need all the details anyway, but in the circumstances I definitely concur with the comment made to Levin by Weiss: “Nobody wants to resurrect this stuff. It’s unfortunately in the public record now. But it doesn’t have to be in your book.” Indeed not.
But I don’t want to end on a sour note. This is a splendid book
That I recommend to anyone with an interest in how science works, and in the power of human imagination and ability. What LIGO actually measured on 14 September 2015 was a change in the length of detector arms 4 kilometres long that amounted to one ten-thousandth of the width of a proton. To scale that up to “see” a change in length as great as the width of a human hair would require a detector as long as a hundred billion times the circumference of the Earth. It is worth sitting back and letting that sink in. If human beings are capable of measuring that, they are capable of almost anything, given the will to do it. And if you want to know how they did it, in spite of all the trials and tribulations, you will have to read the book.

John Gribbin is a Visiting Fellow in Astronomy at the University of Sussex, and author of 13.8: The Quest to Find the True Age of the Universe.

[Peter Tillman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is about as good as popular science gets: a book written by a gifted scientist-writer, herself a working physicist. She talked to almost all the principal players in the LIGO project, and she’s a good interviewer too. Highly recommended. 4.5 stars, rounded up to 5.

The LIGO project detected gravity waves (3 events so far) starting in 2015, in time for the centennial of Einstein's 1915 paper predicting their existence.

The reviews to read:
John Gribbin, WSJ:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-billio...
“This is a splendid book that I recommend to anyone with an interest in how science works and in the power of human imagination and ability.”

Maria Popova, NY Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/bo...
“What makes the book most rewarding is Levin’s exquisite prose, which bears the mark of a first-rate writer: an acute critical mind haloed with a generosity of spirit.”

Lawrence M. Krauss, NYRB:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016...
"Levin’s writing is casual and sometimes poetic, and the fortunate existence of an interesting and curious cast of characters makes her book a unique and convincing account of the discovery of gravitational waves.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating - not just the science, surprisingly, but the personal dramas and infighting of the team - Rai Weiss, Kip Thorne, Ron Drever, Robbie Vogt etc - pioneers all, working away at something many considered a dead end/waste of time/fool's errand...and then, finally, that incredible, improbable detection...

review here: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/bo...

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

The subject of gravitational waves is fascinating. Being able to hear major galactic events like collapse of stars into black hole, or a collision of two galaxies has been in the realm of theoretical physics for exactly 100 years until late last year the first event was officially recorded at LIGO. Naturally such an exciting project attracted a lot of drama. This is not the first science book that confirmed my speculations that the academic world is full of cutthroat politics and fierce competition. If you are working on something groundbreaking, you better bet your keister someone else is working on it too, and is secretly hoping for you to get struck by lightning. When there is prestige, Nobel Prize, and personal fulfillment on the line, all is fair. I bet Janna Levin got into some bad blood over publishing some of the uglier conflicts at LIGO. Other than the juicy scientific gossip, this book is full of great information on a very relevant topic, presented in an accessible language not bogged down by industry jargon. Recommended.

[Sue · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even if you know how the story ends (and, unless you've been living under a rock, you surely do), Janna Levin keeps you on the edge of your seat until the very end. Most of the science went over my head, but Levin's compassionate chronicle of the great minds and crazy personalities that made the recording of gravitational waves a reality, 100 years after Einstein theorized them, is intimate and thrilling. I highly recommend the audiobook, narrated by the author.

[Brian Clegg · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Théo d'Or]

Yes, black holes sing. No, I'm not making this up. In the dark heart of the Perseus galaxy cluster, 300 million light- years from Earth, a supermassive black hole has been singing the same note for 2,5 billion years. Its tone registers 57 octaves below middle C and, according to scientists at Nasa' s Chandra X-Ray Center, is a resounding B-flat. But just so you know, 57 octaves below middle C is still a million, billion times lower than what we can hear. If people actually heard it, we'd be so freaked out. Which is probably why the angels kept having to tell people to get up. Ellington is dead. Long live Ellington.

[Carlos · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is more of a chronicle of the work that went and it's still going into developing equipment that could be able to listen to disruption on the cosmos thereby proving the presence of black holes or at least that there disturbances on the time space continuum , I loved the physics aspects of it and the epilogue finally made it all worth it when it actually proved the existence of black holes , I'm sure that as I'm speaking there people are writing books, reports and articles about the existence and dynamics of black holes , the understanding of it might well change everything we think we know about the Big Bang and our cosmos.... This book it's just the beginning , highly recommend it to people that want an introduction to theoretical physics and/or the history of the project that made it possible to prove a concept that at one point people only considered science fiction.

