Books

Books : reviews

Seth Fletcher.
Einstein's Shadow: the inside story of astronomers' decades-long quest to take the first picture of a black hole.
Ecco. 2018

Photographing a black hole sounds impossible, a contradiction in terms. But Shep Doeleman and a global coalition of scientists have done just that.

With exclusive access to the team, journalist Seth Fletcher spent five years following Shep and an extraordinary cast of characters as they assembled the Event Horizon Telescope, a virtual radio observatory the size of the Earth. He witnessed the team’s struggles, setbacks, and breakthroughs, and along the way, he transforms astrophysics into something exciting, accessible, and immediate, taking us on an incredible adventure to better understand the complexity of our galaxy, the boundaries of human perception and knowledge, and how the messy human endeavor of science really works.

Weaving a compelling narrative account of human ingenuity with excursions into cutting-edge science, Einstein’s Shadow is a tale of great minds on a mission to change the way we understand our universe—and our place in it.