POSTING RULES & NOTES
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*
NY Times Sunday Book Review, Apr. 24 2016
Maria Popova Reviews Janna Levin’s ‘Black Hole Blues’
By MARIA POPOVA
BLACK HOLE BLUES
And Other Songs From Outer Space
By Janna Levin
241 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.
In 1977, the Voyager 1 spacecraft carried the Golden Record into space —
a disc containing a representative selection of Earth’s sounds, ranging
from an erupting volcano to a kiss to some of humanity’s greatest music.
It was an endeavor more poetic than scientific, which Carl Sagan saw as
sonic proof of our being “a species endowed with hope and perseverance,
at least a little intelligence, substantial generosity and a palpable
zest to make contact with the cosmos.”
Meanwhile, a small community of experimentalists were attempting the
reverse in a rigorous scientific endeavor with poetic undertones. They
were trying to build an apparatus that would detect the sonic message of
the cosmos as it made contact with us via gravitational waves — ripples
in the fabric of space-time, first envisioned by Einstein in his
pioneering 1915 paper on general relativity.
In “Black Hole Blues: And Other Songs From Outer Space,” the
astrophysicist and novelist Janna Levin chronicles the decades-long
development of this magnificent machine — a quest marked by the highest
degree of human intelligence, zest and perseverance. Taking on the
simultaneous roles of expert scientist, journalist, historian and
storyteller of uncommon enchantment, Levin delivers pure signal from
cover to cover.
For Einstein, gravitational waves were an entirely theoretical concept —
he couldn’t imagine a human-made tool that would detect them. But our
imagination and our tools shape one another. As technology advanced,
scientists set about proving Einstein’s vision, culminating in the Laser
Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. “An idea sparked in the
1960s, a thought experiment, an amusing haiku, is now a thing of metal
and glass,” Levin writes of the scientific collaboration known as LIGO —
the costliest project the National Science Foundation has ever funded,
exceeding $1 billion in total. Its story is proof that hardly any field
is as laced with stubbornness and sensitivity as science.
Levin profiles the key figures in this revolution with Dostoyevskian
insight into the often irrational human psychology animating this
rigorous project of reason. She counters the mad-genius archetype with
evidence that trailblazing scientists accomplish great feats not because
of their idiosyncrasies and ferocious egos but despite them, often
skirting self-destruction with only a measure of luck and a generous
dose of forgiveness from sympathetic peers.
Central to LIGO’s success are its three original architects, known as
the Troika: Rainer Weiss, the brilliant ruffian who invented the
apparatus at the heart of LIGO; Kip Thorne, the revered astrophysicist
and relativist with the wildly speculative yet mathematically precise
mind, whose charisma saved the project from going under; and Ron Drever,
the prickly Scottish genius considered a scientific Mozart — “a
childlike spirit attached to a wondrous mind that just seemed to emanate
astonishing compositions.” People, Levin intimates, are fragmentary but
indivisible — they bring their aptitudes and their flaws to the work.
Rigor and self-righteousness often go in tandem, as do idealism and
egotism. These scientists all contain multitudes.
Levin harmonizes science and life with remarkable virtuosity. As a boy,
Drever made gadgets from bits of rubber tubing and sealing wax and built
an entire television — possibly the only one in his Scottish village —
on which locals watched the queen’s coronation. He carried this hacker
spirit of zeal and frugality into his ingenious prototypes for LIGO.
Thorne’s Mormon mother found her feminism incompatible with their faith,
and the family broke with the church — the seedbed of the rebelliousness
that made him a visionary scientist. Weiss’s youth in the golden age of
high fidelity and his romance with a pianist catalyzed his obsession
with making music easier to hear; he later envisioned an instrument to
make the sound of space discernible. “LIGO covers the same frequency
range as the piano,” he tells Levin.
These aren’t coincidences, Levin suggests as she dismantles the eureka
convention of science, exposing the invisible, incremental processes
that produce the final spark we call genius.
Predating the Troika was the lone pioneer Joseph Weber, who built a
different, much cheaper instrument in the 1960s. Claiming to have
detected a gravitational wave, he became a scientific
