If quantum mechanics reduced reality’s hard surfaces to “probability distributors,” then Stephen Hawking’s “black hole information paradox” revealed that “scientists were missing something fundamental about the way the Universe works.” So explains Scientific American editor Seth Fletcher in Einstein’s Shadow, which zig-zags among the lives of contemporary astronomers who assembled a network of radio telescopes trying to peer into the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Avidly seeking a popular audience, Fletcher references the band Rush and H.P. Lovecraft as he sketches out the morphing theories driving this exploration of things unseen. In the end, he writes, the radio telescope “saw something. The question is, what?” Like the Universe itself, the unknown continues to expand.
