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davecapp's review against another edition
5.0
For science nerds who also love a good story, this one's a keeper.
In September 2015 the LIGO project made the first direct measurement of gravitational waves and observed the first ever binary black hole system. Black Hole Blues is the amazing tale of the 50 year project to validate Einstein’s 1915 predictions on gravity, and the incredible story of the people and personalities behind the effort.
Janna Levin writes with humor, insight, compassion, but with a scientists discerning eye towards separating truth from perception, and avoiding the trap of rewriting history based on those who won. For anyone with a love of science, and history, and the amazing people behind the stories, this book is a must read, and to top it all off, it has an amazing ending.
For those in love with astronomy or astrophysics, it’s on par with Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos (Dennis Overbye – 1992).
In September 2015 the LIGO project made the first direct measurement of gravitational waves and observed the first ever binary black hole system. Black Hole Blues is the amazing tale of the 50 year project to validate Einstein’s 1915 predictions on gravity, and the incredible story of the people and personalities behind the effort.
Janna Levin writes with humor, insight, compassion, but with a scientists discerning eye towards separating truth from perception, and avoiding the trap of rewriting history based on those who won. For anyone with a love of science, and history, and the amazing people behind the stories, this book is a must read, and to top it all off, it has an amazing ending.
For those in love with astronomy or astrophysics, it’s on par with Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos (Dennis Overbye – 1992).
shivani_maurya's review against another edition
4.0
Levin is right next to Tyson on my favorite scientist list. If you haven't heard her talk about black holes and higher dimensions, I would highly recommend watching (or listening to) her interviews on StarTalk. I had thought only personalities like Sagan or Tyson were capable of evoking the wonder for science. But Levin's enthusiasm and scientific fervor for her field puts her squarely in the same ranks. The way she tells it, I could listen to her talk of black holes and what not for hours on end.
On StarTalk, this book gets name dropped a LOT. Not exaggerating. So I decided to give it a try. And now, having finished and slept on this book, I can confidently declare that I enjoyed it. Contrary to the title, it has little to do with black holes. What it centers on instead is the evolution of LIGO from its conception to implementation. Levin offers a peak into the post war multi-national race to verify the existence of gravitational waves as predicted by Einstein in the 1916. I was mildly surprised to find how human centric the account was. It fleshes out the scientists who were directly and indirectly involved in the endeavor. Levin goes into details of problems facing any ambitious scientific inquiry of this proportion, where doubts abound and biases/mistakes can be destructive both personally and academically.
One can't help but admire the pioneering efforts and sympathize with the angst that comes with them. Every year we pay cursory attention to the Nobel prize winners. This here, is the account of what leads to one such win. There is human drama, a lot of red tape, technical obstacles, battle with doubts etc. Things one can't associate with Nobel prize wins when one reads in the papers. Levin brings the LIGO into the forefront against the backdrop of people who joined in or dropped off as it edged closer to its objective over decades. A slow crawl, that will test the patience of many a seasoned scientists. What becomes quite clear by the end? That the shift from theoretical to experimentally verifiable is not a easy one. It is cost prohibitive and at times even personally damaging. But scientists are known to persevere to the end, bitter or sweet. Through her records Levin allows the readers to participate in the joys and frustrations of the arduous journey that culminates in its true beginning in September 2015.
Reading this book made me wonder, how dramatic and of import each scientific discovery actually is. Contrary to the public opinion of people trudging away in the labs, this book paints a picture of the scientists that many would find surprising and humanizing. I wish to read other accounts like this one in the future. And for now, I thank Janna for the taste of wonder.
On StarTalk, this book gets name dropped a LOT. Not exaggerating. So I decided to give it a try. And now, having finished and slept on this book, I can confidently declare that I enjoyed it. Contrary to the title, it has little to do with black holes. What it centers on instead is the evolution of LIGO from its conception to implementation. Levin offers a peak into the post war multi-national race to verify the existence of gravitational waves as predicted by Einstein in the 1916. I was mildly surprised to find how human centric the account was. It fleshes out the scientists who were directly and indirectly involved in the endeavor. Levin goes into details of problems facing any ambitious scientific inquiry of this proportion, where doubts abound and biases/mistakes can be destructive both personally and academically.
