Actual universe. Books that my parents brought me for my birthday. That by age 11 i have an answer to that annoying question that adults always ask the kids. What do you want to be when you grow up. I said i want to be an astrophysicist. That pretty much shut them up. If you say that. That was it. They just walk away at that point. To this day i am a little bit scarred for having not known a night sky until i saw one in the hayden planetarium. From those mountaintops in chile into the stay when i go to commune with the cosmos in these singularly majestic sites and i look up at the night sky it reminds me of that. Ladies addendum and thank and gentlemen thank you all for coming. We will see you at the year in review in january. Have a great night. [applause]. Book tv is on twitter and facebook and we wont hear want hear from you. Post post a comment on her facebook page. Facebook. Com book tv. [inaudible] am a friend of the book fair in the chair of the literary society. Have you turned your phoness off. I expect they had been off all day. Than thank you for coming to support the book fair. Ha we think our sponsors and especially the Knight Foundation the Bachelor Foundation and the degroot foundation. We think all of your friends and we hope all of you that are not friends of the book fair will become friends in the volunteers hundreds of them around and about making this work while. A special thanks to Miami Dade College for hosting us all in for sponsoring this absolutely wonderful event. Dade c the session will feature a conversation between two women who had caused a lot of excitement in their fields. It is best known as the creator and curator the site that features an assortmentckina from the past. And now she has several millions and astro physicist. Who views science as a is a powerful force in culture. Even assessable. They had been called a hipster sh physicist. As he is a professor of business. Also the pioneer work which is the center for art and ideaswi the concentration and philosophy. Her two previous books wereoo the highly acclaimed she returns to nonfiction with her new book. Other songs from outer space tells of the 50 Year Campaign to detect Gravitational Waves which has made a big news in 2016. Im going to leave it to dr. Levin to tell you more about her book. Please welcome. [applause]. I have to say first that this is one of the most fascinating and beautifully written books theyve ever read and i dont take that lightly. I didnt have to pay her to say that. So you tell this story of the century long vision and half a century long quest to hear the sound of the space time. As i was reading one thing kept coming to mind which was a very short piece that the great journalist wrote in the summer of 19376 days after Amelia AirportAmelia Earhart disappeared. Ot the best things of mankind are the things that are undertaken not for some definite Measurable Results but because someone not counting the costs are calculated of the consequences is moved by curiosity the level of excellence. The compulsion to event or make her understand in suchue persons. They alone surpass themselves. T they the explorers into the creators partake of it. They do not know what they discover. They do not know where their impulses taking them. They can give no account in advance of where theyre going they do with the useless no mere in the dust of which it has made. Re is great wings from the sky. It was really after. There was an experiment that did not bear fruit for flight. To me it is that contemporary counterpart to that. Its as much as this. How do they have the courage to do that. I think you are so perceptivelyo it is about the human campaignt, and the drive. Well in some sense the insanity of it. It wasnt about blind success. It was a great moment. In reality it was a arduous campaign. Very much like climbing a mountain in the sense that not everybody can make it to the summit. Theres something about that universal a drive just to know and just as he that i saw it was at work there. The timeline is that einstein did that. He lived at a time before all of the technologies have made it impossible to test it out. In 1915 they publish the great theory. And then from the trenches. I am incredibly impressed that there is this solution. The beautifully describes the time around where all of theg manse of. E mass he doesnt think that there can be real. There is nothing terminus enough to cause them. He never you commented from the very unusual sampling. They are physicist. I shout out. Ut to al this notion that you use it as a lens and it is a book about science. Its really a book about the lenses for the larger question. Just the human spirit. And its so unusual and inventive about it. Each chapter is a psychological profile of one of the major people involved in with the real kind of style pros that you tell. S you interpret it so eloquently between scientist journalist and novelist. Ll us tell us about the main characters. But i set out to do was something completely different. Wate i wanted to write a book about black holes as a scientist who works on black holes all the time and i felt that i have some different ways to discuss it in different ways and to talk about the scientific part of it. Its not what the book about at all. Halfway through i got caught up in another story. I think this is how science has done sometimes. You start to follow it and you realize that theres Something Better in this other direction and if you can bear to stowaway your original ideas and be willing to follow it so i started talking to people like ray rice. He is one of the original architects of this experiment. He began dreaming about it was very unpopular with the new york accent. He came from germany originally but has a certain intonation that i associate with a generation not so much a region and i thought ray isai a character in a novel and hes giving me dialogue. Hes giving it to me. Theyre like 50 hours of tape. I started hearing that the book could be written in a more novelistic style about the characters. And so i began with ray. In the book i describe as