It's difficult to overstate how remarkable an achievement LIGO is.https://twitter.com/NobelPrize/status/915152867874476032 …
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In part, that's because it's a new way of observing the Universe, like the early telescopes or microscopes.
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In 1998 I went to a talk by Kip Thorne where he said LIGO would likely need a strain sensitivity of "1 part in 10 to the 21" to see anything
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That's an accuracy comparable to measuring the distance to the Sun to an accuracy of one atom.
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At the time I simply laughed, and thought it would take centuries, or never happen.
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Here's the abstract for the Nobel-winning paper. And there, in the second sentence, a "strain of 10^-21", bang on the money.pic.twitter.com/oej6Anewmw
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Frankly, it's just utterly, utterly mindboggling that (a) we could predict gravitational waves; that
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(b) people like Joseph Weber and Rai Weiss could even conceive of measuring them; and
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(c) that people like Weiss, Thorne, Barish, Drever and their many, many collaborators could actually carry it out.
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Oh, and (d) that they persisted over half a century!
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So, hat's off to all of them, & congrats on an utterly remarkable achievement, one giving us a new window onto the Universe.
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Oh - and here's looking forward to the next 50 years, as we improve the sensitivity of detection, and make many major discoveries!
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