Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space

absolutely fascinating delineation of what it took in people, ideas, time, governmental funding, invention and experimentation to confirm the existence of gravity waves posited by Einstein about 100 years ago..

Heavily focused on personalities and controversies, deeply voyeuristic. Little of the real science is reviewed. Reading this book one would imagine that creative scientists are bizarre, control freaks, relentlessly infighting, forgiving little, firing each other, bearing grudges for decades, and in other ways deeply flawed individuals. This mediocre commercial-level writing by someone with enough training in physics to do much better is seriously disappointing.

A disappointment. Most of the book is comprised of gossipy stories about the handful of men who were responsible for the ferment about gravitational wave measurement. Not nearly enough about the astronomy itself. Author's writing style is colloquial but quirky, and the result is uneven reading.

We are donating our personal libraries to the New York City Library on York Avenue, which has an all volunteer bookstore in the basement, which raises a million dollars a year for the library system. This little book will sell for a couple of dollars there, and every penny helps. Price here on the store is a tiny bit higher and I would avoid buying it at any price.

On the positive side, some of the passages are powerful and elegant: Gravitational astronomy promises a “score to accompany the silent movie humanity has compiled of the history of the universe from still images of the sky, a series of frozen snapshots captured over the past four hundred years since Galileo first pointed a crude telescope at the Sun.”

Or this passage on the role of scientists:

Scientists are like those levers or knobs or those boulders helpfully screwed into a climbing wall. Like the wall is some cemented material made by mixing knowledge, which is a purely human construct, with reality, which we can only access through the filter of our minds. There’s an important pursuit of objectivity in science and nature and mathematics, but still the only way up the wall is through the individual people, and they come in specifics… So the climb is personal, a truly human endeavor, and the real expedition pixelates into individuals, not Platonic forms.

And, in fairness, she writes before the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detected a ripple in the fabric of spacetime caused by the collision of two black holes in the autumn of 2015.

But, her writing is novelistic, a series of short stories, really, about the various contributors to LIGO, with all kinds of - inter-mural battles over priority and personality -- all in great need of an excellent editor.

Bottom line: I would like to find a good science writer who can tell this incredible story, but so far my search is fruitless.

Robert C. Ross
August 2018

Far too much detailed personal characterization and interaction details. The Physics ,Structures, and design of the instruments are seriously shortchanged (No Illustrations!). Although I am not a physicist (I'm a retired geochemist)... I was hoping for at least decent illustrations: instrumentation, the overall structures, and a printout of the "Signal". Even the focus of the book (personalities, academic politics) was confusing and enormously distracting... I'm still not sure who the good guys or the bad guys are... The Science is Noble Prize class, the average reader will probably miss the whole impact if they get though the book. I would give the book at best a 2 1/2 stars.

If you are interested in the sociology and psychology of the people who made LIGO happen, you'll like this book. If you are more interested in the physics or astronomy concepts (like me), you'll be disappointed.

To whit: there are lots and lots of verbatim transcriptions of dialogue betwixt the author and the LIGO actors. Not my cup of tea...

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“A campaign to record the [sounds of the universe] began a half century ago. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is to date the most expensive undertaking ever funded by the National Science Foundation…

There are two LIGO observatories, one in Hanford, Washington, and the other in Livingston, Louisiana…With integrated costs exceeding a billion dollars and an international collaboration of hundreds of scientists and engineers, LIGO is the culmination of entire careers and decades of technological innovation…

As 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.”

The above extract comes from this well-written and informative book by Janna Levin. She is a professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University (in Upper Manhattan, New York City). Levin is also director of sciences at “Pioneer Works” (a center for arts and sciences in Brooklyn). As well, she is an author and has recently been named a Guggenheim Fellow (one who demonstrates exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts).

This book is about the history of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory or LIGO. But what exactly is LIGO? It is a large-scale U.S. physics experiment and observatory to detect cosmic gravitational waves and to develop gravitational-wave observations as an astronomical tool. The original LIGO observatories (there are two) were conceived, built, and operated by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Later, the sensitivity of the original LIGO detectors were enhanced to become “Advanced LIGO.”

(Note that the word “Observatory” of LIGO is somewhat deceiving as detection is actually made by sound.)

