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jasondangelo 's review for:
Black Hole Survival Guide
by Janna Levin
It seems weird to say that I have a favorite theoretical astrophysicist, but I do. I first encountered Janna Levin’s writing in 2003. We had traveled down to Orlando to take our son to Disney World with my Father-in-law and his family. On the road trip back up to Connecticut, we stopped at the NASA base for a couple of hours. It was in their giftshop that I found How the Universe Got Its Spots, and I bought it off the strength of its cover and the first couple of paragraphs. The publisher had only recently published the paperback version, so the giftshop was packed with the book.
I love physics and theoretical physics and cosmology, but I am no longer adept at any of the math that goes with them, nor do I any longer have any interest in the math. That’s where Levin becomes such an excellent guide for me. She writes beautifully and has a talent for communicating the ideas and issues of the field without needing to tangle us up with the mathematics undergirding the science. You get all of the wonder, and all of the reason, without any of pain, a garden of delights without the weeds. I’m thankful for all the scientists who have wrestled with the math to make all this knowledge and speculation possible, but I’m find leaving that stuff to them.
The Black Hole Survival Guide did not disappoint me. It is set up as a small field guide, as though you are planning a trip into a black hole. Levin uses the conceit to talk about what a black hole is, what the properties of the black hole are, how time travels when near them, and the competing theories surrounding them. It is funny and moving and rich. Not surprisingly, her writing has only improved with time; she is at the heights of her powers in this small book. With concepts this dense and grandiose, it is lovely to have the music of her language to coat them and make them graspable and digestible.
The ending discussion of the decades-long fight between relativists and quantum theorists was all new to me, and of course it blew my mind. I had not heard of the theory that our universe is a 3-D hologram of a 2-D space. I’ll be sitting with that for a while (and finding a few informative videos on Youtube to expand on the ideas I first encountered here).
If you love what science thinks and know without wanting to deal with the numbers and formulas, if you prefer the literary to the hard math, then Levin is the guide for you. I’ll be returning to this book, I am sure, in a couple of months to take the journey again and see what new things I discover that passed me by in the first read.
I love physics and theoretical physics and cosmology, but I am no longer adept at any of the math that goes with them, nor do I any longer have any interest in the math. That’s where Levin becomes such an excellent guide for me. She writes beautifully and has a talent for communicating the ideas and issues of the field without needing to tangle us up with the mathematics undergirding the science. You get all of the wonder, and all of the reason, without any of pain, a garden of delights without the weeds. I’m thankful for all the scientists who have wrestled with the math to make all this knowledge and speculation possible, but I’m find leaving that stuff to them.
The Black Hole Survival Guide did not disappoint me. It is set up as a small field guide, as though you are planning a trip into a black hole. Levin uses the conceit to talk about what a black hole is, what the properties of the black hole are, how time travels when near them, and the competing theories surrounding them. It is funny and moving and rich. Not surprisingly, her writing has only improved with time; she is at the heights of her powers in this small book. With concepts this dense and grandiose, it is lovely to have the music of her language to coat them and make them graspable and digestible.
The ending discussion of the decades-long fight between relativists and quantum theorists was all new to me, and of course it blew my mind. I had not heard of the theory that our universe is a 3-D hologram of a 2-D space. I’ll be sitting with that for a while (and finding a few informative videos on Youtube to expand on the ideas I first encountered here).
If you love what science thinks and know without wanting to deal with the numbers and formulas, if you prefer the literary to the hard math, then Levin is the guide for you. I’ll be returning to this book, I am sure, in a couple of months to take the journey again and see what new things I discover that passed me by in the first read.