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The following is a conversation with Barry Barish, a theoretical physicist at Caltech and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves.
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LIGO, or the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, is probably the most precise measurement device ever built by humans.
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It consists of two detectors with four kilometer long vacuum chambers situated 3,000 kilometers apart, operating in unison to measure a motion that is 10,000 times smaller than the width of a proton.
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It is the smallest measurement ever attempted by science, a measurement of gravitational waves caused by the most violent and cataclysmic events in the universe, occurring over tens of millions of light years away.
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This is the Lex Friedman podcast and here is my conversation with Barry Barish.
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You ve mentioned that you were always curious about the physical world and that an early question you remember stood out where you asked your dad, why does ice float on water?
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And he couldn t answer.
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And this was very surprising to you.
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So you went on to learn why.
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Maybe you can speak to what are some early questions in math and physics that really sparked your curiosity?
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Yeah, that memory is kind of something I use to illustrate something I think that s common in science, is that people that do science somehow have maintained something that kids always have, a small kid.
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eight years old or so, ask you so many questions, usually, typically, that you consider them pests, you know, tell them to stop asking so many questions.
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And somehow, our system manages to kill that in most people.
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So in school, we make people to study and do their things, but not to pester them by asking too many questions.
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And I think, not just myself, but I think it s typical of scientists like myself that have somehow escaped that.
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Maybe we re still children, or maybe we
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somehow didn t get it beaten out of us, but I think it s, I teach in college level, and it s, to me, one of the biggest deficits is the lack of curiosity, if you want, that we ve beaten out of them, because I think it s an innate human quality.
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Is there some advice or insights you can give to how to keep that flame of curiosity going?
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I think it s a problem of both parents, and the parents should realize that s a great quality we have, that you re curious and that s good.
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Instead, we have expressions like, curiosity killed the cat.
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And more, but I mean, basically, it s not thought to be a good thing.
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Curiosity killed the cat means if you re too curious, you get in trouble.
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And you can lead to trouble.
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I don t like cats anyway, so maybe it s a good thing.
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Yeah, that, to me, needs to be solved, really, in education and in homes.
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It s a realization that there s certain human qualities that we should,
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try to build on and not destroy, one of them is curiosity.
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Anyway, back to me and curiosity.
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I was a pest and asked a lot of questions.
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My father generally could answer them at that age.
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And the first one I remember that he couldn t answer was not a very original question, but basically that ice is made out of water.
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And so why does it float on water?
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And
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He couldn t answer it.
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It may not have been the first question.
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It s the first one that I remember.
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And that was the first time that I realized that to learn and answer your own curiosity or questions, there s various mechanisms.
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In this case, it was going to the library or asking people who know more and so forth.
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But eventually, you do it by what we call research.
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But it s...
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driven by, if you re, hopefully you ask good questions, if you ask good questions and you have the mechanisms to solve them, then you do what I do in life, basically.
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Not necessarily physics, but, and it s a great quality in humans and we should nurture it.
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Do you remember any other kind of, in high school, maybe early college, more basic physics ideas that sparked your curiosity, or mathematics, or science in general?
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I wasn t really into science until I got to college, to be honest with you.
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But...
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Just staying with water for a minute, I remembered that I was curious why, what happens to water?
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You know, it rains and there s water in a wet pavement, and then the pavement dries out.
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What happened to this water that came down?
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And I, you know, I didn t know that much.
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And then eventually I learned in chemistry or something, water s made out of hydrogen and oxygen.
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Those are both gases.
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So how the heck does it make this substance that s liquid?
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Yeah, so that has to do with states of matter.
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I know perhaps LIGO and the thing for which you ve gotten the Nobel Prize and the things, much of your life work, perhaps was a happy accident in some sense in the early days, but is there a moment where you looked up to the stars and also the same way you wondered about water, wondered about some of the things that are out there in the universe?
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Oh yeah, I think everybody looks and is in awe and is curious about what it is out there.
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And as I learned more, I learned, of course, that we don t know very much about what s there.
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And the more we learn, the more we know we don t know.
