Black Hole Blues

The Story of Joseph Weber, the Tragic Hero of Science Who Followed Einstein’s Vision and Pioneered the Sound of Space-Time, brought out beautifully by Janna Levin in Black Hole Blues.

Excerpts of a review by Maria Papova. A heads up....though I did an excerpt, it's still fairly long, but I'd strongly recommend a full read. It has meaning beyond astronomy, beyond science, beyond psychology, beyond time....it tells how evidence comes but later, and up until it comes? Well..... it's metaphysics.

                                

In his groundbreaking 1915 paper on general relativity, Albert Einstein envisioned gravitational waves — ripples in the fabric of space-time caused by astronomic events of astronomical energy. Although fundamental to our understanding of the universe, gravitational waves were a purely theoretical construct for him. He lived in an era when any human-made tool for detecting something this faraway was simply unimaginable, even by the greatest living genius, and many of the cosmic objects capable of producing such tremendous tumult — black holes, for instance — were yet to be discovered.

One September morning in 2015, almost exactly a century after Einstein published his famous paper, scientists turned his mathematical dream into a tangible reality — or, rather, an audible one.

                      

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, an enormous international collaboration known as LIGO, consisting of two massive listening instruments 3,000 kilometers apart, decades in the making, recorded the sound of a gravitational wave produced by two mammoth black holes that had collided more than a billion years ago, more than a billion light-years away.

One of the most significant discoveries in the history of science, this landmark event introduces a whole new modality of curiosity in our quest to know the cosmos, its thrill only amplified by the fact that we had never actually seen black holes before hearing them. Nearly everything we know about the universe today, we know through five centuries of optical observation of light and particles.

Now begins a new era of sonic exploration. Turning an inquisitive ear to the cosmos might, and likely will, revolutionize our understanding of it as radically as Galileo did when he first pointed his telescope at the skies.

                        

In 'Black Hole Blues' astrophysicist and novelist Janna Levin tells the story of LIGO and its larger significance as a feat of science and the human spirit. Levin, a writer who bends language with effortless might and uses it not only as an instrument of thought but also as a Petri dish for emotional nuance, probes deep into the messy human psychology that animated these brilliant and flawed scientists as they persevered in this ambitious quest against enormous personal, political, and practical odds.

Somewhere in the universe two black holes collide — as heavy as stars, as small as cities, literally black (the complete absence of light) holes (empty hollows). Tethered by gravity, in their final seconds together the black holes course through thousands of revolutions about their eventual point of contact, churning up space and time until they crash and merge into one bigger black hole, an event more powerful than any since the origin of the universe, outputting more than a trillion times the power of a billion Suns. The black holes collide in complete darkness. None of the energy exploding from the collision comes out as light. No telescope will ever see the event.

What nobody could see LIGO could hear, a sensitive, sophisticated ear pressed to the fabric of space-time. She writes of this astonishing instrument:

An idea sparked in the 1960s, a thought experiment, an amusing haiku, is now a thing of metal and glass.

But what makes the book most enchanting is Levin’s compassionate insight into the complex, porous, often tragic humanity undergirding the metal and glass, nowhere more tragic than in the story of Joseph Weber, the controversial pioneer who became the first to bring Einstein’s equations into the lab. Long before LIGO was even so much as a thought experiment, Weber envisioned and built a very different instrument for listening to the cosmos.

Weber was born Yonah Geber to a family of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants in early-twentieth-century New Jersey. His mother’s heavy accent caused his teacher to mishear the boy’s name as “Joseph,” so he became Joe. As a teenager, he dropped out of Cooper Union out of concern for his parents’ finances and joined the Navy instead. When the war ended, he became a microwave engineer and was hired as a professor at the University of Maryland.

Eager to do microwave research, he turned to the great physicist George Gamow, who had theorized cosmic microwave background radiation, a thermal remnant of the Big Bang, which would provide unprecedented insight into the origin of the universe and which Weber wanted to dedicate his Ph.D. career to detecting. But Gamow inexplicably snubbed him. Two other scientists eventually discovered cosmic microwave background radiation by accident and received the Nobel Prize for the discovery. Weber then turned to atomic physics and devised the maser, the predecessor of the laser, but, once again, other scientists beat him to the public credit and received a Nobel for that discovery, too.

Levin writes:

Joe’s scientific life is defined by these significant near misses… 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. Famous for nearly getting there.

