Here is a version of a review I wrote fir ther Wall St Journal:In February this year scientists announced the detection of a burst of gravitational waves from space. The waves, predicted by Einsteins general theory of relativity, came from a pair of colliding black holes, each with about 30 times the mass of our Sun, in a galaxy more than a billion light years away. The ripple they produced jiggled the Earth by much less than the diameter of an atom. The astonishing story of how science was able to measure such a tiny effect, at a cost of a few hundred million dollars (which seems modest given the achievement) is told by Janna Levin in this superb new book. Levin is able to tell the tale so soon, and so well, because she has had privileged access to the experiment (known as LIGO, from Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) and the experimenters for several years, and knew that the first runs were due in September 2015. Like the experimenters, and everyone in the scientific community, she was stunned by the speed with which LIGO has produced results, but was able to squeeze in a brief mention of the news in an Epilogue. Levin is herself a scientist, which explains her privileged access; but more than that she is a writera writer with a background in science, rather than a scientist who writes. Her book is less about the nuts and bolts of the science and technology, although it contains enough of that to satisfy our interest in how such measurements can be made, and more about the people, personalities and politics involved in getting such an expensive and long-gestating (four decades and counting) project to fruition. She gives due credit to Joseph Weber, a lone pioneer who built a gravitational wave detector in the sixties and thought he had found something, but was later proved wrong. In spite of this false start, Webers example encouraged interest in the possibility of detecting such waves, and stimulated others to take up the challenge. It was Weber who brought Einstein into the lab. The contributions and clashes of the three key players in Levins story who did take up that challenge are each given comfortable space, and should soon be sharing a Nobel Prize. They are Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne and Ronald Drever, the troika who got things moving, both scientifically and politically. The project grew out of a course on relativity theory that Weiss was teaching at MIT, in the early 1970s. His class were intrigued by the idea of gravitational waves ripples in space and to entertain them he devised a purely hypothetical idea (a thought experiment) for detecting such waves. The idea involved bouncing beams of light of mirrors to create so-called interference patterns. The passage of a gravitational wave through the experiment would change the interference pattern. Then, Weiss decided to try to turn the thought experiment into reality. He was, he said, going to try to do the most interesting thing I could think of even though the project, if it succeeded at all, would take decades. It looked as if the effort would fail for lack of funds. But in 1975 Weiss met Thorne, a leading theorist in the field of relativity, and also a leading light at Caltech, who was seeking a partner to work on the search for gravitational waves. It was a marriage made in heaven. The troika was completed when they headhunted Drever from Glasgow, where he had established a formidable reputation as a hands on physicist who got things done, and was working on his own gravitational wave detector. Drever had been brought up in the sealing wax and string tradition of British scientists such as Ernest Rutherford, and was a genius at cutting corners and making things work provided he was left to do it his way. This was an asset when the project was young and impoverished, but as Levin details his approach became a problem when the project became a large, well-funded bureaucratic organisation with no room for mavericks. But the Nobel Committee had better get its skates on; none of these pioneers is in the first flush of youth, and Drever, sadly, now suffers from dementia. Not that Nobel Prizes, and the lust for them, are necessarily always a good thing. In an interview with Levin, Weiss refers to them as the sin in this field, causing friends to fall out with each other over claims for priority. On the scientific side, I was pleased to see Levin giving due emphasis to the importance of the discovery of a system known as the binary pulsar, which was seen in the early 1990s to be losing energy in a way which could only be explained by gravitational radiation. This was itself Nobel-winning work, and gave a great boost to the attempt to detect gravitational waves directly. Indeed, it was the binary pulsar that proved Einstein right, in so far as that needed proving. The importance of LIGO is that it provides a way to study gravitational waves directly, opening a new window on the Universe, potentially as important as opening up radio or X-ray astronomy. So far, it has detected what people expected it to detect; the real excitement begins when it begins to detect the unexpected. There are some minor irritations regarding Levins style. She is clearly unfamiliar with English places and titles, which wont bother many of her readers. More annoyingly, when introducing the physicist John Wheeler she cannot resist a parenthetical difficult not to mention his most famous student, Richard Feynman. Actually, it is easy. Just leave out that sentence. But this is a small price to pay for the pleasure of Levins easy style, which makes the reader feel like they are sitting in on her interviews or watching over her shoulder as she writes. I am much more uncomfortable about Levins telling, in my view too detailed, of the rivalries which led Drever to be pushed out of the project at the end of the 1990s. The other protagonists were interviewed and gave their versions of the truth in detail, but Drever is now unable to tell his side of the story. I am not sure that we need all the details anyway, but in the circumstances I definitely concur with the comment made to Levin by Weiss: Nobody wants to resurrect this stuff. Its unfortunately in the public record now. But it doesnt have to be in your book. Indeed not. But I dont want to end on a sour note. This is a splendid bookThat I recommend to anyone with an interest in how science works, and in the power of human imagination and ability. What LIGO actually measured on 14 September 2015 was a change in the length of detector arms 4 kilometres long that amounted to one ten-thousandth of the width of a proton. To scale that up to see a change in length as great as the width of a human hair would require a detector as long as a hundred billion times the circumference of the Earth. It is worth sitting back and letting that sink in. If human beings are capable of measuring that, they are capable of almost anything, given the will to do it. And if you want to know how they did it, in spite of all the trials and tribulations, you will have to read the book. John Gribbin is a Visiting Fellow in Astronomy at the University of Sussex, and author of 13.8: The Quest to Find the True Age of the Universe.