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I mean, we don t know what the majority of anything is out there.
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what we call dark matter, dark energy, and that s one of the big questions.
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When I was a student, those weren t questions.
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So we even know less, in a sense, the more we look.
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So of course, I think that s one of the areas that almost it s universal.
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People see the sky, they see the stars, and they re beautiful, and see it looks different on different nights, and it s a curiosity that we all have.
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What are some questions about the universe that, in the same way that you felt about the ice, that today, you mentioned to me offline you re teaching a course on the frontiers of science, frontiers of physics.
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What are some questions, outside the ones we ll probably talk about, that kind of,
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Yeah, fill you with, get your flame of curiosity up and firing up, you know, fill you with awe.
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Well, first I m a physicist, not an astronomer, so I m interested in the physical phenomenon, really.
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So the question of dark matter and dark energy, which we probably won t talk about, are recent, they re in the last 20, 30 years, or certainly dark energy.
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Dark energy is a complete puzzle.
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It goes against what you will ask me about, which is general relativity and Einstein s general relativity.
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It basically takes something that he thought was what he called a constant, which isn t.
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And if that s even the right theory, and it represents most of the universe.
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And then we have something called dark matter, and there s good reason to believe it might be an exotic form of particles.
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And that is something I ve always worked on, on particle accelerators and so forth.
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And it s a big puzzle what it is.
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It s a bit of a cottage industry in that there s lots and lots of searches, but it may be a little bit like looking for a treasure under rocks or something.
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We don t have really good guidance, except that we have very, very good information that
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it s pervasive and it s there.
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And that it s probably particles, small, that evidences all of those things.
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But then the most logical solution doesn t seem to work, something called supersymmetry.
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And do you think the answer could be something very complicated?
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You know, I like to hope that, think that most things that appear complicated are actually simple if you really understand them.
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I think we just don t know at the present time, and it isn t something that affects us.
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It does affect, it affects how the stars go around each other and so forth, because we detect that there s missing gravity, but it doesn t affect everyday life at all.
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think and expect, maybe, and that the answers will be simple and we just haven t found it yet.
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Do you think those answers might change the way we see other sources of gravity, black holes, the way we see the parts of the universe that we do study?
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It s conceivable.
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The black holes that we ve found in our experiment and we re trying now to understand the origin of those,
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It s conceivable, but doesn t seem the most likely that they were primordial.
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That is, they were made at the beginning.
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And in that sense, they could represent at least part of the dark matter.
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So there can be connections.
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Dark black holes or how many there are, how much of the mass they encompass is still pretty primitive.
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We don t know.
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So before I talk to you more about black holes, let me take a step back to, I actually went to high school in Chicago and would go to take classes at Fermilab, watch the Buffalo and so on.
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So let me ask about, you mentioned that Enrico Fermi was somebody who was inspiring to you in a certain kind of way.
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Why is that, can you speak to that?
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Sure.
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He was amazing, actually.
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I ll come to the reason in a minute, but he had a big influence on me at a young age.
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But he was the last
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physicist of note that was both an experimental physicist and a theorist at the same time.
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And he did two amazing things within months.
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In 1933, we didn t really know what the nucleus was, what radioactive decay was, what beta decay was when electrons come out
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of a nucleus, and near the end of 1933, the neutron had just been discovered, and that meant that we knew a little bit more about what the nucleus is, that it s made out of neutrons and protons.
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The neutron wasn t discovered till 1932.
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And then once we discovered that there was a neutron and proton, and they made the nucleus, and then there are electrons that go around,
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the basic ingredients were there.
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And he wrote down not only just the theory, a theory, but a theory that lasted decades and has only been improved on, of beta decay, that is the radiation.
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He did this, came out of nowhere, and it s a fantastic theory.
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He submitted it to Nature magazine, which was the primary, best place to publish even then.
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and it got rejected as being too speculative.
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And so he went back to his drawing board in Rome, where he was, added some to it, made it even longer, because it s really a classic article, and then published it in the local Italian journal for physics and the German one.