an inverted triangle. Riangle, alm almost like the white of the shirt sort of bounding his beard. But kip is a real free spirit. It wasnt a cliche. Oduct of they just thought they looked crazy and he was already anon incredibly famous person. They wanted to get in bigger than his own, schmitz away. He was thinking what can i do that is bigger than myself. And what can i do is big for the whole community. Begins with the three of them and is now a team of nearly a thousand. They weave of the personal history into the genius. They show how every fragment of our lives adds up to our cultural contribution is essentially a giant listening instrument. When he was a young man he fell in love with a pianist. Then im in the free spirit hippie came from this unusual mormonun family of feminist. Es. And with the obituary for the mother said Something Like old radical dies. Thats the headline and you can tell when kip relays that that he is kind of proud. He really is. And bond grew up in kind of a very poor village in scotland where he was building things out of junk including a tv set, which was probably the only one in the village. He took that hacker spirit and took it to the largest Scientific Institution in the world. Eventually recruited by caltech. He goes to harvard than caltech and hes reluctant to leave scotland, but i love about his story is that he liked to cut bits of rubber matting off a bold experiments and make new things while people at harvard were using the most advancedet. Guest it was the most advanced, he was using the earths Magnetic Field because it was free. He had a way of exploiting what he had to make something incredible out of it, but eventually, this experiment youre describing became too big for all of them and raised the ram shackle structure on the perimeter of mit. It was called a palace and with nine noble lawyeriets. The sheer crepeyne nesnes nn crappiness of it, and occasionally a window would blow out down the street and they would steal each others electricity through pipes overhead. One time he did an experiment with a cat. I dont know. And ray says ray says they were an odd bunch, but they were free to experiment and his first prototype was a meter and a half. And one of his colleagues said what youre doing is nothing, its going to amount to nothing. And if the sun blew up. You wouldnt be able to and he says its true. Id be better looking out my window and he realized it would have to be three times bigger, bigger than the campus, bigger and the city, bigger than the town. And the book really looks at the hero moment from the genius myth from that moment. And youve revealed the slow incremental buildup of personhood within an individual life that amounts to the spark we call genius, and its the sciences and the amounting to eventually, after abdicated the most tragic not the most, certainly the most tragic fellow in the book. The first to try to build an instrument to detect gravitational rays. Joes story is difficult so even before there was ray, and kip and ron and before this was idea, there was joe weber. And joe weber was like the shackleton of physics, he was almost the first. He was almost he had some of the original ideas for the mazer, the predecessor to the laser, but was not part of the noble winning prize team for the laser. And he had nobel prize ideas and sort of missed it. He had something to measure something in the microwave astronomically, the first detection of the light left over from the big banning. When it came to Gravitational Waves, he struck out before not struck out, but like a pioneer. And they were engenius, but they were not capable of detecting Gravitational Waves in their form. He believed they were, he believed they were ringing all the time and he claimed ripples. This is while everybody is partying at woodstock in 1969. Yes, joe weber is at an obscure physics prospect presenting what could have been the biggest scientific discovery of that era. Absolutely. Hes saying, im measuring ripples in this space time. Its not telescopes or picture in the sky, its more like a tuning forecast ringing in resonance, to space itself. So its a recording device and he becomes the most famous scientist of the time for about two years, webber bars, as they were described, are everywhere. They Start Building them in scotland, in japan and even put some of joes instruments on the moon and suddenly in moscow. Suddenly the skies are quiet for everybody else and so, after about two years, the entire Community Turns against him and its a very difficult and painful year and he spends the next 25, 30 years essential i defending himself. They go vicious, not that they turn against him, he becomes the butt of every joke. And we should look at graph evaluation aa a evaluational gravitation gravitational is so important. Since galileo weve watched the universe. We take pictures. Theres an entire different world of sound that could reveal things that were important. When galileo was looking up at the universe, the telescope of his time was so primitive, he didnt know that galaxies existed. And 95 of the universe is dark, the revelation of the past 15 years, less than 5 of the universe is luminous, so we can take pictures and it looks like this universe full of stars in our galaxy, as many galaxies in the observable, and its a beautiful world. But actually 95 of the universe is not luminous, you cannot take a picture of it, its dark. The only way we might detect some of this stuff is through the effect it has on space and time and Gravitational Waves are these ripples in space and time. So when the black holes move, for instance, they ring. Its like the ringing of the drum they record the sound of the drum and almost like the body of instrument playing of an electric guitar. Thats why everybody was so excited about joe weber. What happened, he fell from grace and ligos is being built. And joe weber is a one man show with his janitor and his end, its heartbreaking, hes suffering from leukemia and one winter morning he goes to clean the lab because hes the janitor, he slips on the ice and falls and never recovers. Hes