[Holly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Today's announcement of a second detection of gravitational waves reminded me how much I enjoyed and learned from this book. As in How the Universe Got Its Spots Levin intersperses her personal story with clearly-explained physics, but in a much lighter way here - this is in no way a memoir. She's an educated observer and an acquaintance if not admirer of many of physicists involved. She's writing a full account (to-October 2015) of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) project(s). Here's part of a passage I highlighted that shows how she guides the reader.

The decades of labor hidden by this unassuming single-story building will culminate in an accomplishment that I am going to try to impress upon you deserves new adjectives, new descriptors. I'm crossing the modest threshold of a trailer into the R&D phase of an experiment that will measure waves in the shape of space less than a billionth of a trillionth of the length of the machine. [italics mine]

I recall thinking while reading that this is sort of a nuts and bolts "process" book, i.e., about the process of big science; sort of like the documentary "Particle Fever" on Netflix about CERN and the Higgs Boson (which I've watched about six times!). There aren't that many difficult equations or graphs and images, or brain-melting theoretical problems to tackle. Instead Levin conveys the frustrations and obsessions of the eccentric researchers, as well as the excitement of having their hard work vindicated.

[Sookie · Rating 2 out of 5]

In this book Janna Levin says, "In the Milky Way, there may be one neutron star collision with another neutron star every ten thousand years, although these predictions are still very uncertain." The speed with which the world has moved since LIGO and VIRGO, statements made by scientists like Levin become obsolete within a year or so. In mid October (10/16/2017), the world saw collision of two neutron stars and the information that astrophysicists collected during the event has changed the course of astrophysics.

The book, however, lacks the structure and organization that is necessary when presenting a subject matter such as "gravitational waves". Levin's approach is more conversational and goes through the book like a magazine piece, while talking to scientists and their motivation. The tone of dialogues is restricted to casual exchange of backgrounds and ideas while the subject matter is treated as a by-product of the process.

[Pustulio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Antes de que lean este libro deben saber que no es un libro técnico, no es un libro que te explica como hacen las cosas. Es un libro que te cuenta la historia de como llegamos al punto en el que nos encontramos respecto a hoyos negros. A quién agradecer cuando ven esa nota científica de la cuál puede que entiendan o no entiendan del todo lo que significa pero que saben que es un gran logro.

Este libro bien podría ser un libro de ciencia ficción pero lo más chingón de todo es que real. Todo lo que pasa en este libro es real y lo único que puedo pensar:



Que bonito libro MUA MUA MI AMOR

[John Jr. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Astrophysicist and author Janna Levin has a good nose. In the late naughts, catching a rising swell of attention to Alan Turing as the centenary of his birth drew near, she wrote a novel that intertwined his life with that of logician Kurt Gödel, which she called, with a knack for alluring but sometimes twisty language, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines. Sure, anyone could’ve looked up the date of Turing’s birth, but few would’ve guessed he’d soon be the subject of a major American film. A few years later, again with an anniversary looming, Levin decided to chronicle the decades-long effort to catch a new kind of wave, and she began interviewing major participants, visiting laboratories, and compiling an account to be published sometime in 2016, 100 years after Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves. It’s as if (pardon the illogical analogy) somebody had said in 1492, “Hey, I think I’ll go to the Bahamas in case any Europeans turn up.” On February 10 of this year, not many people knew of these waves; on the 11th, the world was set on its ear, so to speak, by the announcement that they’d been heard, and Levin’s book, already on its way to print, was simply rescheduled to come out in March. She didn’t know how the story would end; the entire book is written from the standpoint of an open question. But she was there with the backstory just when we wanted it.

As we’ve grown to expect of scientific discovery, the work involves immensities both large and small. The basic idea for the project dates back to the 1960s, when slide rules were still in common use. The leading figures in the tale are old men now or, in one case, passed on. Hundreds of others contributed; Levin lists all of them in the back of the book. The plot keeps repeating itself: think of something, try it; figure out another way, try that; think of something bigger, ask for money, build it; imagine improvements, work them in, try it. The cost has become enormous; a relatively early plan had a price tag comparable to some present-day Hollywood films, around $70 million, but that was in the 80s, and the total has since surpassed a billion dollars. The machines involved are basically yardsticks, but they’ve grown from something that’ll fit in a room, to a prototype that’s 40 meters on a side, to a fully functioning device whose arms stretch four kilometers—that’s not far short of the horizon to someone standing on the ground. The aim all along has been to detect a tiny sound—it has frequently been called a chirp—that began very long ago and very far away. As Levin puts it, “The signals are infinitesimal. The sources are astronomical. The sensitivities are infinitesimal. The rewards are astronomical.”