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At the same time, in January of 1932, Giulio and Curie, for the first time, saw artificial radioactivity.
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This was an important discovery because radioactivity had been discovered much earlier.
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They had x-rays and you shouldn t be using them, but there was radioactivity.
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People knew it was useful for medicine.
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But radioactive materials are hard to find, and so it wasn t prevalent.
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But if you could make them, then they had great use.
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And Giulio and Curie were able to bombard
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aluminum or something with alpha particles, and find that they excited something that decayed and had some half-life and so forth, meaning it was an artificial version, or let s call it not a natural version, an induced version of radioactive materials.
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Fermi somehow had the insight, and I still can t see where he got it, that the right way to follow that up was not using charged particles like alphas and so forth, but use these newly discovered neutrons as the bombarding particle.
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Seemed impossible, they barely had been seen.
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It was hard to get very many of them.
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But it had the advantage that they re not charged, so they go right into the nucleus.
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And that turned out to be the experimental work that he did that won him the Nobel Prize.
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And it was the first step in fission, the discovery of fission.
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And he did this two completely different things, an experiment that was a great idea and a tremendous implementation because how do you get enough neutrons?
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And then he learned quickly that not only do you want neutrons, but you want really slow ones.
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He learned that experimentally and he learned how to make slow ones and then they were able to go through the periodic table and make lots of,
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particles.
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He missed on fission at the moment, but he had the basic information, and then fission follows soon after that.
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Forgive me for not knowing, but is the birth of the idea of bombarding with neutrons
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Is that an experimental idea?
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Was it born out of an experiment, he just observed something, or is this an Einstein-style idea where you come up from basic intuition?
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I think it took a combination, because he realized that neutrons had a characteristic that would allow them to go all the way into the nucleus, when we didn t really understand what the,
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you know, what the structure was of all this.
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So that took an understanding or recognition of the physics itself of how a neutron interacts compared to, say, an alpha particle that Giulio and Curie had used.
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And then he had to invent a way to have enough neutrons and, you know, he had a team of associates and he pulled it off quite quickly.
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So, you know, it was pretty astounding.
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And probably, maybe you can speak to it, his ability to put together the engineering aspects of great experiments and doing the theory that probably fed each other.
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I wonder, can you speak to why we don t see more of that?
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Is that just really difficult to do?
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It s difficult to do.
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Yeah, I think in both theory and experiment, in physics anyway, it was conceivable if you had the right person to do it, and no one s been able to do it since.
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So I had the dream that that was what I was going to be like, Fermi.
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So you love both sides of it, the theory and the experiment.
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Yeah, I never liked the idea that you did experiments without really understanding the theory or the theory should be related very closely to experiments.
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And so I ve always done experimental work that was closely related to the theoretical ideas.
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I think I told you I m Russian, so I m gonna ask some romantic questions, but is it tragic to you that he s seen as the architect of the nuclear age, that some of his creations led to potentially, some of his work has led to potentially still the destruction of the human species, some of the most destructive weapons?
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Yeah.
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I think even more general than him, I gave you all the virtues of curiosity a few minutes ago.
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There s an interesting book called The Ratchet of Curiosity.
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You know, a ratchet is something that goes in one direction.
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And that is written by a guy who s probably a sociologist or philosopher or something.
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And he picks on this particular problem but other ones, and that is the danger of knowledge, basically.
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You re curious, you learn something,
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So it s a little bit like curiosity killed the cat.
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You have to be worried about whether you can handle new information that you get.
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So in this case, the new information had to do with really understanding nuclear physics.
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And that information, maybe we didn t have the sophistication to know how to keep it under control.
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Yeah, and Fermi himself was a very apolitical person, so he wasn t very driven by, or at least he appears in all of his writing, the writing of his wife, the interactions that others had with him as either he avoided it all or he was pretty apolitical.
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I mean, he just saw the world through kind of the lens of a scientist.
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But he asked if it s tragic.
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The bomb was tragic, certainly on Japan, and he had a role in that.
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So I wouldn t want it as my legacy, for example.
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I mean, but brought it to the human species that it s the ratchet of curiosity that we, we do stuff just to see what happens.