So, what are gravitational waves? They are ripples in the curvature of space-time that propagate as waves, generated in certain gravitational interactions that spread outward from their source (such as two colliding black holes). They were predicted by Albert Einstein (1879 to 1955) in 1916 on the basis of his Theory of General Relativity (1915).

Levin does a good job in detailing the fifty-year history of LIGO. She gives us the biographies (most obtained through interviews) of the major scientists responsible for bringing the LIGO experiment to fruition (some people may find these biographies tedious to read) and captures quite well their vision, spirit, struggles, obsessions, aspirations, frustrations, and trials as they attempt to capture these elusive waves. All the necessary science is intertwined with this important human element.

The two main things you will learn is: (1) how science works (2) the power of human ability and imagination.

If you read the end of the above quoted extract, you will see that Levin thought LIGO was a “fool’s ambition.” (These are the last two words of the last chapter of this book.) Even many of the scientists working on LIGO had their doubts.

As Levin was about to bring her finished book to her publisher, she received an e-mail in Dec 2015 telling her that LIGO had “recorded a signal consistent with the…merger of two…black holes!!” (Detection of these waves occurred on Sep 14, 2015 with the announcement of this discovery being made on Feb 11, 2016.)

Thus, Levin had to add an “epilogue” to her book. Therefore, the chapters of this book are concerned with the history of LIGO but the epilogue is about the 2015 discovery of gravitational waves.

Finally, the only problem I had with this book is that it screams out for illustrations (pictures, diagrams, etc.). Everything in this book is in words. I would have liked to have seen pictures or diagrams of LIGO and its main components. And portraits of the key scientists involved would have been nice.

In conclusion, at the very beginning of this book, Levin dedicates an entire page to a Machiavelli quotation:

“There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.”

This 1513 quote perfectly describes the true story of LIGO that’s detailed in this revealing book!!!

(First published 2016; 16 chapters; epilogue; main narrative 210 pages; acknowledgements; appendix; notes; index; about the author)

<<Stephen PLETKO, London, Ontario, Canada>>

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This is one of those science books that gets behind the technology and delves into the people. The personalities involved in LIGO are certainly strong ones and it makes for an interesting read. Of course no sooner had LIGO been brought on line than it did what it was designed to do - detect gravitational waves. That news apparently came after Janna Levin finished (or veryt nearly finished) the book and that brief story was included in a very interesting epilogue. The science is, of course, earth-shaking but the path to building these "observatories" seems nearly impossible, And yet man has the ability to predict what is necessary for this observation and nature confirmed our analysis. It's an intriguing story on how we place our finger on the pulse of the universe.

Ms. Levin beautifully covers the story of an historic scientific accomplishment. The concept of how black holes form, and how they affect space and time, can be difficult to comprehend, but Levin explains it in a way most people can understand without being overwhelmed. The same goes for the theory, design, and construction of the instruments used to detect them. She tells the interesting tale of the often difficult politics and personalities behind the building of the two LIGO, which have recently made ground-breaking discoveries that confirmed thoeries and justified all the effort and expense it took to create them. This is a worthy history of a landmark in scientific achievement, with a first-hand account from its pioneers.

A historian is supposed to gather the evidence and construct a coherent
picture of events, sorting through the different perspectives and
incomplete data; instead Levin offers biographical sketches and a
personal narrative, the story of her efforts to gather the material for
a history. She never delivers a straightforward analysis of events:
the problem is particularly acute for the upheaval surrounding the
conflict between Vogt and Dever, where we never learn what really
happened; she merely provides scraps of the recollections from each
of the participants, leaving the task of synthesis to the reader.

The jacket of my hard-cover copy claims Levin is "a first-rate writer"
whose exquisite prose" makes the book "most rewarding"; I found the
opposite: this was a hard read. Levin frequently misuses words:
for example,
"realism" is not a synonym for "reality"; "surety" is a pretentious
substitute for "certainty" and "inspiral" is not a word at all. Where was
her editor?