The scheme is fairly simple, and Levin sketches it early. As it occurred to Rai Weiss, it was “let’s measure gravitational waves by sending light beams between things.” Levin amplifies that: “Suspend mirrors…and watch them toss on the passing gravitational wave. Keep track of the distance between them and their motions will record the changing shape of spacetime.”

She’s usually deft at explaining the science. In its current form, the project uses two huge installations, one in Washington and the other in Louisiana. Why two? You want a second one “not only to confirm the detection…but also to ascertain the location of the sound. The utility of two detectors on the Earth is like the utility of two ears on the head.” But the heart of the story, for Levin, is elsewhere: it’s not the science but the scientists, their background, their strengths and weaknesses, how they think, the labs they work in, the way they work with others. For most of them, we get a good sense even of how they talk, for Levin has tried to let them speak for themselves, through recent conversations of her own as well as earlier interviews.

Rai Weiss considered studied engineering in undergraduate school at M.I.T. but found that physics had fewer requirements. He’s a restless tinkerer, an emeritus member of the project now but still likely to be found with his hands in the apparatus. You can sometimes hear him trying to fix his memories into words: of an all-night talk with Kip Thorne in 1975, he says, “We made a huge map on a piece of paper of all the different areas in gravity. Where was there a future? Or what was the future, or the thing to do?” (Levin’s quotations can sometimes seem diffuse, but they catch her subjects thinking on the fly.) Despite his taste for independent work in a lab, Weiss eventually becomes the one most determined to do what it takes, in terms of studies and proposals and concessions, to keep the project going and growing. He’s the one who went to the National Science Foundation, who took the idea into the realm of big science.

Much like Weiss and much unlike him is Ron Drever, an experimentalist from Scotland with a special skill for ingenious methods—he once achieved an important result from a device he built in his mother’s backyard. Drever has some sort of visual-intuitive sense that’s the envy of his colleagues; he can work something out with a diagram that Thorne could resolve only with lengthy calculations. But despite Kip’s last name, Drever is the thorny one, convinced of the rightness of his views, virtually incapable of accommodating others; eventually he’s fired from the project. And there are mysteries about this man. Why, since childhood, has he always required special attention? Why does Levin report that she has only heard his voice in recordings? She’s cagey about him, which is one of the things that keep you turning the pages.

And then there’s theorist Kip Thorne himself. He’s the persuasive charmer, the one who soothes and smooths over and reconciles; Levin says, “Kip could make you believe.” Thorne may be even more far-seeing than the others in this tale. Levin reports, “He went so far as to say that by…1962, it was obvious to him that gravitational waves must exist, although the debates would continue…for another twenty years.” (Though Levin doesn’t say so, Thorne has one thing in common with the great popularizer Carl Sagan: each helped shape a major Hollywood film—Contact in Sagan’s case, Interstellar for Thorne. Levin does mention the latter.) You get the sense that his appearance disarms people; Weiss, meeting Thorne for the first time, recalls, “He’s a delightful man, but he looked cuckoo, absolutely cuckoo.”

The supporting players are well drawn, too. There’s Joe Weber, another experimentalist and an embodiment of “almost.” Levin says, “He was Shackleton many times, almost the first: almost the first to see the big bang, almost the first to patent the laser, almost the first to detect gravitational waves.” Weber, who died in 2001, was also an almost tragic figure; hubris led him to push his claims of detection too far, and he ended up setting back a field he had helped pioneer. There’s Jocelyn Bell Burnell, an astronomer who “found the first four pulsars ever discovered by human beings” but who was omitted from the Nobel Prize for the work. And there’s Robbie Vogt, the first director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO for short), who learned as a child in Nazi Germany to hate authority; he’s the sort of person who would take an administrative job because he’s sure all the other candidates would be worse.

