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Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space
| Title | Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space |
| Writer | |
| Date | 2024-11-25 08:09:58 |
| Type | |
| Link | Listen Read |
Desciption
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. Read more
Review
I found this book fascinating about the 40+ year project that some had deemed a waste of money because of the possibility that it might not ever work, being that the technical challenges are huge and the number and strengths of the sources of signals were unknown. The number of people working on this through the years is legion, and the author did a great job of interviewing and then writing about the various personalities and infighting a large project like this will have. Warts and all are on display, with a balanced and rather diplomatic comparison of who said what about whom, making the brilliant people involved come alive as real humans, not just caricatures as pop culture usually portrays scientists. The egos and the different ways that people think are obviously amplified when the people are in this upper realm of intellectual endeavor interact and clash, and the contributions of all those diverse minds, the theoretical and experimental, are well laid out in this book.The technical details are touched on without going into arcane engineering or scientific jargon, which wouldn't have bothered me, but I realize that this makes this book much more approachable for a larger audience, and Janna Levin does it with great success, I think Isaac Asimov, the great explainer to the layman, would've been hard-pressed to do better.I was sad when I finished it.