It is obvious LIGO had to overcome a lot of resistance from the
scientific community. Its creators managed to make the case to the
National Science Foundation and a skeptical Congress that it
really was worth spending billions of dollars to collect what is
probably less than a megabyte of information. Levin makes no effort
to summarize this argument; surely, she owes the reader an explanation
of what truly can be learned from this "observatory", not just the
fanciful metaphor of the sound being added to a silent movie.

None-the-less, by working hard, the reader can glimpse the enormous
effort and dedication needed to bring to completion an astonishing
technical achievement.

The author, a theoretical cosmologist, describes the event that is at the heart of this worthwhile volume with these words: "Somewhere in the universe two black holes collide, an event as powerful as any since the origin of the universe, outputting more than a trillion times the power of a billion Suns. That profusion of energy emanates from the coalescing holes in a purely gravitational form, as waves in the shape of spacetime, as gravitational waves."
Professor Levin's book is the tale of the scientists who theorized and developed a means for detecting these gravitational waves, first predicted by Albert Einstein just over one hundred years ago. It is an intriguing and entertaining account of the creation of one of the largest and most sophisticated (but startlingly theoretically simple) projects in the last half century. Levin's particular gift is communicating for the reader the fascinating personalities and eccentricities of the scientists involved with the creation of the gravitational wave observatories.
A satisfying read on its own, but a good complementary story is "The Particle at the End of the Universe" by Sean Carroll, the story of the creation of the facility which detected the Higgs Boson particle.

Educated layperson--not a scientist. Enough science to stretch me regarding the fascinating story of the discovery of gravitational waves and proof of the existence of black holes. I liked the human stories--the dedication to ideas over decades. Nice, unique, jump-to-the-chase writing style. Love Levin's descriptions of the awesome infinitesimal and expansive distances and cataclysmic events. Really a great book. Thoroughly enjoyable, even suspenseful. Hard to put down. Thank you Janna Levin for bringing science alive!

My English teachers would have worn out pencils writing "awk" on nearly every page of this terribly written book on an otherwise fascinating subject.
"In serendipity with the Nazi advance..."? Really? Take a writing lesson from Richard Rhodes or James Gleick. "The raw electrical power was invested in a device, carried in a fighter plane over a target, and freed to sail down to Earth...." It's called "dropping a bomb". Refer to Rhodes' "Making of the Atomic Bomb" for basic facts and before gratuitously trashing J. Robert Oppenheimer. Strong opinions expressed for the sake of being opinionated - however politically naive and superficial. I pity Barnard College physics students obliged to sit thru Levin lectures. I'm a good the store customer, but this title I gladly returned to my local library.

KGB indeed harassed Kip Thorne rather openly whenever he came to Moscow. I was living in St. Petersburg, Russia, at that time, I was exchanging science-related letters with him, and at some point in late 1970s, he forwarded me an invitation to meet him in Moscow, at the Intourist hotel (special hotel for foreigners only) where he was staying. Soviet citizens were not allowed inside Intourist hotel, so we met in the lobby and talked when walking along the street. A guy in the KGB "uniform": black suit, white shirt, and tie, was shamelessly following our every step, he even put his hand to the ear to make sure that we understand that he is listening to our conversations. I met with foreign scientists before and after that, I realized that they were under surveillance, but this was never done so openly. Some time after that, I was summoned to the KGB regional office, where they showed me Xerox copies of my own letters to Kip Thorne and warned that sending any scientific material abroad without a KGB permission is strictly illegal (by the way, opening letters was illegal too, but for that, the punishment was usually a reprimand). Communist regime at that time was not as brutal as during Stalin's times but it was still a ruthless dictatorship.

Also, I do not think that Braginsky was a KGB agent just because he was allowed to travel abroad. While most people were not allowed -- I got my first permission in 1989, at the height of perestroika -- a few researchers were allowed to go, I knew several of them, and I can vouch for them that they were not KGB agents at all. Overall, the KGB effect was somewhat over-exaggerated by us: yes, there was a lot of intimidation, letters that we got from abroad came opened etc, but it was not about getting any information about us -- the KGB knew perfectly well that we were all against the communist dictatorship. One of my advisors, Professor Revolt Pimenov, was sent to exile to Syktyvkar, Komi republic, for reading and distributing Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, and other illegal books, told me that one of the local KGB employees confessed to him that some agents, when tasked to install microphones in the dissidents' apartments, instead sold them to radio hams -- we already know that you do not like us, he said.

