Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space

From one of our most eminent theoretical astrophysicists and an award-winning writer, Black Hole Blues tells the inside story of the scientific pursuit to detect gravitational waves: the holy grail of modern cosmology, the soundtrack of the universe.

In 1916 Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves: ripples in the very fabric of spacetime generated by unfathomably powerful events. If such vibrations could somehow be recorded, we could observe our universe for the first time through sound: the hissing of the Big Bang, the whale-like tunes of collapsing stars, the low tones of merging galaxies, the drumbeat of two black holes collapsing into one. For decades, astrophysicists have searched for a way of doing so. Today, hundreds of scientists are at work on a billion-dollar project called LIGO, designed to achieve this revolutionary aim and confirm Einstein’s prediction. If successful, its only equivalent in both scale and importance would be the discovery of the Higgs Boson at CERN. In Black Hole Blues, Janna Levin provides a firsthand account of the surprises, disappointments, achievements and risks in this unfolding story – a uniquely compelling, intimate portrait of cutting-edge science at its most awe-inspiring and ambitious.