[Dailydave] Book Review: Janna Levin's "Black Hole Blues"

[Dave Aitel]

http://www.amazon.com/Black-Blues-Other-Songs-Outer/dp/0307958191

So I wanted to do a quick review of Janna Levin's book on gravitational
waves. In specific, her book is on how BIG SCIENCE happens. Because finding
actual gravitational waves makes for a great case study - it was done in
public, unlike in our industry.

But like our industry it had government funding, international competition,
feuding researchers, and self-important charlatans. Surprisingly, this is
work that has been going on for decades. I had no idea how long people had
been working this exact problem. Literally, generations.

Janna's book has the additional valuable perspective that she is a
scientist in the field. The book has small moments of shine when her own
place in the story comes through, as many of the people she is interviewing
are friends, or close friends of friends. Like all scientific communities,
this is a small, highly connected one.

It's the details that sell this kind of story - what does it actually take
to measure the bending of spacetime itself? Well, you have to crawl through
a few tunnels of black widows and build a lot of very complex software
because you mistakenly built your hyper-sensitive vibration detector next
to a tree farm.

There are lessons here for other scientific industries. I thought it was
particularly poignant how many times they built detectors they KNEW
WOULDN'T HAVE THE RESOLUTION TO DETECT ANYTHING. The gravity wave detectors
in the end were a gigantic colossal leap of faith in our own science. One
that paid off.

-dave
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