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book review

Janna LevinSonja Georgevich

It's a peculiar quirk of history that the study of black holes seems inordinately endowed with tales of adversity and personal tragedy. One hundred years ago this spring, Karl Schwarzschild, the German Jewish astronomer who initiated the modern theory of black holes during his off hours while he was a soldier in the First World War, died within months of making his great breakthrough. He was the victim of an infection contracted on the Russian front. Stephen Hawking, the celebrated scientist who revolutionized our understanding of black holes in the 1970s famously did so while battling ALS. And just last month, a quarter-billion-dollar space telescope launched by the Japanese space agency to study black holes in unprecedented detail stopped communicating with Earth and may be lost, costing years of scientists' time and effort.

It's against this backdrop of hard knocks that Janna Levin brings us the lesser known but at times equally heartbreaking drama behind the effort to "hear" gravitational waves – the subtle vibrations in space and time that are generated by black holes colliding in distant galaxies.

As it happens, the decades-long quest came to a triumphant conclusion earlier this year when researchers working with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) experiment announced the first detection of gravitational waves. But long before the historic news conference, Levin was speaking to the principal architects behind the experiments and its less successful predecessors to get their story. Her compelling chronicle of a lifetime quest forms the backbone of Black Hole Blues and Other Songs From Outer Space. While it includes the important steps and technical achievements made along the way, at a deeper level the book is a meditation on what makes science so very hard and why it can exact such a heavy toll from those who pursue it.

As a professor of physics and astronomy at Columbia University in New York, Levin brings an insider's familiarity with the landscape of modern astrophysics. But she is an accomplished and perceptive storyteller who brings to light the drives and desires behind the science. Her previous books (including the speculative novel A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines) and an autobiographically revealing appearance on the Moth Radio Hour, demonstrate that she does not shy away from the emotional currents that often run like hidden nerves through the intellectual meat of a science story.

The main characters are an eclectic bunch, such as Rainer Weiss, a Brooklyn kid who grew up toying with loudspeakers and other audio equipment dragged home on the subway, never imagining he'd eventually be tuning into the cosmos as a scientist at MIT. Or Ron Drever, who was raised learning how to make do with scarcity in post-war Scotland and who built a television so that his family could watch the Queen's coronation. And there's Kip Thorne, the Mormon-raised theorist whose influential vibe in gravitational research is like that of a Zen master crossed with Gandalf the wizard. Weiss and Thorne were both at centre stage during a Washington news briefing in February where LIGO's Nobel-worthy result was unveiled to the world. In another tragic twist, Drever, who was ejected as director of the project in 1992 after an epic administrative battle and now suffers from dementia, could not attend. Levin's book gives the presence – and absence – of these key players the personal context that news reports could not.

But most poignant of all is the story of Joe Weber, an experimental physicist who came up with his own approach to detecting gravitational waves long before LIGO was built – a "luckless expedition," as Levin writes, that grew increasingly contentious after Weber became convinced he had spotted something.

Weber died in 2000 without ever concerning his colleagues he had done it. Some of the most compelling conversations in the book are between Levin and Virginia Trimble, a well known Caltech astronomer who was also happened to be Weber's second wife. (The two married after a few weekends together and always called each other by their last names.) Trimble has long been a favourite personality for journalists who cover astronomy and space, starting with a 1962 profile in Life magazine that touted her good looks and 180 IQ. But when explaining why she has decided not to expend energy defending her husband's research record, she reveals a pathos that springs from a lifelong devotion to eking cosmic truth out of an unco-operative universe.

"Science is a self-correcting process," Trimble tells Levin, "But not necessarily in one's lifetime."

Ivan Semeniuk writes about science for The Globe and Mail.

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