Black hole blues
"In 1916, Einstein became the first to predict the existence of gravitational waves: sounds without a material medium generated by the unfathomably energy-producing collision of black holes. Now, Janna Levin, herself an astrophysicist, recounts the story of the search, over the last fifty years, for these elusive waves--a quest that has culminated in the creation of the most expensive project ever funded by the National Science Foundation ($1 billion-plus). She makes clear the how the waves are created in the cosmic collision of black holes, and why the waves can never be detected by telescope. And, most revealingly, she delves into the lives and fates of the four scientists currently engaged in--and obsessed with--discerning this soundtrack of the universe's history. Levin's account of the surprises, disappointments, achievements, and risks of this unfolding story provides us with a uniquely compelling and intimate portrait of the people and processes of modern science"
Stats for nerds
3recommend
6mentions
5people
2017–2025years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Janna Levin, Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space. It describes the construction of the LIGO experiment over a span of about 50 years. It does have a lot of character studies (one of Levin’s strengths) but also plenty of details about the incredible equipment and what it took to design it and put it all together.
- list of (most of) the books mentioned in this thread so far. I tried reading every comment but used chatGPT instead.
1. The Big Rich - Texas oil boom.
2. Barbarians at the Gate - Private equity origins.
3. Masters of Doom - John Carmack and Id Software.
4. Einstein by Walter Isaacson - Einstein's discoveries.
5. Houdini!!! - The escape artist and magician.
6. The Double Helix - DNA discovery.
7. Stress Test by Tim Geithner - Financial crisis.
8. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl - Concentration camp survival.
9. The Chariots of Apollo - NASA's space program.
10. Across the Airless Wilds by Earl Swift - Development of the moon buggy.
11. Apollo: The Race to the Moon by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox - Apollo missions.
12. The Secret Life of Groceries by Benjamin Lorr - Food supply chains.
13. The Prize by Daniel Yergin - Oil industry evolution.
14. Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson - Ambitious wreck divers.
15. The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes - Manhattan Project.
16. American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin - Robert Oppenheimer.
17. Conquistador by Buddy Levy - Hernán Cortés and the Aztecs.
18. Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner - Water infrastructure in the American West.
19. The Wright Brothers by David McCullough - The invention of flight.
20. Walt Disney by Neal Gabler - Vision and innovation in entertainment.
21. Tuxedo Park by Jennet Conant - Invention of radar.
22. Insisting on the Impossible - Edwin Land and instant photography.
23. The Logic of Failure - Understanding and avoiding failure.
24. The Big Short by Michael Lewis - 2008 financial crisis.
25. The Box by Marc Levinson - Shipping container revolution.
26. Latitude by Nicholas Crane - Cartography innovations.
27. When the Heavens Went on Sale by Ashlee Vance - Space startups.
28. The Founders by Jimmy Soni - PayPal's early days.
29. The Perfectionists by Simon Winchester - Precision engineering.
30. The Little Engine That Could - Children's classic.
31. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell - Success mechanics.
32. Shoe Dog by Phil Knight - Founding of Nike.
33. Black Hole Blues by Janna Levin - Building LIGO.
34. Freedom’s Forge - WWII industry mobilization.
35. Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes - Electrification by Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse.
36. The Path Between the Seas by David McCullough - Panama Canal construction.
37. Annapurna by Maurice Herzog - Climbing a Himalayan peak.
38. Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder - Data General engineers.
39. Showstopper by G. Pascal Zachary - Development of Windows NT.
40. Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand - WWII survival.
41. The Measure of All Things by Ken Alder - Defining the meter.
42. The Cuckoo’s Egg by Clifford Stoll - Tracking a hacker.
43. The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Kanigel - Srinivasa Ramanujan.
44. The Power Broker by Robert Caro - Robert Moses and New York infrastructure.
45. How Big Things Get Done - Large-scale project execution.
46. Dealers of Lightning by Michael A. Hiltzik - Xerox PARC.
47. Built by Roma Agrawal - Civil engineering insights.
48. The Will to Keep Winning by Daigo Umehara - Competitive gaming.
49. Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold - Low-temperature physics.
50. Carrying the Fire by Michael Collins - Apollo 11.
- One thing the book Black Hole Blues (Janna Levin) brought home to me was the absurdity of actually getting this project done. Now that it's complete, it's easy to say that it was obviously a good idea. It's another thing entirely to bet huge budgets on something that doesn't seem very likely to succeed.
- In the book Black Hole Blues by Janna Levin [0], she mentions that there was one member of the LIGO project who became the "go to" person for any technical discussions because they had memorized large parts of the infrastructure. Having memorized it, they could quickly "debug" issues and evaluate proposed changes. The implication was that asking the individual was faster than having to get together multiple people and then poll them for what they thought the answer might be.
In my own career, I've spent the last 15 years working in finance technology. Many of the systems involved in this industry are legacy (with lots of patches), complex and distributed with all of the attached problems that come with them. Multiple times over that, I've seen people with excellent memories and understanding of the system be able to pinpoint problems just by taking a couple symptoms and deducing the root cause in a few minutes. It really can be a superpower.
The one down side of course is that you build this great mental model for a system that only ever exists at one firm. This can lead the situation where you become more valuable to the firm over time as fewer people remain who understand the system. In turn, your opportunity cost of leaving goes up because you would have to start from zero at your next job.
[0] - https://amzn.to/3lkSfmu
- I was at a talk by Janna Levin, astrophysicist and author of a book Black Hole Blues that describes LIGO. (E.g., https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/18/books/review-black-hole-b...)
She gave a neat analogy between GWs, as sensed by LIGO, and an electric guitar. In the sense that a distant pluck on the string is transmitted as a wave down the string to the pickup, which senses a little wiggle in the string and amplifies it. I thought it was a poetic analogy that gives a second meaning to the word "instrument" in this context.
- Sean Carroll is interviewing Janna Levin at the LA Public Library downtown branch, next Thursday night: http://lfla.org/event/black-hole-blues-songs-outer-space/
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