Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space in Science and Inquiry

May 29, 2019 Rusty rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: science, prose, non-fiction, history

I spend more time than is probably healthy thinking about things like, ‘what is the greatest feat of engineering that humanity has ever achieved?’

I’ve got a sorta of tentative list, they include things like the Apollo moon landing, the Large Hadron Collider, the Hubble Telescope (or really, just about any cutting edge optical telescope developed since the Hubble was created) and, as you might suspect if you know what this book is about, LIGO (the Laser-Interferometer-Gravitational-Observatory). I spend more time than is probably healthy thinking about things like, ‘what is the greatest feat of engineering that humanity has ever achieved?’

I’ve got a sorta of tentative list, they include things like the Apollo moon landing, the Large Hadron Collider, the Hubble Telescope (or really, just about any cutting edge optical telescope developed since the Hubble was created) and, as you might suspect if you know what this book is about, LIGO (the Laser-Interferometer-Gravitational-Observatory).

To try to put this in perspective - Gravitational Waves are really hard to detect, they were predicted by Einsteins’s General Relativity way back in the day, but aside form seeing patterns in the cosmic background microwave radiation that strongly imply they were part of the early universe, no one has ever detected them.

Because a Gravitational Wave is really a flaw in space-time, the universe itself flexing and squeezing in ever so subtle ways. So subtle in fact, that for the realistic chance of detecting them, then a device must be built that can detect such a ripple as small as one ten-thousandth the width of a proton.

This book covers what became a life long obsession for a few people as the LIGO was conceived, funded, and eventually built. It followed the brief fame of a guy way back in the 60’s that claimed to have detected them, and all the fallout from the later realization that he was in error.

And through it all, a few people never giving up the dream of building a device like what he have today.

A device so spectacularly sensitive and large that it requires miles long tunnels underground filled with lasers and mirrors and obsessive monitoring. The sites where the Observatories are built are sometimes believed be nefarious top secret govt facilities where time-traveling missions are conducted - and the engineers and scientists who work there have to do quite a bit of public outreach to try to calm the locals.

The whole thing is fascinating to me. This book was written prior to the LIGO team announcing their success in detecting Gravitational Waves (it’s covered in an epilogue) and is really about the 50 year journey to get this completed.

The topic is riveting, I was a little flustered how the technical aspects were glossed over in favor of focusing on the personality conflicts of the principal actors in the story.

Still, worth the read, but IMO could have been more than what it was. ...more

1 like · Like · see review