One can't help but admire the pioneering efforts and sympathize with the angst that comes with them. Every year we pay cursory attention to the Nobel prize winners. This here, is the account of what leads to one such win. There is human drama, a lot of red tape, technical obstacles, battle with doubts etc. Things one can't associate with Nobel prize wins when one reads in the papers. Levin brings the LIGO into the forefront against the backdrop of people who joined in or dropped off as it edged closer to its objective over decades. A slow crawl, that will test the patience of many a seasoned scientists. What becomes quite clear by the end? That the shift from theoretical to experimentally verifiable is not a easy one. It is cost prohibitive and at times even personally damaging. But scientists are known to persevere to the end, bitter or sweet. Through her records Levin allows the readers to participate in the joys and frustrations of the arduous journey that culminates in its true beginning in September 2015.
Reading this book made me wonder, how dramatic and of import each scientific discovery actually is. Contrary to the public opinion of people trudging away in the labs, this book paints a picture of the scientists that many would find surprising and humanizing. I wish to read other accounts like this one in the future. And for now, I thank Janna for the taste of wonder.
taurustorus's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
hopeful
informative
inspiring
slow-paced
3.25
mkesten's review against another edition
3.0
A pair of stars orbit around each other several billion years ago. They die a billion 400 million light years away from us. They decay into two black holes. The black holes orbit around each other and eventually collide creating a massive interstellar kaboom. In 2015, the sound waves eventually reach earth where a team of Caltech and MIT scientists have recently completed a massive interferometer to catch the sound waves and give us our first physical proof of black holes almost exactly one century after Einstein published his scientific paper on gravitational waves predicting the existence of black holes. Sounds like fiction, no. It actually happened.
annacantcook's review against another edition
3.0
I wanted this book to have more of the science behind black holes and gravitational waves than it did. It was more of the people and drama behind LIGO than about the science, although there were some explanations. An okay book, written well, but not what I wanted.
pustulio's review against another edition
5.0
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
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
david_r_grigg's review against another edition
4.0
How could you detect a faint tremor in the very fabric of space-time itself? How could you possibly measure a tiny stretching and compression a mere one ten-thousandth of the diameter of a proton? And why would you want to? That’s what Black Hole Blues is all about.
Just over a century ago, Albert Einstein developed his General Theory of Relativity, which interprets gravity as a deformation of space-time caused by the presence of matter. One of the more obscure predictions of the theory was that the acceleration of a large mass should cause ripples in space-time: gravitational ‘waves’. No one at the time could have imagined that such tiny ripples could ever actually be detected. Einstein himself vacillated about whether such waves would indeed exist.
Nevertheless, in the mid–1970s the first evidence was gathered that accelerating masses did indeed emit such waves, though it was indirect evidence. A binary system of orbiting neutron stars was shown to be losing energy as the two stars spiralled closer to each other. Where was the energy going? Only gravitational waves seemed to fit the bill.
Knowing that gravitational waves exist is one thing: actually being able to ‘hear’ them is another.
This book, then, is about the decades-long struggle to find a way of detecting such waves. Only the most cataclysmic of astronomical events such as the collision of massive stars or the merging of black holes could be expected to generate ripples we might have a chance of detecting. Even then, the ripples would be almost unimaginably small. Yet a small group of scientists persisted in believing that there were ways it could be done.
Of course, a scientifically-literate reader today knows that it was done. Gravitational waves were first detected in 2015. But the bulk of Black Hole Blues was written before that detection. That doesn’t detract from the interest of the book, which details the individuals
3 involved in trying to build detectors, or at least in the early days, in figuring out what technology they would need to develop in order to build a detector.
The author introduces us to the many talented scientists involved in this drawn-out process, which started in the late 1960s. It is as much a story of the conflicts between genius-level personalities, and about the funding challenges and politics, as it is about the actual science. This is science in the raw, a struggle of human beings striving to understand the universe but also caught up in normal human concerns: about having and keeping a job; about dealing with difficult colleagues and bosses; about finding enough support and money to keep going; about the lure of prestige and honours.
