Overall Favorite Books of 2016
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4.
BLACK HOLE BLUES
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In Black
Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space, which crowns the year’s finest
science books, cosmologist and novelist Janna
Levin tells the story of the century-long vision, originated by
Einstein, and half-century experimental quest to hear the sound of spacetime by
detecting a gravitational wave. This book remains one of the
most intensely interesting and beautifully written I’ve ever encountered — the kind that comes about
once a generation if we’re lucky.
Everything we know about the universe so far
comes from four centuries of sight — from peering into space with our eyes and
their prosthetic extension, the telescope. Now commences a new mode of knowing
the cosmos through sound. The detection of gravitational waves is one of the
most significant discoveries in the entire history of physics, marking the dawn
of a new era as we begin listening to the sound of space — the probable portal
to mysteries as unimaginable to us today as galaxies and nebulae and pulsars
and other cosmic wonders were to the first astronomers. Gravitational
astronomy, as Levin elegantly puts it, promises a “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.”
Astonishingly enough, Levin wrote the book
before the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) — the
monumental instrument at the center of the story, decades in the making — made
the actual detection of a ripple in the fabric of spacetime caused by the
collision of two black holes in the autumn of 2015, exactly a century after
Einstein first envisioned the possibility of gravitational waves. So the story
she tells is not that of the triumph but that of the climb, which renders it
all the more enchanting — because it is ultimately a story about the human
spirit and its incredible tenacity, about why human beings choose to devote
their entire lives to pursuits strewn with unimaginable obstacles and bedeviled
by frequent failure, uncertain rewards, and meager public recognition.
Indeed, what makes the book interesting is
that it tells the story of this monumental discovery, but what makes it
enchanting is that Levin comes at it from a rather unusual perspective. She is
a working astrophysicist who studies black holes, but she is also an incredibly
gifted novelist — an artist whose medium is language
and thought itself. This is no popular science book but something many orders
of magnitude higher in its artistic vision, the impeccable craftsmanship of
language, and the sheer pleasure of the prose. The story is structured almost
as a series of short, integrated novels, with each chapter devoted to one of
the key scientists involved in LIGO. With Dostoyevskian insight and nuance,
Levin paints a psychological, even philosophical portrait of each protagonist,
revealing how intricately interwoven the genius and the foibles are in the
fabric of personhood and what a profoundly human endeavor science ultimately
is.
She writes:
Scientists
are like those levers or knobs or those boulders helpfully screwed into a
climbing wall. Like the wall is some cemented material made by mixing
knowledge, which is a purely human construct, with reality, which we can only
access through the filter of our minds. There’s an important pursuit of
objectivity in science and nature and mathematics, but still the only way up
the wall is through the individual people, and they come in specifics… So the
climb is personal, a truly human endeavor, and the real expedition pixelates
into individuals, not Platonic forms.
For a taste of this uncategorizably wonderful
book, see Levin on the story of the
tragic hero who pioneered gravitational astronomy and how
astronomer Jocelyn Bell discovered pulsars.
BRAIN PICKINGS
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