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Levin J. - Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space

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Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2016. 256 p. ISBN: 0307958191The authoritative story of the headline-making discovery of gravitational wavesby an eminent theoretical astrophysicist and award-winning writer.
From the author of How the Universe Got Its Spots and A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, the epic story of the scientific campaign to record the soundtrack of our universe.
Black holes are dark. That is their essence. When black holes collide, they will do so unilluminated. Yet the black hole collision is an event more powerful than any since the origin of the universe. The profusion of energy will emanate as waves in the shape of spacetime: gravitational waves. No telescope will ever record the event; instead, the only evidence would be the sound of spacetime ringing. In 1916, Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves, his top priority after he proposed his theory of curved spacetime. One century later, we are recording the first sounds from space, the soundtrack to accompany astronomys silent movie.
In Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space, Janna Levin recounts the fascinating story of the obsessions, the aspirations, and the trials of the scientists who embarked on an arduous, fifty-year endeavor to capture these elusive waves. An experimental ambition that began as an amusing thought experiment, a mad idea, became the object of fixation for the original architectsRai Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Ron Drever. Striving to make the ambition a reality, the original three gradually accumulated an international team of hundreds. As this book was written, two massive instruments of remarkably delicate sensitivity were brought to advanced capability. As the book draws to a close, five decades after the experimental ambition began, the team races to intercept a wisp of a sound with two colossal machines, hoping to succeed in time for the centenary of Einsteins most radical idea. Janna Levins absorbing account of the surprises, disappointments, achievements, and risks in this unfolding story offers a portrait of modern science that is unlike anything weve seen before.
Contents
When Black Holes Collide
High Fidelity
Natural Resources
Culture Shock
Joe Weber
Prototypes
The Troika
The Climb
Weber and Trimble
LHO
Skunkworks
Gambling
Rashomon
LLO
Little Cave on Figueroa
The Race Is On

Levin J.: author's other books


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Also by Janna Levin A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines How the Universe Got Its - photo 1
Also by Janna Levin

A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

How the Universe Got Its Spots

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A KNOPF Copyright 2016 by Janna - photo 2THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A KNOPF Copyright 2016 by Janna - photo 3

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2016 by Janna Levin

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Levin, Janna, author.

Title: Black hole blues and other songs from outer space / by Janna Levin.

Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2016. | 2016 |

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 20150466924 |

ISBN 978-0-307-95819-8 (hardcover) | ISBN 0-307-95820-4 (ebook) |

Subjects: LCSH: Gravitational waves. | Black holes (Astronomy)

Classification: LCC QC179 .L48 2016 | DDC 539.7/54dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015046692.

ebook ISBN9780307958204

Cover design by Janet Hansen

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Contents

To Warren, Gibson, and Stella

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.

MACHIAVELLI , The Prince (1513)

1
When Black Holes Collide

Somewhere in the universe two black holes collideas heavy as stars, as small as cities, literally black (the complete absence of light) holes (empty hollows). Tethered by gravity, in their final seconds together the black holes course through thousands of revolutions about their eventual point of contact, churning up space and time until they crash and merge into one bigger black hole, an event more powerful than any since the origin of the universe, outputting more than a trillion times the power of a billion Suns. The black holes collide in complete darkness. None of the energy exploding from the collision comes out as light. No telescope will ever see the event.

That profusion of energy emanates from the coalescing holes in a purely gravitational form, as waves in the shape of spacetime, as gravitational waves. An astronaut floating nearby would see nothing. But the space she occupied would ring, deforming her, squeezing then stretching. If close enough, her auditory mechanism could vibrate in response. She would hear the wave. In empty darkness, she could hear spacetime ring. (Barring death by black hole.) Gravitational waves are like sounds without a material medium. When black holes collide, they make a sound.

No human has ever heard the sound of a gravitational wave. No instrument has indisputably recorded one. Traveling from the impact as fast as light to the Earth could take a billion years, and by the time the gravitational wave gets from the black hole collision to this planet, the din of the crash is imperceptibly faint. Fainter than that. Quieter than can be described with conventional superlatives. By the time the gravitational wave gets here, the ringing of space will involve relative changes in distance the width of an atomic nucleus over a stretch comparable to the span of three Earths.

A campaign to record the skies began a half century ago. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is to date the most expensive undertaking ever funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), an independent federal agency that supports fundamental scientific research. There are two LIGO observatories, one in Hanford, Washington, and the other in Livingston, Louisiana. Each machine frames 4 square kilometers. With integrated costs exceeding a billion dollars and an international collaboration of hundreds of scientists and engineers, LIGO is the culmination of entire careers and decades of technological innovation.

The machines were taken offline over the past few years for an upgrade to their advanced detection capabilities. Everything was replaced but the nothingthe vacuumone of the experimentalists told me. In the meantime, calculations and computations are under way in groups across the world to leverage predictions of the universe at its noisiest. Theorists take the intervening years to design data algorithms, to build data banks, to devise methods to extract the most from the instruments. Many scientists have invested their lives in the experimental goal to measure a change in distance comparable to less than a human hair relative to 100 billion times the circumference of the world.

In the hopefully plentiful years that follow a first detection, the aspiration is for Earth-based observatories to record the sounds of cataclysmic astronomical events from many directions and from varied distances. Dead stars collide and old stars explode and the big bang happened. All kinds of high-impact mayhem can ring spacetime. Over the lifetime of the observatories, scientists will reconstruct a clanging discordant score to accompany the silent movie humanity has compiled of the history of the universe from still images of the sky, a series of frozen snapshots captured over the past four hundred years since Galileo first pointed a crude telescope at the Sun.

I follow this monumental experimental attempt to measure subtle shifts in the shape of spacetime in part as a scientist hoping to make a contribution to a monolithic field, in part as a neophyte hoping to understand an unfamiliar machine, in part as a writer hoping to document the first human-procured records of bare black holes. As the global network of gravity observatories nears the final stretch of this race, it gets harder to turn attention away from the promise of discovery, although there are still those who vehemently doubt the prospects for success.

Under the gloom of a controversial beginning and the opposition of powerful scientists, grievous internal battles, and arduous technological dilemmas, LIGO recovered and grew, hitting projections and escalating in capability. Five decades after the experimental ambition began, we are on the eve of the crash of a colossal machine into a wisp of a sound. An idea sparked in the 1960s, a thought experiment, an amusing haiku, is now a thing of metal and glass. Advanced LIGO began to record the skies in the fall 2015, a century after Einstein published his mathematical description of gravitational waves. The instruments should reach optimum sensitivity within a year or two, maybe three. The early generation of machines proved the concept, but still success is never guaranteed. Nature doesnt always comply. The advanced machines will lock on and tolerate adjustments and corrections and calibrations and wait for something extraordinary to happen, while the scientists push aside their doubts and press toward the finish.

As much as this book is a chronicle of gravitational wavesa sonic record of the history of the universe, a soundtrack to match the silent movieit is a tribute to a quixotic, epic, harrowing experimental endeavor, a tribute to a fools ambition.

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