It also demonstrates that science is a self-correcting endeavour, as it discusses the case of Joseph Weber, who convinced himself, and for a while the scientific community, that he was detecting gravitational waves in the harmonic ringing of a massive bar of metal. But others were unable to reproduce his results, and theorists showed that such a detector, even if it worked, would only detect astronomical events of an unlikely magnitude and frequency. This was not scientific fraud; merely an error of technique. But Weber would never accept that he had been wrong, and became a sad footnote to scientific history.
Though this setback tainted the study of gravitational waves for some years, a small group at Caltech and M.I.T. kept pushing on with an effort to achieve detection using laser interferometers. Eventually their efforts, and generous financial support from the U.S. National Science Foundation led to the building of two instruments called LIGO, one in Washington State, the other in Louisiana. It was these two instruments which, after achieving a high level of sensitivity, both registered the first gravitational waves in September 2015, as described in an Epilogue to the book.
Black Hole Blues is well worth reading if you are interested in how science is actually done, and particularly if you are interested in this facinating new window on the universe.
Just over a century ago, Albert Einstein developed his General Theory of Relativity, which interprets gravity as a deformation of space-time caused by the presence of matter. One of the more obscure predictions of the theory was that the acceleration of a large mass should cause ripples in space-time: gravitational ‘waves’. No one at the time could have imagined that such tiny ripples could ever actually be detected. Einstein himself vacillated about whether such waves would indeed exist.
Nevertheless, in the mid–1970s the first evidence was gathered that accelerating masses did indeed emit such waves, though it was indirect evidence. A binary system of orbiting neutron stars was shown to be losing energy as the two stars spiralled closer to each other. Where was the energy going? Only gravitational waves seemed to fit the bill.
Knowing that gravitational waves exist is one thing: actually being able to ‘hear’ them is another.
This book, then, is about the decades-long struggle to find a way of detecting such waves. Only the most cataclysmic of astronomical events such as the collision of massive stars or the merging of black holes could be expected to generate ripples we might have a chance of detecting. Even then, the ripples would be almost unimaginably small. Yet a small group of scientists persisted in believing that there were ways it could be done.
Of course, a scientifically-literate reader today knows that it was done. Gravitational waves were first detected in 2015. But the bulk of Black Hole Blues was written before that detection. That doesn’t detract from the interest of the book, which details the individuals
3 involved in trying to build detectors, or at least in the early days, in figuring out what technology they would need to develop in order to build a detector.
The author introduces us to the many talented scientists involved in this drawn-out process, which started in the late 1960s. It is as much a story of the conflicts between genius-level personalities, and about the funding challenges and politics, as it is about the actual science. This is science in the raw, a struggle of human beings striving to understand the universe but also caught up in normal human concerns: about having and keeping a job; about dealing with difficult colleagues and bosses; about finding enough support and money to keep going; about the lure of prestige and honours.
It also demonstrates that science is a self-correcting endeavour, as it discusses the case of Joseph Weber, who convinced himself, and for a while the scientific community, that he was detecting gravitational waves in the harmonic ringing of a massive bar of metal. But others were unable to reproduce his results, and theorists showed that such a detector, even if it worked, would only detect astronomical events of an unlikely magnitude and frequency. This was not scientific fraud; merely an error of technique. But Weber would never accept that he had been wrong, and became a sad footnote to scientific history.
Though this setback tainted the study of gravitational waves for some years, a small group at Caltech and M.I.T. kept pushing on with an effort to achieve detection using laser interferometers. Eventually their efforts, and generous financial support from the U.S. National Science Foundation led to the building of two instruments called LIGO, one in Washington State, the other in Louisiana. It was these two instruments which, after achieving a high level of sensitivity, both registered the first gravitational waves in September 2015, as described in an Epilogue to the book.
Black Hole Blues is well worth reading if you are interested in how science is actually done, and particularly if you are interested in this facinating new window on the universe.