If, like me, your college physics course was the equivalent of “Physics for Poets,” you are likely to enjoy reading Janna Levin’s book about gravitational waves titled, Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space. Using a light touch in presenting the science, Levin focuses on the people, the personalities, and their stories. The result is a readable and entertaining way of picking up something new about science while gaining resonance with scientists by Levin’s showing that their lives are as messy as our own.

Rating: Four-star (I like it)

This is a fascinating book, mostly about the personalities who pulled off this amazing achievement. She mentioned in the foreword she had started writing a completely different book, relatively accessible, about gravitational waves, and all the physics behind LIGO, and that she had nearly all the material for that book before her editor diverted her to write this book. High five to the editor, but ...

I hope she reads this review, and is hard at work finishing the book she first intended.

There is help in understanding the universe. Janna Levin offers up great insight in how man searches the cosmos for answers; some answers to questions that have not even been asked yet. It is in the descriptions of the humanity of the searchers, their flaws, their humor... those things that make them even more amazing in their dedication, that brings this book to life.

This is a background story with vivid characters and settings. The conclusion to the story is already known; however, the persistence required and personal, scientific and financial complexity of such a big science project makes a terrific story. Jana Levin tells the story in a way that makes the complex science, personalities and politics understandable and fascinating.

Nice bio sketches but very little of physics. Ms. Levin has made no attempt to describe the machine at the heart of the LIGO. She could, at the least, provide a schematic diagram of the interferometer that is used at LIGO. If she has such a low opinion of the readers, she could put at least a couple of relevant pages in appendix. Ans so this book gets from me 4 stars for the blues and 2 stars for physics.

Levin does not concentrate enough on the science and the actual workings of LIGO and spends too much time on the conflicts and clashes among the founders. A good history but one that concentrates too much on the main LIGO characters. I feel Gravity's Kiss by Harry Collins was substantially better because it also concentrates on the science and the working crew (not just history of leaders), and thus is a more inside view.

This is not just another book about black holes or gravitational waves. This is a book about how large-scale, long-term science gets done. It is also an incredible human study, and a pleasantly lyrical homage to experimentalists and experiments. It's a very fast read, an enjoyable drama of egos and politics. I'd recommend it to readers who wouldn't otherwise read a book about physics - it is an interesting character story that just might teach you something new about the history and practice of science.

A fascinating look into the human side of science. If your goal is to understand gravitational wave theory and reality look elsewhere. But if you want an examination of the mixture of ego, vision and human foibles in big science this is a book for you.

If hundreds of pages about the personalities and politics of a big science project written in an amateurish style (Where was the editor on this?) is what you're looking for, then this book is for you. It's page after tedious page of "Kip said..." "Rai said...".

If you're curious about the science, look elsewhere.

Janna Levin has written a wonderfully human story about the challenges behind conceiving, funding, and then building, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). LIGO has recently (2016) been in the news for the first direct detection of waves predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity, gravitational waves. These are waves in spacetime itself, and their observation is likely to open an entire new window into our universe. "Black Hole Blues" is the back story of the journey from early gravitational wave research, to the conception of LIGO and its early growing pains, to, in a final coda, the recent successful observation of the waves.

I adored this book, mostly because it gives you a different perspective into the world of big physics experiments and how they are originally conceived and then carried to completion. This book isn't the kind of pop science whose main goal is trying to convey the challenging science of theoretical physics (not saying that these bad, just that this is no that book!), instead this the story of the personal journeys that occur along the way to an amazing achievement like LIGO. With direct access to many of the main players in the collaboration, the book spends different chapters on their different perspectives of the history and controversies (and oh there were a lot) behind LIGO. The closest comparison for the style of this book is "The Soul of a New Machine", Tracy Kidder's description of the race to build a new microcomputer. Similar to that book by the time you finish this one you come away even more amazed at the successes of large engineering and science projects, and also see them as the result of an at times messy and chaotic process, not just the result of a "we had an idea" and "then we built it" process. If you dig getting perspective on scientists and their journeys to discovery, this book is perfect for you.