Levin is a mostly reliable narrator—maybe only a fussbudget will care that in World War II, no nuclear weapon was “carried in a fighter plane over a target.” But she’s an unreliable stylist; some of her prose could benefit from a detangling treatment. Whether or not you know the concept of a random walk, you may stumble over this, as did one of the book’s two New York Times reviewers: “Progress was as random as the walk of a shred of lint through hot air.” She tells us that a Soviet researcher made a speech “for which he was later denunciated.” She uses “conceded” when she means “acceded” and says “the upscale” when she means “the scaling up.” And, despite her efforts to keep the general public in mind, she leaves unexplained a few terms such as “stochastic.”

Anyone reading the book now will know that the search paid off. But Levin, writing before the results were announced, repeatedly stresses the uncertainty. She calls the quest “quixotic” at one point and says elsewhere, “Gravitational-wave detection was risky, controversial, technologically nearly impossible.” In a way, the long effort is reminiscent of something Norbert Wiener pointed out about the atomic-bomb project: until it was done, no one knew whether it could be done. Some people may wonder whether the results so far have been worth the cost, as others have no doubt wondered whether the Large Hadron Collider has been; Levin herself says, “LIGO also needs to do more to justify the investment versus rewards calculus. LIGO has to ‘do astronomy,’” by which she seems to mean that this project, and others like it now being built, can’t rest on their laurels but must continue to advance scientific understanding. Is the answer worth the price? For me, the idea that human societies must focus on A, B, and C and can’t do D until later, as well as the related idea that not doing D would somehow in itself advance A, B, and C, goes against a part of human nature and a part of human history, the part that says we do and we must figure out for ourselves how things work. Besides, though we’ve mostly moved beyond the Victorian spirit, we still vibrate to tales of Ulysses-like striving, as many of our superhero entertainments show. There’s something of grandeur and inspiration here; listen attentively and you’ll hear it.

I read an uncorrected proof that lacked Levin’s epilogue, which addresses LIGO’s first success, and am curious how she wrapped up this short (256 pages) yet sweeping tale. But the body of her text ends on a fine note:

Somewhere in the universe two black holes collide…maybe more than a billion years ago.… A vestige of the noise of the crash has been on the way to us since early multicelled organisms fossilized in supercontinents on a still dynamic Earth.… When I started to write this book, the sound reached Alpha Centauri.… As the sound moves through the interstellar space outside the solar system, the detectors will be operational.… [Finally,] someone…in the control room…might barely hear something that sounds different. A sophisticated computer algorithm will parse the data stream in real time and send a notification…and someone will be the first to look over the specs of the trigger and think calmly, “This might be It.”

[This review also appears on my blog.]

[LITTLEz · Rating 3 out of 5]

ชื่อหนังสือคือหลอกกันมาก คิดว่าจะได้อ่านเรื่องหลุมดำแบบเต็มๆซะอีก

หนังสือเล่มนี้เล่าเรื่องเกี่ยวกับโครงการสถานีสังเกตการณ์ไลโก เป็นการตรวจจับคลื่นความโน้มถ่วงจากหลุมดำซึ่งเป็นทฤษฎีที่ไอน์สไตน์ทำนายไว้

เหมือนดูสารคดีอยู่เลย หนังสือเริ่มเล่าตั้งแต่อดีตของนักวิทยาศาสตร์แต่ละคนก่อนจะมาทำงานที่ไลโก เล่าถึงอุปสรรคต่างๆของการทำงาน ทั้งด้านเงินทุน และความขัดแย้งภายใน ค่อยๆเล่าไปทีละก้าวๆของโครงการ ตั้งแต่วันที่ยังไม่มีคนเชื่อว่าหลุมดำมีอยู่จริง ขอเงินวิจัยไม่สำเร็จเพราะโครงการไม่น่าเชื่อถือ จนถึงการสร้างเครื่องต้นแบบ สร้างสถานีสังเกตการณ์สำเร็จ ไปจนถึงวันที่ตรวจจับคลื่นความโน้มถ่วงได้เป็นครั้งแรก

ตอนอ่านยอมรับเลยว่าง่วงและแอบเบื่อๆบ้าง ต้องไปหาอย่างอื่นทำแล้วค่อยกลับมาอ่านใหม่ถึงจะไปต่อได้

[Katie Long · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating peek behind the curtain of the massive, nearly billion dollar and fifty year, conception and implementation of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) project. The goal being to observe intergalactic events that we can’t see, through their sounds instead. Brilliance, personality clashes, scientific disagreements, and a healthy measure of uncertainty that it would ever work, all combine for one heck of a story.

