Janna Levin is an Astrophysicist on the faculty at Barnard who also runs the programming at the multi-disciplinary art space in our neighborhood, Pioneer Works. She’s got a tremendous amount of energy and diverse set of interests, all of which are brought to bear on this epic tale of the conception and realization of the first Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) capable of detecting black holes.

I read a lot of Science Fiction, and Science Non-Fiction is a different animal but they share some common threads. The idea of the LIGO came about as a conceptual experiment to prove Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which postulated the existence of Gravitational Waves. Unlike light waves, which can be detected by all sorts of visual equipment, gravitational waves are the sound of the large scale events in universe – merging of black holes, explosion of supernovas, rotations of neutron stars, and remnants of radiation from the creation of the universe. These events are occurring billions of light years away from earth, and thus require extraordinarily sensitive equipment to detect. The vision and optimism to conceive of a large scale machine for detecting sounds only a small fraction of a second long from millions of miles away is nothing short of other-worldly. Through Levin’s chatty interviews with all the scientists seeking to prove the existence of gravitational waves, it is hard not to think that the two key scientists Rei Weiss and Kip Thorne, who began theorizing this project in 1968 and saw it through until the first black hole detection in 2015, have some special powers of imagination, curiosity, and endurance.

The most similar history of science book I have read is Richard Rhodes The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Although Black Hole Blues is a much slimmer volume, both books demonstrate the important and complex collaborations which produce large scale scientific projects. The business of science at this scale requires government support; and it’s political. although the LIGO is not a military project, Levin describes how Rochus Vogt, the director, hired a lobbyist to help him get government approval and funding. It was finally approved by a Republican administration, who at the last minute changed the location of one of the LIGOs from Maine to Louisiana to punish the Democratic senator from Maine. The challenges to this project were so numerous and diverse that it’s hard not to share Levin’s enthusiasm and excitement.

I give this book 4🪐 out of 5🪐.