Dave's book review for Einstein's Shadow
Author: Seth Fletcher
Pages: 288
Finished reading: 2026-09-23
Back to my books page for more reviews, etc.
My Review
I mostly enjoyed reading this. I learned a lot and the subject was very interesting!
However, I’ve never been a huge fan of stories about bureaucracy, and the whole second half of this book is dominated by various committees and organizations and meetings. This happens a lot in the non-fiction space travel books too. It’s kind of interesting, but not why I pick up a book about space and science.
My second gripe is that I did not actually understand how VLBI (very-long-baseline interferometry) actually works from the description in the book alone. Actually, the core problem is that I don’t think it explained how astronomical interferometry works. I mean, how exactly does comparing the signals from distant radio telescopes act like "one huge telescope"? Maybe the explanation is there and I missed it? The "what" is there, but not the "how" and "why".
To be clear, the book basically parrots what you’ll read in the introductory paragraphs here:
But I expect popular science books to give better layman explanations than Wikipedia! I mean, that’s why I read popular science books.
Finally, the book ends on a cliffhanger! They have the data and they’re starting to decode it and… it ends. Why was this book published before they were able to decode the results?
The Wikipedia page for the EHT, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_Horizon_Telescope has the rest of the story:
The first image of a black hole, at the center of galaxy Messier 87, was published by the EHT Collaboration on April 10, 2019, in a series of six scientific publications. … In March 2021, the Collaboration presented, for the first time, a polarized-based image of the black hole which may help better reveal the forces giving rise to quasars. … On 12 May 2022, astronomers unveiled the first image of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*."
This book was published in 2018, a year before the first results.
It wasn’t a waste of my time or anything, but it could have been so much better.
Oh! And I almost forgot! There was a call-back to the other physics book I recently finished (Dave’s book review for Escape from Shadow Physics) with a mention of complementarity (wikipedia.org) in relation to black holes and "information loss". Complementarity is beyond strange.
Wikipedia’s summary: "The complementarity principle holds that certain pairs of complementary properties cannot all be observed or measured simultaneously. For example, position and momentum, frequency and lifetime, or optical phase and photon number."
As soon as that word comes up, you know you’re in for a wild ride. As near as I can tell, it’s essentially a modern religion based on abstract mathematics, philosophy, and hubris.