not found for days. And its a very, very tough story that the gravitational wave observatory sign is there and its blanched by weather and reveals when people ask you how are you maintaining your facility he shows his wallet to indicate how hes maintaining his facility. But i think that now people are coming around to say the right things about joe weber. Well, he was credited in the light of the discovery was announced in. Which i loved. It meant a lot they did that. The very first discovery paper of this discovery of the century, possibly. They cite in the introductory paragraph that joe weber is the pioneer of gravitational web science. Thats wonderful, his wife, virginia, who is also an astronomers, she, i think is the most likeable and unusual character in the book, but she has one line where she says to you, science is a selfcorrecting process not necessarily in ones lifetime. And its just, oh, you know . Yeah. But your novel, a madman dreams of machines, based on lives of alan tearing and curtle has two tragic heroes. What is the draw in all tragic heroes. In a way theyre all of us. All of us are, but also the notion that tragedy and triumph can coexist, but not necessarily in the same time scale. And its playing with the time scales that are at the heart of black hole, the human time scale and the gravitational wave that we detected ultimately. 1. 4 billion years ago. Yes. Before our civilization existed. You know, so what are the time scales of tragedy and triumph. So you mention in the beginning when i finish the book, the discovery hadnt been made and i printed out a cape copy for ray and kip thorne for accuracy, i wanted to make sure there were no factual errors. On the day the gravitational wave struck, its one of those strange accidents. So if you imagine 1. 3 billion years ago two black holes are in their final throes together and execute their final orbit. Would you like to read the beautiful is this the opening . The opening was written before. This is an opening that describing perform wh what happened perfect it happened. When i wrote the opening i did not believe the discovery would happen for years and neither did ray, when people told me it will be years before the discovery happens, people told me not to write the book yet, to hold off on it. Ray is like what are you going to do if something happens. Its not about, in some sense, the success, which you perceptively picked up on, but this is the opening paragraph of the book. 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 who wihollows. They course through thousands of revolutions about the eventually 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, 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 lightment no telescope will ever see the event. And i think what was remarkable was when they actually detected the two black holes, it was the single largest event weve detected since the origin of the universe. More energy, more power came out of that collision than the power of all the suns shining in the universe combined at that moment. And yet, it was a completely dark event, and the only detector that recorded it was this detector ligo 1. 3 billion years coming from the southern do sky this essentially sound is recorded in a machine in the coast of louisiana and scoots 7 milliseconds across the continent until it rings in washington with the same sound. Astonishingly einstein wrote the mathematical model of this in the fall of 1915. The detection happened exactly a century later in the fall of 2015. This is incredible. Nobody can believe that because ray kept like a madman, in his 80s by now, walking up and down the tunnels of the 4 kilometer long incident. And so many people people said we better ask ray. Ray was pushing, i want it, i want this and he would be okay if i cant have that the anniversary of another paper in 2018. Everyone was telling him, ray, its not going to happen. Its never going to happen in 2015. One of the most touching parts, sentences in the book comes toward the end. Youre sitting across from roy robbie. One of the directors of ligos, one of the champions of it, flawed in his own way and dedicated. An 80someyearold man sitting in the academic dingy office and you say, he looked at me from behind wilted orchids, and it just captures the whole this is these mens lives. Yes. And no sense, no sense its going to be a success or not. Robbie eventually was fired from the project and for the past 25 years hes had an office on the same floor as the ligo people and doesnt speak to them and they dont speak to them. Robbie is an intimidating man. When some of my friends heard i was going to meet robbie . Are you sure youre going to be okay . Hes a big man, a german prisoner of war and emigrated to the United States and has a hatred of authority because of his experience under the nazi regime. And once again the formative character. Thats right, he hates authority, but becomes an authority and there are several things he said to me through the wilted orchids, which are painful. When they discover Gravitational Waves it wont be me that hes ousted from the project and says about himself as an authority, he says, that he never strove for power because power corrupts you. And its almost like a statement about himself. A very poignant remark in this day and age. Yeah. Yeah, its very difficult because he talks about, also, how cal tech was in some sense more of his country than either germany or the u. S. And science was what he wants to be known for, not what he endured in germany in the first 15 years of his life, which was difficult years and not, you know, in some sense even as an immigrant, but as this leader of science. And thats the other beautiful undertone to the book, that its this manifesto for science as a Unifying Force because, you know, with thousands of scientists around the world, have collaborated and i keep thinking that this is one of the last recordings of einsteins voice where he talks about the common language of science, this is who he its a recording from the peek of world war ii and hes making the case for science. Its t