Janna Levin's book Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space is a history of the building of LIGO, the first gravitational wave observatory. It's readable and meticulous in its physics, and also artfully precise in the portraits it sketches of the primary participants behind the massive venture, a diverse set of scientists including Joe Weber, Robbie Vogt, Barry Barish, and "The Troika": Rai Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Ron Drever.

Bottom Line: scientists are human beings – insightful yet fallible, brilliant when not blind, charming and often petty. The search for gravitational waves was a huge challenge in multiple dimensions:

• theoretical — computing the parameters of never-before-seen cosmic sources and never-before-built apparatus
• technical — designing, fabricating, debugging, and running some of the most delicate devices ever imagined
• personal — forming alliances, smoothing ruffled feathers, and orchestrating teams of workers over decades
• financial — acquiring and investing the resources to actually make it all happen

Impressive – Black Hole Blues the book, as well as LIGO!

_{(re my personal involvement in estimating cosmic sources of gravitational waves as a graduate student of Kip Thorne in the late 1970s, cf Kip the Dragon (2000-03-25), Relativity plus Astrophysics (2000-03-29), Cherished Beliefs (2000-04-19), Ni ad Me, Pulsar Waves (2000-04-06), Spinning Sources (2000-04-11), Quantum Nondemolition (2000-02-05), Soft Outside Crunchy Center (2000-05-01); and see also Gravitational Waves - Thirty Years Later (2011-07-15), 2018-01-27 - Slow French News, 2021-05-20 - Conservation of Physics, ...) - ^z - 2024-03-25}