In Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space, Janna Levin, a celebrated astrophysicist who has written both fiction (A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines) and nonfiction (How the Universe Got Its Spots), recounts the epic scientific quest to detect gravitational waves. At the time of writing, Levin's major protagonists and interviewees--including physicists Kip Thorne, Rainer Weiss and Ronald Drever--couldn't be sure that the search for gravitational waves wouldn't turn out to be a horribly expensive wild goose chase. Levin chronicles the enormous amount of brainpower, hard work and luck that went into the successful creation of the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) and its recent detection of the ripples in space-time that Einstein predicted a century ago.
Levin is adept at writing with clarity and even lyricism about conceptually difficult topics. She refers to gravitational waves as "a sonic record of the history of the universe, a soundtrack to match the silent movie." Quasars are a "luminous jet propelled millions of light-years out, a cosmological signal we saw from Earth for the first time in the 1960s and didn't know what the hell could possibly do that." Apart from her clever descriptions, Levin excels at explaining and dramatizing the interpersonal conflict at the heart of just about any large-scale cooperative endeavor. Levin is careful to see both sides of every squabble, and judicious in giving credit to the troubled, fractious scientists who contributed to what might prove to be one of the greatest discoveries of the last century. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books