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Recent Physics Books: Gravitational Waves and Brief Lessons

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I was on vacation last week, but brought along a bit of work in the form of a book I had agreed to review for another publication. Having gotten into pop-science reading mode for that, I also polished off a couple of other short pop-physics books that have gotten some buzz recently, Janna Levin's Black Hole Blues And Other Songs From Outer Space and Carlo Rovelli's Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. These are both short (the ebook edition of Black Hole Blues is 206 pages, while Rovelli's lessons take up just 57 electronic pages), and quick, engaging reads, totally suited for reading on trains, planes, and cruise ships.

Black Hole Blues is a history of the search for gravitational waves that culminated in LIGO's big discovery this past fall. The main focus is on the careers of Rainer Weiss, Ron Drever, and Kip Thorne, with side trips into the stories of Joe Weber and Robbie Vogt, a competitor to LIGO and a somewhat controversial administrator in the project's early stages, respectively.

This is less a story about the science of gravitational waves than a story about the doing of science, with vividly described personalities and personality conflicts. LIGO's development had several periods that would fairly be described as "tumultuous," and Levin goes into these in compelling detail. The principal sources for historical discussions seem to be interviews with Thorne and Weiss (Weber died several years back, and Drever is rather old and in ill health), which slants the story a little in their direction; Levin is pretty clear about this, though, and Thorne and Weiss are classy enough that all their direct comments about past colleagues are very diplomatic.

The book could not possibly be more timely, of course. In fact, as someone who knows how the book publishing process goes, the most impressive part of this for me was the final chapter, which describes the first unambiguous detection of gravitational waves last September. It's not just that Levin does a good job of capturing the excitement, but that the book came out in March but she describes events that took place in December. That's got to be in the page-proof stage, and getting that chapter written, edited, and added in time for the book's release is some serious "Stop the presses!" effort. It's a credit to everyone involved that they made the effort and did such a good job with it.

Rovelli's book is much less specific, and is drawn from a series of columns he wrote for an Italian newspaper. As the title promises, it offers seven "lessons," essays clocking in under ten pages each, on relativity, quantum mechanics, cosmology, the Standard Model, quantum gravity, thermodynamics and statistical physics, and human consciousness. There's a single equation, the central relationship of Einstein's general relativity, and this is mostly decorative.

The tone throughout the book is very philosophical and meditative, and very much a "view from 30,000 feet" kind of overview. As someone who knows (some of) the technical details of these subjects, the pleasure of this is seeing how Rovelli chooses to distill each of these subjects down to a single central idea or organizing principle. This is, of course, a highly personal take on the subject, most notably in the fifth chapter, where Rovelli only goes into his own preferred theory, Loop Quantum Gravity, and doesn't give much hint of alternative approaches. This is appropriate for the context and length restriction, but take it with a pinch (or several) of salt.

The principal weakness of both of these books is one of the standard failure modes of science writing for non-scientists, namely a tendency toward excessively poetic language. There's a tricky balance to be struck here, of course: as a writer, you want the book to have enough literary quality to hold the interest of nonscientists, while not obscuring the essential science details. This is also largely a question of personal tastes-- while my own preference is for plainer language, most of the glowing reviews on Rovelli's Amazon page cite its poetic qualities as a form of high praise. Levin's book is necessarily more grounded, being a history of a very concrete experiment, but there are occasional passages, mostly about astrophysical sources of gravitational waves, where it gets a bit more flowery than I'd like.

Both of these books will (to paraphrase one of my grad school professors) give the reader a small taste of what it's like to do physics without actually conveying any ability to do physics. But then, they're not supposed to teach you how to solve problems, just inspire interest in the subject, and they both do an excellent job of that. And there's no shortage of other books out there going into more detail (see, for example, my past recommendations here for books on general science and quantum physics). As an experimentalist by training and inclination, I slightly prefer Levin's story for its details of the inner workings of one of the most impressive experiments in history, but both of these are fun and insightful, and you wouldn't go wrong taking either of these to the beach this summer.

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