And that is how Weber got to gravitational waves — a field he saw as so small and esoteric that he stood a chance of finally being the first. 

In 1969 Joe Weber announced that he had achieved an experimental feat widely believed to be impossible: He had detected evidence for gravitational waves. Imagine his pride, the pride to be the first, the gratification of discovery, the raw shameless pleasure of accomplishment. Practically single-handedly, through sheer determination, he conceives of the possibility. He fills multiple notebooks, hundreds of pages deep, with calculations and designs and ideas, and then he makes the experimental apparatus real. He builds an ingenious machine, a resonant bar, a Weber bar, which vibrates in sympathy with a gravitational wave. A solid aluminum cylinder about 2 meters long, 1 meter in diameter, and in the range of 3,000 pounds, as guitar strings go, isn’t easy to pluck. But it has one natural frequency at which a strong gravitational wave would ring the bar like a tuning fork.

                       
                       Joseph Weber with his cylinder

Following his announcement, Weber became an overnight celebrity. His face graced magazine covers. NASA put one of his instruments on the Moon. He received ample laud from peers. Even the formidable J. Robert Oppenheimer, a man of slim capacity for compliments, encouraged him with a remark Weber never forgot: “The work you’re doing,” Oppenheimer told him, “is just about the most exciting work going on anywhere around here.”

Under the spell of this collective excitement, scientists around the world began building replicas of Weber’s cylinder. But one after another, they were unable to replicate his results — the electrifying eagerness to hear gravitational waves was met with the dead silence of the cosmos.

Weber plummeted from grace as quickly as he had ascended. Levin writes:

Joe Weber’s claims in 1969 to have detected gravitational waves, the claims that catapulted his fame, that made him possibly the most famous living scientist of his generation, were swiftly and vehemently refuted. The subsequent decades offered near total withdrawal of support, both from scientific funding agencies and his peers. He was almost fired from the University of Maryland.

His disrepute soon veered into cruelty — he was ridiculed and even baited by false data intended to trick him into reaffirming his claims, only to be publicly humiliated all over again. In one of the archival interviews Levin excavates, he laments:

I simply cannot understand the vehemence and the professional jealousy, and why each guy has to feel that he has to cut off a pound of my flesh… Boltzmann committed suicide with this sort of treatment.

By the late 1980s, Weber had submerged himself even deeper into the quicksand of his convictions, stubbornly trying to prove that his instrument could hear the cosmos. For the next twenty years, he continued to operate his own lab funded out of pocket — a drab concrete box in the Maryland woods, where he was both head scientist and janitor. Meanwhile, LIGO — a sophisticated instrument that would eventually cost more than $1 billion total, operated by a massive international team of scientists — was gathering momentum nearby, thanks largely to the scientific interest in gravitational astronomy that Weber’s early research had sparked.

He was never invited to join LIGO.

Science is a self-correcting process, but not necessarily in one’s own lifetime.

When the LIGO team published the official paper announcing the groundbreaking discovery, Weber was acknowledged as the pioneer of gravitational wave research. 

Their genius is a testament to our own worth, an antidote to insignificance; and their bounteous flaws are luckless but seemingly natural complements, as though greatness can be doled out only with an equal measure of weakness… Their broken lives are mere anecdotes in the margins of their discoveries. But then their discoveries are evidence of our purpose, and their lives are parables on free will.

Free will, indeed, is what Weber exercised above all — he lived by it and died by it. 

At the end of the magnificent and exceptionally poetic 'Black Hole Blues', Levin offers a wonderfully lyrical account of LIGO’s triumph as she peers into the furthest reaches of the space-time odyssey that began with Einstein, gained momentum with Weber, and is only just beginning to map the course of human curiosity across the universe:

Two very big stars lived in orbit around each other several billion years ago. They orbited in darkness, probably for billions of years before that final 200 milliseconds when the black holes collided and merged, launching their loudest gravitational wave train into the universe.

The sound traveled to us from 1.4 billion light-years away. One billion four hundred million light-years.

We heard black holes collide. We’ll point to where the sound might have come from, to the best of our abilities, a swatch of space from an earlier epoch.

Pause for a minute to actually try and grasp that extent of time and space....finite mind attempting to grasp close to infinite concepts.....your head can actually hurt. But that's what gives us the opportunity to stretch that mind of ours, look beyond known paradigms....as fascinating as the within, what say !?!