Janna Levin

This is a rather fascinating personality-centric accounting of post-WWII science that lead to the facilities that currently detect Gravity Waves. The science is there at the core, from the postulations to the amazingly hard-fought politics and accounting that made the whole thing happen.

And believe me, it almost didn't happen so many times. Fortunately, it did and a few years ago we had confirmation of real-life Black Holes to celebrate over.

Truly, I couldn't be happier. Science needs these show more kinds of astronomical wins. It was astronomical in the way they pulled it off, too.

But wow, the rest of the story reads like a great novel full of difficult personalities, boundless hope, disappointment, and heroism. Kinda like most science. But then, it is a calling. These men and women are truly devoted to the cause despite not always agreeing on the best direction or means to the goal.

So did this read like a soap opera full of departmental squabbles, politics, money-wrangling, and even a little madness thrown in?

Yep.

But that's what makes it so interesting. They did it despite all that. And the project is very healthy now. :) :) Fun read! show less

I guess I am a physics nerd, because I was spellbound by this brief yet detailed history of the development of the LIGO and the search for gravitational waves. Levin knows her physics, and uses striking images and analogies to explain the physics behind the LIGO endeavor and why its results are so important. She also knows her physicists and relates the rivalries, personality conflicts and hurt feelings matter of factly. All of this is fascinating to me,, as are the politics behind funding show more the two Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatories in Lousiana and a fdw hours drive from me in Hanford, WA. I want to convince my book club to read this one. show less

I thought this little primer on physics was perfectly delightful. I've never seen anyone explain physics in quite this way before, but it was absolutely charming. The biggest points (for me) were on the topology of the universe. Geometry trumps General Relativity. For, as we know, neither General Relativity or Quantum Physics can describe the actual shape of the universe. No predictive power at all.

But then, even Einstein said there would have to be yet another comprehensive paradigm shift. show more

I personally like to think that all science will always have to do successive paradigm shifts as if it, too, followed the Marxian axiom. It means there will never be an end to learning, and THAT is something gorgeous to behold. :)

ANYWAY, back to this book. Levin's prose takes the highly unusual tack of posing as letters to her mom, being awesomely personal and revealing while also illustrating just how much she loves the science she does. The mix, far from being awkward, turns the whole struggle and acquisition of knowledge into an end that we can all admire greatly. It also makes it REAL in a way I rarely see in these kinds of non-fiction books. Or perhaps it's not all that rare, because I do get a very awesome sense of the people for whom the science is everything, but in her case, I just feel love, sympathy, and shared joy.

This is not your standard boilerplate introductory pop-sci text. Rather, it is a personal and gorgeous love-note to the ideas that shine so bright, always asking more questions, demanding more sacrifices, and, in the end, revealing even more of the universe.

Totes respect. show less

Black holes are complicated, largely because what we think we know is mostly extremely long distance observation, mixed with debatable quantum mechanics and a lot of plain old conjecture. Janna Levin, professor of Physics at Columbia, manages to explain it rationally, clearly and even excitingly in her microbook The Black Hole Survival Guide. Spoiler alert: there is no surviving a black hole.

Levin uses everyday objects to make understanding the process and the thing easy to follow. First of show more all, black holes are actually nothing. It takes her some time to get readers to understand that, but black holes contain nothing and are nothing. Yet they are fearsomely massive and dense. The old cliché is that they’re so dense even light cannot escape from them. But just because we can’t see light beyond the event horizon doesn’t mean black holes are dark on the other side. All the thrashing and smashing and tearing apart could well mean it is extremely bright on the other side as energy is released. We just can’t see it from our side. Plus, the event horizon is a hologram, not a window, she says. It contains all the information from everything that passes through, while the interior holds nothing. This kind of explanation makes the book a real page turner for me, and for sci-fi and astrophysics fans in general I would imagine.

First up for explanation is gravity. Gravitation is curved spacetime. The distortion of space means gravity fields around various bodies. Free-fall paths are curves in space, not straight lines. They trace an arc, much like throwing something across the room. Therefore the earth does not pull on the moon. Rather, it bends space and the moon falls freely along it, a very different concept. Levin says this was Einstein’s greatest finding.

A black hole, as everybody knows, is massively dense. A black hole with the same mass as our sun would be just six kilometers wide, if that puts it in perspective. It consumes everything that ventures near, and destroys it, instantly shredding it to its subatomic components. It destroys the information, the history that it carried with it for eons. Destroyed matter can reappear as flares, fairly vomited from the black hole, bearing no relation whatsoever to what came in through the event horizon.

A black hole warps time so much it basically stands still at the event horizon. Levin uses the example of two women in a mothership far from the black hole. If one leaves and ventures towards the black hole, her voyage would seem normal to her. But the woman in the mothership would die of old age watching her. The last moment, crossing the event horizon, would appear to take forever. From the event horizon looking out, the universe would advance billions of years in moments.
Meanwhile, back at wrapping your brain around incredible concepts, the black hole singularity that we naively think of as the center of a sphere within the black hole is really at a future point in time and not a point in space at all. She says light can no more travel toward you from the singularity than light can travel into the past. This is a further good reason why a black hole seems dark and no light escapes. It’s all in the past from our side of the event horizon.

There are contradictions to deal with as well. My favorite is that relativity’s prediction of the singularity means it cannot be.

Levin also has the best explanations through analogy of quantum mechanics that I have seen. She says as with a musical chord vs a single note, a quantum particle cannot be in a precise place and simultaneously have a precise motion. If a particle is in a precise location, it is in a superposition of motions. If it is moving at a precise speed, it is in a superposition of locations. Position and velocity are complementary observables in physics talk. Saying particles have precise motion and location is as silly as saying a note is the same as a chord in Levin’s description.

This comes closer to explaining it in plain English than anything I have yet reviewed, which is about ten other books on quantum mechanics now.

Bottom line: keep away from black holes. No great worry there, as the nearest one would take numerous lifetimes to reach, even at the speed of light. It’s a voyage that would end badly, unlike this fun little book.

David Wineberg show less