The real joy in this book is found in Levin's wonderful phrases. There may be too much personal drama and office politics stuff at the slight expense of adequately developing the fundamental science, but Levin consistently nails the right-words-in-the-right-order thing. The detection of gravitational waves started with high end audio tech in the 1940s. The theory of these space-time ripples started with Einstein a generation earlier. Detection was recently achieved in late 2015 via two identical instruments, separated by 1500 miles, each capable of detecting changes across their 2.5 mile long vacuum tubes of about 0.0000000000000001 miles. All in all, Levin offers a fine telling of humanity's greatest signal-to-noise story.

Astrophysicist and author Janna Levin has a good nose. In the late naughts, catching a rising swell of attention to Alan Turing as the centenary of his birth drew near, she wrote a novel that intertwined his life with that of logician Kurt Gödel, which she called, with a knack for alluring but sometimes twisty language, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines. Sure, anyone couldve looked up the date of Turings birth, but few wouldve guessed hed soon be the subject of a major American film. A few years later, again with an anniversary looming, Levin decided to chronicle the decades-long effort to catch a new kind of wave, and she began interviewing major participants, visiting laboratories, and compiling an account to be published sometime in 2016, 100 years after Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves. Its as if (pardon the illogical analogy) somebody had said in 1492, Hey, I think Ill go to the Bahamas in case any Europeans turn up. On February 10 of this year, not many people knew of these waves; on the 11th, the world was set on its ear, so to speak, by the announcement that theyd been heard, and Levins book, already on its way to print, was simply rescheduled to come out in March. She didnt know how the story would end; the entire book is written from the standpoint of an open question. But she was there with the backstory just when we wanted it.As weve grown to expect of scientific discovery, the work involves immensities both large and small. The basic idea for the project dates back to the 1960s, when slide rules were still in common use. The leading figures in the tale are old men now or, in one case, passed on. Hundreds of others contributed; Levin lists all of them in the back of the book. The plot keeps repeating itself: think of something, try it; figure out another way, try that; think of something bigger, ask for money, build it; imagine improvements, work them in, try it. The cost has become enormous; a relatively early plan had a price tag comparable to some present-day Hollywood films, around $70 million, but that was in the 80s, and the total has since surpassed a billion dollars. The machines involved are basically yardsticks, but theyve grown from something thatll fit in a room, to a prototype thats 40 meters on a side, to a fully functioning device whose arms stretch four kilometersthats not far short of the horizon to someone standing on the ground. The aim all along has been to detect a tiny soundit has frequently been called a chirpthat began very long ago and very far away. As Levin puts it, The signals are infinitesimal. The sources are astronomical. The sensitivities are infinitesimal. The rewards are astronomical.The scheme is fairly simple, and Levin sketches it early. As it occurred to Rai Weiss, it was lets measure gravitational waves by sending light beams between things. Levin amplifies that: Suspend mirrorsand watch them toss on the passing gravitational wave. Keep track of the distance between them and their motions will record the changing shape of spacetime.Shes usually deft at explaining the science. In its current form, the project uses two huge installations, one in Washington and the other in Louisiana. Why two? You want a second one not only to confirm the detectionbut also to ascertain the location of the sound. The utility of two detectors on the Earth is like the utility of two ears on the head. But the heart of the story, for Levin, is elsewhere: its not the science but the scientists, their background, their strengths and weaknesses, how they think, the labs they work in, the way they work with others. For most of them, we get a good sense even of how they talk, for Levin has tried to let them speak for themselves, through recent conversations of her own as well as earlier interviews. Rai Weiss considered studied engineering in undergraduate school at M.I.T. but found that physics had fewer requirements. Hes a restless tinkerer, an emeritus member of the project now but still likely to be found with his hands in the apparatus. You can sometimes hear him trying to fix his memories into words: of an all-night talk with Kip Thorne in 1975, he says, We made a huge map on a piece of paper of all the different areas in gravity. Where was there a future? Or what was the future, or the thing to do? (Levins quotations can sometimes seem diffuse, but they catch her subjects thinking on the fly.) Despite his taste for independent work in a lab, Weiss eventually becomes the one most determined to do what it takes, in terms of studies and proposals and concessions, to keep the project going and growing. Hes the one who went to the National Science Foundation, who took the idea into the realm of big science.Much like Weiss and much unlike him is Ron Drever, an experimentalist from Scotland with a special skill for ingenious methodshe once