There and obviously there are a lot of Unanswered Questions to this day about his personal life is personal finances. What was interesting is that people who were close to him did agree to talk and i had to assume that was with his permission, so im surprised a little bit disappointed i spent time called invading the kremlin spokesman and pressed him over and over to try to make this happen and finally he said, you dont need to meet the president to interview him. You know everything there is to know about him. He has said it all. Look on our website. There is some truth to that. He is somewhat he is very open. He talks a lot in the key is to read it all and balance what you can with other sources. Host Steven Lee Myers is the author and heres the book the new czar, the rising rate of vladimir putin. Mr. Myers, thank you for being with us on book tv here in miami. Book tvs live coverage of the miami book festival now continues at the chamber of commerce here in miami. Its gorgeous and we will back inside with the several hours of live coverage ahead, but we will go back inside the book tv room here and up next is author janna levin, talking about black hole blues and other songs from outer space and other songs. [inaudible conversations] im a friend of the book there. Have you turned your phones off . I expect they have been off all day. Thank you very much for that and thank you for coming to support the book fair. We thank our sponsors and especially the knight foundation, oh zero, the bash the foundation. We thank all of you friends and we hope to those of you that are not friends of the book fair will become friends and the volunteers, hundreds of them around and about making this work well. A special thanks to Miamidade College for hosting us all in sponsoring this wonderful event. This session will feature a conversation between two women who have caused a lot of excitement in their respective fields. Maria is best known as the creator and curator of the brain ticking. Org, a site that features eclectic assortment of culture, books and images and text from the past. Her efforts a starter with an email to a few friends and now she has several million devotees. Doctor jan 11 is an astrophysicist and conceptual writer who abuse science as a powerful force and culture. She makes such topics as by kos, dark energy and the big bang seem cool and assessable. She has been called the hipster physicist for her on orthodox approaches such as posting standing world only soirees, scientific soirees and appearing as a guest on the cold air show. Doctor levin is a professor of physics and astronomy at Bernard College and the director of sciences which is a center for our and ideas in red hook, brooklyn. Shields aba physics and astronomy from bernard with a concentration in philosophy and a phd from mit in physics. Her two previous books work the highly acclaimed how the universe got its spot and a fabulous awardwinning novel work with her new book she returns to nonfiction. Black hole blues and other songs from outer space tells the 50 Year Campaign to detect Gravitational Waves, which made big news in 2016. Im going to leave it to doctor levin to tell you more about her book because i clearly know when i am over my head, so please welcome maria and jan 11. [applause]. [applause]. I have to say first that this is one of the most fascinating and beautifully written books ive ever read read. I did not even have to pay her. So, you tell this story of this century long vision and half century long quest to detect the grudge tatian waves and as i was reading black hole blues and other songs from outer space one thing coming to mine which was a short piece that Walter Lippman wrote in the summer of 1937, six days after a millionaire heart disappeared into the pacific ocean. Hero the best things of mankind are the things undertaken not part measurable results, but because someone not counting the costs are calculating the consequences of live by curiosity, a point of honor to invent or make her understand and mankind overcomes what would keep it earthbound forever. All of the heroes, saints, sears, explorers and the creators partake of it. They do not know what they had discovered. They do not know whether impulses taking them and can give no account in advance of where they are going or explain with there been. They do the useless, brave, noble, foolish and wisest things and what they prove to themselves and others is that man is no mere creature of this habit, no mere collective machine, but in the dust of which he is made there is also fire now and then by great wings in the sky. So beautiful and painful to think that it was really after she was lost. She was lost and there was an experiment that did not bear fruit for flight, but to me black hole blues and other songs from outer space is the counterpart to that because its beautifully written and this enormous extraordinary heroism, but also the book itself is a testament to that because you wrote before this anonymous experiment had clear results, when it was uncertain, so so how did you have the courage to do that. I think you are so perceptive because thats exactly in some sense what i thought the book was about, the Human Campaign and drive and in some sense the insanity. It wasnt about wind to success, so when this finally did succeed people described as they turned it on and there was this great moment of incredible scientific discovery, but in reality it was a 50 year arduous Campaign Like climbing a mountain in the sense that not everyone makes it to the summit with bodies strewn along the way and they keep climbing and there is something about that universal drive just to know, just to see that i thought was at work there and it was so interesting. The timeline is that einstein first envisioned the mathematical model for educational waves in 1915, but he lived at a time before radar, before the technology that made it possible to test this