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That curiosity, that in sort of my area of artificial intelligence, that s been a concern.
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On a small scale, on a silly scale perhaps currently, there s constantly unintended consequences.
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You create a system.
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and you put it out there and you have intuitions about how it will work, you have hopes how it will work, but you put it out there just to see what happens.
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And in most cases, because artificial intelligence is currently not super powerful, it doesn t create large-scale negative effects, but that same curiosity, as it progresses, might lead to something that destroys the human species.
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And the same may be true for bioengineering, there s people
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that engineer viruses to protect us from viruses, to see how close is this to mutating so it can jump to humans, or engineering defenses against those.
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And it seems exciting, and the positive applications are really exciting at this time, but we don t think about how that runs away in decades to come.
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Yeah, and I think it s the same idea as this little book, The Ratchet of Science, The Ratchet of Curiosity.
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I mean, whether you pursue, take curiosity and let artificial intelligence or machine learning run away with having its solutions to whatever you want, or we do it, it s, I think, a similar consequence.
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I think from what I ve read about Enrico Fermi, he became a little bit cynical about the human species towards the end of his life, about having observed what he observed.
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Well, he didn t write much.
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I mean, he died young.
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He died soon after the World War.
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There was already, you know, the work by Teller to develop the hydrogen bomb, and I think he was a little cynical of that, you know, pushing it even further, and the rising tensions between the Soviet Union and the U.S.
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looked like an endless thing.
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But he didn t say very much, but a little bit, as you said,
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, there s a few clips to sort of maybe picked on a bad mood, but in a sense that almost like a sadness, a melancholy sadness to a hope that waned a little bit about that perhaps we can do, like this curious species can find the way out.
1
SPEAKER_01
Well, especially I think people who worked like he did at Los Alamos and spent years of their life somehow had to convince themselves that dropping these bombs would bring lasting peace, and it didn t.
1
SPEAKER_00
As a small interesting aside, it d be interesting to hear if you have opinions on this, his name is also attached to the Fermi Paradox, which asks if there s, formally it s a very interesting question, which is, it does seem, if you sort of reason basically, that there should be a lot of alien civilizations out there.
1
SPEAKER_00
If the human species, if Earth is not that unique by basic, no matter the values you pick, it s likely that there s a lot of alien civilizations out there.
1
SPEAKER_00
And if that s the case, why have they not at least obviously visited us or sent us loud signals that everybody can hear?
1
SPEAKER_01
Fermi s quoted as saying, sitting down at lunch, I think it was with Teller and Herb York, who was kind of one of the fathers of the atomic bomb.
1
SPEAKER_01
And he sat down and he says something like, where are they?
1
SPEAKER_01
Which meant, where are these other?
1
SPEAKER_01
And then he did some numerology where he calculated, you know, how many, what they knew about how many,
1
SPEAKER_01
galaxies there are and how many stars and how many planets then are like the Earth and blah, blah, blah.
1
SPEAKER_01
That s been done much better by somebody named Drake.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so people usually refer to the, I don t know whether it s called the Drake formula or something, but it has the same conclusion.
1
SPEAKER_01
The conclusion is it would be a miracle if there weren t other, you know, the statistics are so high that how can we be singular and separate?
1
SPEAKER_01
So probably there is, but there s almost certainly life somewhere.
1
SPEAKER_01
Maybe there was even life on Mars a while back, but intelligent life, probably.
1
SPEAKER_01
So the statistics say that.
1
SPEAKER_01
Communicating with us, I think that it s harder than people think.
1
SPEAKER_01
We might,
1
SPEAKER_01
not know the right way to expect the communication, but all the communication that we know about travels at the speed of light.
1
SPEAKER_01
and we don t think anything can go faster than the speed of light.
1
SPEAKER_01
That limits the problem quite a bit, and it makes it difficult to have any back and forth communication.
1
SPEAKER_01
You could send signals like we try to or look for, but to have any communication, it s pretty hard when it has to be close enough that the speed of light would mean we could communicate with each other, and I think
1
SPEAKER_01
And we didn t even understand that.
