Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.89 (609 Votes) |
| Asin | : | B01D0MP29S |
| Format Type | : | |
| Number of Pages | : | 258 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2017-10-23 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
The authoritative story of the headline-making discovery of gravitational waves - by an eminent theoretical astrophysicist and award-winning writer. From the author of How the Universe Got Its Spots and A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, the epic story of the scientific campaign to record the soundtrack of our universe.
Of siren songs and human flaws A few weeks ago the world of science was rattled – and rattled seems like the right word – by the discovery of gravitational waves, a culmination of Einstein’s general theory of relativity which the great man predicted a hundred years ago. The waves came from the collision of two black holes, an event of woefully cataclysmic magnitude, releasing energy billions of trillions of times that produced by the sun.And yet astonishingly, the collision registered here on earth in the form of a tremor so slight as to. This book makes far-out physics become real and important to the ordinary human like me. This is an inside story about the long, long road to "proving" gravitational waves happen. You would think this might be a story of great joy and excitement. Rather, it's a sad saga of a number of key individuals who seized on an idea independently and together, then carried it forward at great personal cost till THEY WERE PROVED RIGHT! We mortals cannot quite grasp why this is so, but if you read the book you will come to believe in this kind of science and develop a strong sense of gratitude for everyone who stuck to their. Amazon Customer said A readable account of the rise of LIGO and the detection of gravitational waves. A well-written and informative description of the long struggle to build the two large laser interferometers that recently detected (twice!) the gravitational radiation emitted by the collision of two black holes. The book was actually written before the first of those detections, but, in a stroke of luck for all concerned, soon enough to enable an epilog describing it. Throughout, the author maintains a healthy balance between the geeky details (which she explains clearly enough for the non-geek to fully grasp) and the pers