[Jill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fundamentally, this is the story of the psychology of a bunch of ambitious [mostly] white male physicists. You could write a meta (lit) paper on how the fact of their privilege, their situatedness, defines the science they can do. It's necessary to disclaim this because it's inexcusable that there aren't any women, let alone women of colour, who figure prominently in this narrative -- except one who describes herself as the "trophy wife" of a disgraced old white guy who did controversial experiments with resonating bars. She's apparently a brilliant physicist in her own right, but we don't hear any of the work she's done (that's excusable, I think, for narrative purposes). But, it's written by a [white] female physicist -- more specifically, it's written by Janna Levin, who breathes life into everything that made you fall asleep in high school science classes -- so there's that at least.

I honestly don't know that I understand what LIGO is after reading this, which isn't a glowing recommendation but I've also been trying to fix my sleep schedule so I might not be retaining everything lol. Basically: 4km stainless-steel tubes with lasers and mirrors, set at right angles to one another, set up to record the vibration of gravitational waves. There have to be at least two, to confirm that the vibration isn't bad data (cf that disgraced white guy, Weber, who...did not have two, to say the least). It's a huge amount of work (and money) for potentially no payoff. Spoiler alert: the waves are recorded. I even cried while reading the epilogue (same as when I read The Double Helix wtf with these science success stories). But the experiment, as Levin herself says, isn't really the point -- it's the story of these mildly-interesting men.

I say mildly-interesting because honestly, none of these characters would be that fascinating without Levin's hand deftly guiding us to think so. But under her stewardship, the stories of gravitational physics theory and practice unfold with suspense, and the characters seem to have more than ambition and academic glory motivating them. The physicist "Troika" of Kip Thorne, Rai Weiss, and Ron Drever take up the majority of the narrative -- their relationships, conflicts, and hopes define where Levin takes us. We learn a lot about Ron and Rai's wildly opposed approaches to science -- and while Levin tries to remain unbiased, it's subtly clear who she sides with on a lot of these controversies. Ultimately, we learn about their stories, tribulations, and successes -- not the physics. When the waves are discovered, validating all these decades of political subterfuge, wounded egos, and sleepless nights, Levin writes to Rai with periods, not exclamation points: "Congratulations, Rai, I cannot express my excitement. I cannot imagine yours." There's no real pull, in this narrative, to care for gravitational waves for their own sake; for the thrill of the science.

To send that home: upon some post-book googling, turns out Rai, Kip, and Barry (the most successful (and well-liked) of the program directors) won the Nobel Prize for LIGO in 2017. My first thought had nothing to do with how great the science was or the potential it might bring. It was: "fuck, I wish there was a chapter about that ------ SO many people were left out." That's important: Levin shows us, here, that science is never discovered on the basis of those who get the prize at the end of the day. They might be the most interesting, motivated, or ambitious characters --- or, as seems evident with the exclusion of Ron Drevel, they might just be able to play the game and do science the way the western world currently thinks you should.

It's no secret that the stories behind every scientific discovery can be just as, if not more, interesting than the science itself. There's no one better than Janna Levin, long a champion of the bridge between science and humanities, to show this thoughtfully, heartfully, and analytically. Black Hole Blues takes its winding, sometimes-confusing path through all these stories to show us how very smart white men can a) be huge brats, b) make fabulous discoveries, and c) leave so many at the wayside. In her acknowledgments section, Levin admits she should probably have spent more time on some of the auxiliary figures. This book is good, but she's right: ultimately, we're still focusing on what history tells us are the main characters. This would have been even better if it were hung on "minor" people who made significant, but less substantial, contributions. And fewer white dudes. But Levin, I think, falls prey to her own academic pedigree: she wants us to know she's spent time with, is buds with, all these famous scientists. We're not there yet. Maybe next book.

[Rama Rao · Rating 3 out of 5]

An odyssey for the Kiss of spacetime

This book narrates the building of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory and the detection of the of gravitational waves in 2015. It describes the determination and perseverance of a team physicists dedicated to discovering the existence gravitational waves or spacetime ripples that travel at the speed of light. Spacetime ripples was predicted by Einstein in 1915 but over the past 100 years skepticism existed among cosmologists. The cost of building a machine was astronomical and some physicists questioned the wisdom of such a vast and unwarranted expenditure. But to understand the nature of physical reality and the very fabric of our universe, this effort was necessary. We come across the works of three major players in this odyssey, Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Ron Drever

Columbia University Professor Janna Levin is an author of several books and as a writer and a cosmologist she has a unique style of describing the excitement, joy and drama behind this important discovery in our lifetime. She works closely with physicists, writers, artists and musicians in an ever-expanding role of a scientist interested in art and beauty of creation. Despite her efforts, for a casual reader, the writing may not generate enthusiasm since the story is about the efforts of people who contributed to the success of a physics experiment. The fact that this is the costliest project the National Science Foundation (NSF) has ever funded, exceeding $1 billion, you would have to be very interested in physics and cosmology to appreciate this work.