out and for him you say it was a experiment and haiku and half a century later they Start Building. If you think about, in 1915, einstein publishes his great theory, which is one mathematical sentence describing the curvature of space and time and from the trenches of world war i, Carl Schwartz field is reading that persist reading between calculating canyon fire and he writes down a solution that we now call the black hole and he sends it to einstein and einstein is incredibly impressed that there is a mathematical solution in his own theory that he did not discover that describes the curved spacetime around even something where all the masses concentrated to a point, but he does not think it will be real in nature, so not only is einstein thinking about ripples in the fabric of spacetime, but hes thinking there is nothing tremendous enough to cause them in any significant way because you need things catastrophic like black holes to make Gravitational Waves, sought the time hes thinking about Gravitational Waves he consider it the most important theoretical problem, but never imagines its something measurable that we can record that is in that sense astra physically manageable. You come at it from a unusual standpoint where you are a scientist and also a novelist and in a way you are in a peer group of two like you and alan lightman. Lovely human being. Shout out to alan lightman. Hello, alan. This notion you use science as the lens and is a book about science and really a book about the lens of this larger question of just the human spirit and tenacity and whats so unusual and kind of inventive is that you structure it with each chapter as a kind of psychological profile of one of the major people involved in with a real kind of style that you tell their story and so elegantly between science, journalists and novelists. Tell us about the main characters. When what i set out to do was something completely different. I wanted to write a book about black holes and as a scientist to work on blackholes on the time and i felt that i had some different ways to discuss this and just talk about black call scientifically. Thats not the book is about at all because halfway through i got caught up in another story and i think that this is how science is done from time to time that your bait hypothesis that you want to follow in youth follow it and threw something in the southern direction and if you can bear to throw away your original ideas and be willing to follow it, there is something even kill your darlings. Kill your darlings as Virginia Woolf says. So, ray white is one of the original architects of this experiment called by go, which he began dreaming about the late 60s early 70s that it was still a time when people did not know black holes were real, so it was very impacted what he was doing and i spent a lot of time just with ray and listening to that particular sort of new york accent that he came from germany originally, but has this certain indignation that i associate with a generation, not so much a region and i thought raise a character in a novel and hes giving me dialogue. Hes giving it to me having granted there were like 50 hours of tape, but i started hearing that the book could be written in a more novelistic style about the character and so began with ray and then thoren, the great astrophysicist. Describe what he looks like. I love. Hes very lanky and he always wears this beard, which i think in the book i describe as an inverted triangle, almost like the wife of the shirt with the chestnut lapel sort of bounding his beard, but kip is a real free spirit and i was imagine you can make that praise up just four kip and it wasnt a cliche. He was a real product of the 70s. Ray said when he met kip that he just looked crazy like a hippie guy with long scraggly hair and kip was already a famous astrophysicist by the age of 30. Kip wanted to get into something bigger than his own accomplishments in a way. He was so accomplished he was thinking what i do and what something thats bigger than myself and what i do thats big for the whole community and so it begins with the three of them and a handful of other people and is now nearly a team of 1000 you leave the their personal history into their genius, essentially showing how every fragment of our lives as of two our cultural contribution and ray like oat is essentially a giant listening instrument, so ray when he was a young man, but a pianist and this is what tuned him into this interest of sound and then kip, a freespirited hippie came from this unusual mormon family of feminist who the mother was like unhappy with the churches treatment of women so they kind of left the church and had this rebellious nature 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 advanced magnet designed and he was using the earths magnetic deal because it was free and head this way of exploiting what he had to make something incredible out of it, but eventually this experiment you are describing became too big for all of them pick raise a original prototype, which he builds in this ramshackle structure on the mit campus, a structure that was supposed be torn down. It was the sheer craftiness of the structure that allowed them the freedom to do anything they wanted. Ray did one experiment with like a breakthrough threestory ceiling that the roof and people just occasionally a window would blowout down the street and they would just steal it each others electricity from pipes overhead and he said one time he did on experiment with a cat, i mean, and ray says they were an audit bunch, but they were free somehow to really experiment and his first prototype was a meter and a half and here he is in one of his colleagues said what you are doing is nothing and will amount to nothing and i could do better looking out the window. He thought, its true. If the sun blows up i would do better looking out the window that with my instrument and he realized it had to be 