Black Hole Blues by Janna Levin

I adore the first two books by Janna Levin. I first read her second, a work of fiction titled A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines. It's a work of fiction yet stars Alan Turing, Kurt Godel, and a few other historical figures. Its a beautiful and tragic tale of characters whose work I had a great familiarity with woven into a novel that blurs fact and fiction. Upon getting my hands on it, I stayed up all night until I'd finished it in the early morning. That's the only book I recall doing that with.

I quickly went back in time to read her first book, How the Universe Got Its Spots. It's a non-fiction armchair physics book which I recall being largely a collection of correspondence with her mother about her own work. Also, an excellent book.

I didn't know exactly what I would get from Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space, but I bought it automatically. I had some fairly good guesses from some discussion Janna had during appearances on the Probably Science Podcast. Of course, black holes and music in the title is also a great hint that this book would be about Ligo.

This book is a biography of the Ligo project and many of the key people that made it happen. The narrative tells of humble beginnings in the quest to measure gravity waves. It's a wonderful journey from a ragtag origin of repurposed equipment to the successful detection of gravity waves using one of the most advanced pieces of metrology the human species has ever created.

While you will pick up the scientific objectives, this is not a book about science, per se. No physics degree is required, nor is this the type of book that over-generalizes the science in a way that allows people to have conversations about it while not actually understanding it. Make no mistake, you'll learn about the scientific objectives and the aparatus. But this is really a book about the journey and the people involved.

Along that journey are many setbacks, controversies, and a bit of politics. There seems to be a deep fairness in the storytelling. Where differences of perspective and memory exist, Janna seems to give equal treatment without false balance.

The story spends time with a handful of key contributors and also takes you on site to both Ligo sites as they're being built and coming online. Throughout the entire text, despite some of it being historical, the reader feels very much a long for the ride on the hundred year path from Einstein's initial proposal of gravitational waves and the first empirical detection of this particularly quiet phenomenon.