[Gary · Rating 4 out of 5]

This isn't a science text so much as a journalistic/biographical work on the LIGO project. In effect, it's somewhere between a very long science events article and a short, contemporary history. Levin is more journalist than scientist in this text, though she inserts herself into the narrative in various places and her background as an academic no doubt gave her access to the participants in ways that typical science writer would not have. As more bio/history than science text, we get a lot of he said/he said/they said kind of material about the interpersonal relationships of the participants in that project, and Levin shows us what many of us probably already knew: neither science nor scientists are always scientific. Nonetheless, LIGO has been a dramatic success and whether that is in spite of the foibles of the scientists or because of them is a question that Levin doesn't ask directly. However, it is the background theme of this book. How should "big science" be conducted? By whom? Who gets the credit? Levin doesn't provide an answer, but shows how science moves on in spite of those issues, almost inexorably.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not long ago it was announced that scientists working on something called LIGO detected gravity waves, literally sound, from colliding black holes 1.4 billion light years away. Amazing! This book is about the people who theorized such a detector could be made, how the detectors were built and a bit of the science behind all of it.

Three stars because too much time was spent getting to know the people and too little time was spent on the science. By the time the epilogue comes around, the discovery is almost an afterthought.

Kudos to the author for making the little bit of science understandable and getting this book out so soon after this amazing discovery.

As always, Einstein is correct.

[Todd · Rating 4 out of 5]

The real joy in this book is found in Levin's wonderful phrases. There may be too much personal drama and office politics stuff at the slight expense of adequately developing the fundamental science, but Levin consistently nails the right-words-in-the-right-order thing. The detection of gravitational waves started with high end audio tech in the 1940s. The theory of these space-time ripples started with Einstein a generation earlier. Detection was recently achieved in late 2015 via two identical instruments, separated by 1500 miles, each capable of detecting changes across their 2.5 mile long vacuum tubes of about 0.0000000000000001 miles. All in all, Levin offers a fine telling of humanity's greatest signal-to-noise story.

[Shawn · Rating 2 out of 5]

The information contained in this book about the actual phenomena would easily fit in 20 pages, so unless you're seriously interested in the processes and personalities involved in the history of the search for gravity waves, don't bother. In spite of the rather misleading title, the book really doesn't claim to be other than what it is. Should have read the dust jacket flap or a good review before I picked it up. A quibble, though: why would anyone spend several pages describing one of the very complicated Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) installations but fail to include a diagram of any kind??

[Barrita · Rating 4 out of 5]

Qué bello. Me recuerda a The Emperor of All Maladies, que para explicar ciertos conceptos científicos profundiza en la historia de cómo se descubrieron. Aunque sea más bien una introducción simple, tiene mas bien el objetivo de transmitir lo fascinante que es el universo y lo más fascinante aún que es el largo camino que hemos recorrido para entenderlo. Y lo que falta.

[Thom · Rating 1 out of 5]

Extremely conversational, with petty politics, occasional interesting anecdotes, and a very cool scientific result from a potential fool's errand. This mixed bag reads like an extended article, and I had to resist abandoning it multiple times. 1½ stars.

[Shane Phillips · Rating 1 out of 5]

Got 3/4 through and was still in the 1980's. Did not have the details I want. Like how they can really measure to accuracy the size of an atom.

[Ami Iida · Rating 2 out of 5]

it is only interesting in epilogue. the other chapters are boring...........

[Amanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

A narrativa é excelente, porém, o texto da edição brasileira é mal preparado.

[Mudaser · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5

[Tim Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a strange book, one I generally liked, but it wasn’t entirely what I expected. I had been uncertain about diving into it at first because while the subject of gravitational waves sounded exciting, I hardly knew enough about physics to really make sense of the subject without a lot of hand holding. I had read a few things on black holes and neutron stars for instance, but I was really rather limited on what I knew on the subject or would be able to explain to others.

