I recently read the book Black hole Blues and other songs from Outer Space by Janna Levin. The book is about how Gravitational waves were detected. The author takes us through the journey from origin of idea to detection. Though the book doesn’t get into the technical details a lot, the story was an interesting read as we get to know the logistics of a large scale experiment.

What are Gravitational Waves

Newton proposed the each mass attracts every others and he called this force of attraction as Gravity. He was never able to explain the cause of it. Einstein, revolutionised our understanding of Gravity with his General theory of relativity(GR) in 1915. The most popular explanation of GR is given by a trampoline on which a heavy mass is placed at the centre and multiple small balls revolve around the heavy mass. This is akin to planets revolving around the sun(video). This model explains gravity. The trampoline depicts the space, and the heavy masses like sun and planets bend the space. (Better explanation by Brain Greene on GR)

Taking forward this idea, in 1916 he predicted that just like when there is a disturbance at some point in a lake, it sends out ripples, a disturbance in space(like when astronomically heavy masses like black holes collide) would also send out ripples in the space. These are called the Gravitational waves. (Better Explanation by Brian Greene on Gravitational Waves)

It’s a big deal!

People at LIGO detected the collision of 2 black holes 1.3 Billion Light years away! The big deal about this detection is that such a massive collision just changes the space less than width of proton. Building such an ultra sensitive instrument is no small feat!

The idea that Gravitational waves could be detected was seriously taken 3 physicists - Kip Throne, Rainer Weiss, Ron Drever - together called the Troika! Efforts of these 3 people led to foundation of the LIGO project. The book covers the difficulties they had faced to convince NSF, the congress, fellow physicists to start such a large scale project. There was still no confirmed believes that Gravitational waves were real and could be detected. So, you can imagine what leap of faith pioneers have taken!

Things I liked in the book

1. Getting to know experimental Physicists: The Pop-science news focuses a lot on theoretical physicists for almost every discovery. They surely deserve the fame, as they have depicted how with just sheer power of human intellect mysteries of nature can be solved. But after reading the book, I got to know details of what goes behind the scenes in verifying a theory. This is really challenging, especially if the theory like Gravitational waves is still not widely accepted. Experimental Physicists Rainer Weiss, Ron Drever and Joe Weber pursued this idea seriously and began working on prototypes during the time when not many people believed that Gravitational Waves were real and could be detected. The initial chapters of the book explain the life of these experimental Physicists in brief. This book does a fair job of bringing the life of Experimental physicists to Lime light.

2. Importance of Collaboration: Another important take from the book for me was that it is necessary to be able to work in team no matter how genius you are. Here is an interesting read about the same in Software Development. So, as mentioned previously the members of Troika were the pioneers in starting the work on Gravitational Waves Detection. Among the three men, Ron Drever was an amazing intuitive experimental Physicist. Here is an excerpt from the book depicting his intuitive power

Kip was neck-deep in a tedious, multipage calculation when Ron presented a diagrammatic solution. Ron could not have performed the formal mathematical calculation but still he could somehow see the solution in pictures, impressing Kip indelibly

But working together as team with Ron was very hard. He was not interested in following the team and followed his own ways. As time passed, differences between Ron and the management grew. And one day it lead to firing him out of the LIGO project, which he had co-founded. He could never work on the project again. There are cases where being impudent against authority have won(Albert Einstein!), but collaboration in Science especially in large scale projects is essential.

3. Rai and Kip’s amazing Personalities: As I was reading the book, I fell in the love with the personalities of these 2 physicists. Whenever there were differences between Rai and Ron, it was Kip who used to resolve them patiently. Kip though being an introvert(as claimed in this interview), collaborated with large number of people because there was a need of it in such large scale project. Rainer Weiss was also a lovely guy! As said previously, he was one of the founding members of the LIGO project. He made the initial small prototypes in the initial days with the budget he had. In spite of being such an important member, Rai was never hesitant to do menial works like getting into tunnel and removing the spiders. Rai tried to help the project in as many ways as he could(ref). Such down to earth stories of these great physicists are always inspiring and enjoyable.