3000 times bigger, bigger than the campus, bigger than the city, bigger than that town and thats what they were looking at eventually. Whats so lovely is that the book really on moores the modern hero myth, you know, the genius of that moment and he revealed the slow incremental buildup of personhood within an individual life that amounts to genius, but also culturally across scientists and failures amounting to eventually success and in one of the chapters it was dedicated to it is perhaps the most tragic hero of the book, jill weber who is doing the first two build an instrument. Joes story is difficult. Even before there was ray and kip enron there was joe weber and joe weber was like the shackleton. He was almost the first. He was he had some of the original ideas which was the predecessor to the laser, but not part of the nobel prizewinning team for the laser. He had other ideas considered to be he sort of missed and hit this idea to measure he believed they were ringing all the time and so he claimed discovery of ripples. This is while everyone is partying in woodstock in 1969 and joe webers attic obscure conference at what could be the biggest scientific discovery of that era. Absolutely and he is saying im measuring ripples. This is not a telescope. Its more like a fork thats ringing to the oscillations of spacetime is some, so recording device and he becomes the most famous scientist at the time. For about two years they Start Building them in scotland and japan in the even put some of joes instruments on the moon and suddenly in moscow and suddenly the skies are quiet for everyone and is so after about two years the entire Community Turns against him and its a very difficult and painful year and he spends the next. 5, 30 years defending himself. They go vicious. He becomes the butt of every joke. Week i mean, every can we know right now that the universe has come from observations in the time since galileo. We have only watched the universe. We take pictures. Meanwhile, there is this entire different world of sound that could reveal things as important like when galileo was looking at the universe the telescope of his time was so primitive that he did not know galaxies exist, so what are we not hearing thats out there right now. Also, 95 of the universe is dark. Less than 5 of the universe is luminous, so we can take pictures and it looks like this universe full of stars and there are as many galaxies as there are stars in the milky way and its this beautiful world, but actually 95 of the universe is not luminous. Its dark. The only way we might really detect some of this stuff is through that effect it has on space and time. Gravitational waves are these ripples in space and time. When black holes moved for instance they are like mallets on a drum, so its not just an analogy. Its really really close to ringing of a drum and what these experiments do is record the shape of the drum and play it back to us as sound come almost like the body of an instrument recording this dream of an electric guitar and played back. Thats why everyone was so excited that joe weber, but he plummeted from grace work meanwhile this enormous instrument was being built and joe weber remained a oneman show operating behind the lab where he is janitor and chief scientist. You write about how he is already suffering from leukemia and one winter morning he goes to clean his lab and slips on the eyes, falls and never recovers. He is not found for days and its a test story. The gravitational wave is sort of their and lashed by whether and he reveals when people ask him 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. He was credited in the paper when the discovery was announced which i love and it meant a lot to me that they did this, so this discovery of the century, possibly a site in the introduction paragraph that joe weber is the pioneer. Its wonderful, his wife who is also an astronomer, she i think is one of the most likable characters in your book, but she has this one line where she says , science is a selfcorrecting process, but not necessarily in ones lifetime. You know, your novel based on the lives of alan currying also has these two tragic heroes and like what is the draw . They are all tragic heroes. In a way they are. They are all of us. Also this notion that tragedy and triumph can coexist come about not necessarily on the tame same timescale, almost playing with the timescale of a black holes in the Gravitational Waves what, 1. 4 billion years ago . Before our civilization existed. I mean, so you mention at the beginning when i finish the book the discovery had not been made and i printed out a copy for ray and kip just for accuracy. I wanted to make sure i had just that there was no factual errors on the day that the gravitational wave struck, it was just one of those strange accidents. Imagine 1. 3 billion years ago two black holes in their final throws together and execute their final would you like to read the beautiful passage . Is this the opening . Well, opening was written before this is an opening that described perfectly what ended up happening without any proof. So, when i wrote this opening i did not believe that discovery would happen for years and neither did ray. People said it would be years before the discovery happened and people told me not to write the book yet, but hold off and raise like what are you going to do if something happens and im not im like its not about the success, but this is the opening paragraph of the book. Somewhere in the universe to black holes collide, as heavy as stars at a small, literally black complete absence of life, holes, empty hollow. Tethered by gravity in their final seconds to get at the black holes course through thousands of revolutions about their eventual point of contact churning up space and time until the crash and merge into one bigger black , and even bigger than any 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 t