Skip to main content

Black Hole Blues - Janna Levin ****

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.

 Paperback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Language of Mathematics - Raúl Rojas ***

One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. This interesting little book traces the origins of a whole range of symbols from those familiar to all, to the more obscure squiggles used in logic and elsewhere. On the whole Raúl Rojas does a good job of filling in some historical detail, if in what is generally a fairly dry fashion. We get to trace what was often a bumpy path as different symbols were employed (particularly, for example, for division and multiplication, where several still remain in use), but usually, gradually, standards were adopted. This feels better as a reference, to dip into if you want to find out about a specific symbol, rather than an interesting end to end read. Rojas tells us the sections are designed to be read in any order, which means that there is some overlap of text - it feels more like a collection of short essays or blog posts that he couldn't be bothered ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ctrl+Alt+Chaos - Joe Tidy ****

Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other destructive work mostly by young males, some of whom have remarkable abilities with code, but use it for unpleasant purposes. I remember reading Clifford Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg about the first ever network worm (the 1988 ARPANet worm, which accidentally did more damage than was intended) - the book is so engraved in my mind I could still remember who the author was decades later. This is very much in the same vein,  but brings the story into the true internet age. Joe Tidy gives us real insights into the often-teen hacking gangs, many with members from the US and UK, who have caused online chaos and real harm. These attacks seem to have mostly started as pranks, but have moved into financial extortion and attempts to destroy others' lives through doxing, swatting (sending false messages to the police resulting in a SWAT te...
Post a Comment
Read more