The Speed of Thought

You have got to like a book which concludes with a tale from the Edda...

"Traveling at the Speed of Thought" is a new book by Daniel Kennefick on the history of the search for gravitational radiation.

It is a compact little book, at just under 300 pp.

Princeton University Press
ISBN-13: 978-0-691-11727-0

Daniel knows of what he writes, as a physics PhD from the Caltech Theoretical Astrophysics group (disclaimer: so was I, and I overlapped with Daniel by a year or two).
In addition to his work as a historian of science, he has also published a number of papers on gravitational radiation and the radiation reaction problem.

The books is strictly historical, working forward from Newtonian problems of time variable gravitational field, through Einstein and the first tentative results in the pre-war years of relativity, going on to the post-war years and the renaissance of general relativity.

The book provides a very interesting history of the controversy over the existence of gravitational radiation, an issue mostly settled by now; the controversy over the quadrupole approximation, and recent moves towards detection and exact (numerical) solutions.

The book is a good read, and having met many of the characters and having known some, the perspective is fascinating. I am not sure who the audience is, Daniel goes to some lengths to avoid "math", providing descriptive explanations, but I suspect the text will go way over the head of a general audience and that not few physics undergrads would have to read sections repeatedly to understand the issue. Jargon is generally explained and defined, but builds up inevitably through the book.

The other aspect of the book, is that it restricts itself very tightly to the history of the analytic theory of wave solution to the Einstein equations or approximations thereof. It would have been very interesting to hear more about both the experimental effort - not just Weber's bars, but its successors and the interferometers, and to hear more about the numerical calculations, which are very briefly alluded to.
The omission of numerical relativity is particularly unfortunate since just before the book came out, and presumably after it was written, the key breakthrough in solving the wave problem in relativity was made almost simultaneously by three different groups, and the exact solution for the gravitational radiation problem is now generally considered to be known... but then that would have made for a very long book.

But, hopefully Daniel will in turn document the history of the laser interferometers, ground and space based; the story of LIGO will need to be written any decade now, and the history of numerical relativity is not yet written, but it also will need careful recording for posterity.

One nitpick - Dr Robert Forward died, too young, in 2002, Daniel should have known that when referring to him.