Turns out my unfamiliarity and uncertainty with the subject matter didn’t matter for two reasons. One, what exactly are gravitational waves, why they matter, and the science of detecting and interpreting them were well explained. Gravitational waves are waves in the shape of spacetime, a deforming or ringing of space so to speak purely in gravitational form, occurring due to otherwise unseen and unimaginably distant events often involving immense energies, such as the merger of two black holes, colliding neutron stars, supernovae, pulsars, and the like. Gravitational waves are incredibly faint; “[b]y the time the gravitational wave gets here, the ringing of space will involve relative changes in distance the width of an atomic nucleus over a stretch comparable to the span of three Earths” but represent a new way of seeing the universe, revealing evens that are otherwise unknowable (distant neutron stars can’t be seen, black holes are generally completely invisible, etc.).

The reader learns that a half century ago a project – the most expensive undertaking ever by the National Science Foundation – was started to record gravitational waves, a project known as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Not a telescope despite the name observatory, LIGO is essentially a recording device that can detect and chronicle the sloshing waves in spacetime created by the most aggressive motions in space such as merging black holes. Explaining and then touring the actual LIGO instruments (there are two, one in Livingston, Louisiana and one in Hanford, Washington state), the author makes clear that it is a surprisingly simple to understand device (if not simple to construct and maintain, as it is extremely difficult for instance to call forth and then keep over 18,000 cubic meters in hard vacuum for years at a time in a world with seismic events, weather, and various local fauna who find the LIGO project irresistible all conspiring to destroy that vacuum). Essentially LIGO is device called an interferometer (or ifo for short, though each letter is sounded out), essentially a device that sends a laser light down two arms maintained in vacuum, a laser beam that is split so that one beam travels along one length of the L and the other beam down the other, each beam bouncing off a nearly free-floating mirror at the far end and returning down the original arm to where the beam was split. The light will recombine perfectly if the arms are the same length, but if something however minutely changes this – such as a gravitational wave – the light will interfere with itself. Not to spoil anything, but when a gravitational wave is finally detected December 2015, the ifos “detected changes across their 4 kilometers about a ten-thousandth of the width of a proton.”

The other reason I needn’t have been nervous about reading this book was that for long stretches this was more a of history about the search for gravitational waves (and at times the gossipy history of the projects dedicated to it) than a science book. The author exceled at giving a feel for the personalities involved and the writing there was good (the brilliant chapter introducing Rainer Wise and describing his past and how his quest as a youth in removing the hiss from records ultimately and weirdly transformed into trying to remove the hissing background sound of the universe to hear gravitational waves was one example, another is the grippingly tragic tale of Joe Weber, who claimed to record gravitational waves in 1969 to great acclaim and some popular fame, only to have all his work questioned and then refuted and in the end living a lonely life in his own privately funded laboratory in the woods of Maryland). Simply the amount of time spent on the personalities frankly surprised me a little. It was certainly interesting and often quite relevant, as their were bitter rivalries that not only plagued the LIGO project in particular but almost doomed the very concept of gravitational waves or the idea that they could ever be detected before LIGO even was a concept.

The author is upfront about discussing as much (if not more) the personalities and personal politics behind the science and especially LIGO, “[a]s much as this book is a chronicle of gravitational waves – a sonic record of the history of the universe, a soundtrack to match the silent movie – it is a tribute to a quixotic, epic, harrowing experimental endeavor, a tribute to a fool’s ambition.”

I see some reviewers on Goodreads have talked about the author’s writing style. It could be a bit rambling at times, had a number of personal interjections, and almost veered into gonzo journalism with the author putting herself in the disagreements between various scientists and project managers, not quite taking sides but definitely highlighting and reporting disagreements that some apparently didn’t quite want to dwell on. I think in the end the gonzo aspect seemed to work as the author sort of – to my eyes at least – became an honorary insider, getting access and information she wouldn’t have otherwise gotten (though on the history aspects, not the science so much). Some have said she was a bit poetic at times but that didn’t bother me in the slightest, as this is a bold, new area of physics and astronomy, one that could produce exciting information, LIGO being “a direct commune with fundamental law,” a project that is successful can not only test the General Theory of Relativity but also mark “the opening of an observational window on the universe that differs fundamentally from that provided by electromagnetic and particle astronomy.”

It was a fairly fast and easy read. I would have like a few pictures but it didn’t change my enjoyment of the book.