achieved an important result from a device he built in his mothers backyard. Drever has some sort of visual-intuitive sense thats the envy of his colleagues; he can work something out with a diagram that Thorne could resolve only with lengthy calculations. But despite Kips last name, Drever is the thorny one, convinced of the rightness of his views, virtually incapable of accommodating others; eventually hes fired from the project. And there are mysteries about this man. Why, since childhood, has he always required special attention? Why does Levin report that she has only heard his voice in recordings? Shes cagey about him, which is one of the things that keep you turning the pages.And then theres theorist Kip Thorne himself. Hes the persuasive charmer, the one who soothes and smooths over and reconciles; Levin says, Kip could make you believe. Thorne may be even more far-seeing than the others in this tale. Levin reports, He went so far as to say that by1962, it was obvious to him that gravitational waves must exist, although the debates would continuefor another twenty years. (Though Levin doesnt say so, Thorne has one thing in common with the great popularizer Carl Sagan: each helped shape a major Hollywood filmContact in Sagans case, Interstellar for Thorne. Levin does mention the latter.) You get the sense that his appearance disarms people; Weiss, meeting Thorne for the first time, recalls, Hes a delightful man, but he looked cuckoo, absolutely cuckoo.The supporting players are well drawn, too. Theres Joe Weber, another experimentalist and an embodiment of almost. Levin says, He was Shackleton many times, almost the first: almost the first to see the big bang, almost the first to patent the laser, almost the first to detect gravitational waves. Weber, who died in 2001, was also an almost tragic figure; hubris led him to push his claims of detection too far, and he ended up setting back a field he had helped pioneer. Theres Jocelyn Bell Burnell, an astronomer who found the first four pulsars ever discovered by human beings but who was omitted from the Nobel Prize for the work. And theres Robbie Vogt, the first director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO for short), who learned as a child in Nazi Germany to hate authority; hes the sort of person who would take an administrative job because hes sure all the other candidates would be worse.Levin is a mostly reliable narratormaybe only a fussbudget will care that in World War II, no nuclear weapon was carried in a fighter plane over a target. But shes an unreliable stylist; some of her prose could benefit from a detangling treatment. Whether or not you know the concept of a random walk, you may stumble over this, as did one of the books two New York Times reviewers: Progress was as random as the walk of a shred of lint through hot air. She tells us that a Soviet researcher made a speech for which he was later denunciated. She uses conceded when she means acceded and says the upscale when she means the scaling up. And, despite her efforts to keep the general public in mind, she leaves unexplained a few terms such as stochastic.Anyone reading the book now will know that the search paid off. But Levin, writing before the results were announced, repeatedly stresses the uncertainty. She calls the quest quixotic at one point and says elsewhere, Gravitational-wave detection was risky, controversial, technologically nearly impossible. In a way, the long effort is reminiscent of something Norbert Wiener pointed out about the atomic-bomb project: until it was done, no one knew whether it could be done. Some people may wonder whether the results so far have been worth the cost, as others have no doubt wondered whether the Large Hadron Collider has been; Levin herself says, LIGO also needs to do more to justify the investment versus rewards calculus. LIGO has to do astronomy, by which she seems to mean that this project, and others like it now being built, cant rest on their laurels but must continue to advance scientific understanding. Is the answer worth the price? For me, the idea that human societies must focus on A, B, and C and cant do D until later, as well as the related idea that not doing D would somehow in itself advance A, B, and C, goes against a part of human nature and a part of human history, the part that says we do and we must figure out for ourselves how things work. Besides, though weve mostly moved beyond the Victorian spirit, we still vibrate to tales of Ulysses-like striving, as many of our superhero entertainments show. Theres something of grandeur and inspiration here; listen attentively and youll hear it.I read an uncorrected proof that lacked Levins epilogue, which addresses LIGOs first success, and am curious how she wrapped up this short (256 pages) yet sweeping tale. But the body of her text ends on a fine note:Somewhere in the universe two black holes collidemaybe more than a billion years ago. A vestige of the noise of the crash has been on the way to us since early multicelled organisms fossilized in supercontinents on a still dynamic Earth. When I started to write this book, the sound reached Alpha Centauri. As the sound moves through the interstellar space outside the solar system, the detectors will be operational. [Finally,] someonein the control roommight barely hear something that sounds different. A sophisticated computer algorithm will parse the data stream in real time and send a notificationand someone will be the first to look over the specs of the trigger and think calmly, This might be It.[This review also appears on my blog.]