1
SPEAKER_01
I mean, we re an advanced civilization, but we didn t even understand that.
1
SPEAKER_01
a little more than 100 years ago.
1
SPEAKER_01
So are we just not advanced enough, maybe, to know something about that s the speed of light?
1
SPEAKER_01
Maybe there s some other way to communicate that isn t based on electromagnetism?
1
SPEAKER_01
I don t know.
1
SPEAKER_01
Gravity seems to have the same speed.
1
SPEAKER_01
That was a principle that Einstein had, and something we ve measured, actually.
1
SPEAKER_00
So is it possible, I mean, so we ll talk about gravitational waves and in some sense there s a brainstorming going on which is like,
1
SPEAKER_00
how do we detect the signal?
1
SPEAKER_00
Like what would a signal look like and how would we detect it?
1
SPEAKER_00
And that s true for gravitational waves, that s true for basically any physics phenomena.
1
SPEAKER_00
You have to predict that that signal should exist, you have to have some kind of theory and model why that signal should exist.
1
SPEAKER_00
I mean, is it possible that aliens are communicating with us via gravity?
1
SPEAKER_00
Like why not?
1
SPEAKER_01
Well, yeah, it s true.
1
SPEAKER_01
Why not?
1
SPEAKER_01
For us, it s very hard to detect these gravitational effects.
1
SPEAKER_01
They have to come from something pretty that has a lot of gravity, like black holes.
1
SPEAKER_01
But we re pretty primitive at this stage.
1
SPEAKER_01
very reputable physicists that look for a fifth force, one that we haven t found yet.
1
SPEAKER_01
Maybe it s the key.
1
SPEAKER_01
So, you know, it s- What would that look like?
1
SPEAKER_00
What would a fifth force of physics look like exactly?
1
SPEAKER_01
Well, usually they think it s probably a longer range force than we have now.
1
SPEAKER_01
But there are reputable colleagues of mine that spend their life looking for a fifth force.
1
SPEAKER_00
So longer range than gravity?
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it doesn t fall off like one over r squared, but maybe separately.
1
SPEAKER_01
Gravity, Newton taught us, goes like inversely, one over the square of the distance apart you are.
1
SPEAKER_01
So it falls pretty fast.
1
SPEAKER_00
That s okay, so now we have a theory of what consciousness is, it s just the fifth force of physics.
1
SPEAKER_00
There we go, that s a good hypothesis.
1
SPEAKER_00
Speaking of gravity, what are gravitational waves?
1
SPEAKER_00
Let s maybe start from the basics.
1
SPEAKER_01
We learned gravity from Newton.
1
SPEAKER_01
Right, when you were young, you were told that if you jumped up, the earth pulled you down.
1
SPEAKER_01
And when the apple falls out of the tree, the earth pulls it down.
1
SPEAKER_01
And maybe you even asked your teacher why, but most of us accepted that.
1
SPEAKER_01
That was Newton s picture, the apple falling out of the tree.
1
SPEAKER_01
But Newton s theory never told you why the apple was attracted to the earth.
1
SPEAKER_01
That was missing in Newton s theory.
1
SPEAKER_01
Newton s theory also, Newton recognized at least one of the two problems I ll tell you.
1
SPEAKER_01
One of them is, there s more than those, but one is why does the Earth, what s the mechanism by which the Earth pulls the apple or holds the moon when it goes around, whatever it is?
1
SPEAKER_01
That s not explained by Newton, even though he has the most successful theory of physics ever, went 200 and some years with nobody ever seeing
1
SPEAKER_00
But he accurately describes the movement of an object falling down to Earth, but he s not answering why that, what s, because it s a distance, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
He gives a formula, which it s a product of the Earth s mass, the apple s mass, inversely proportional to the square of the distance between, and then the strength he called capital G, the strength he couldn t determine, but it was determined 100 years later.
1
SPEAKER_01
But no one ever saw a violation of this until a possible violation which Einstein fixed, which was very small, that has to do with mercury going around the sun.
1
SPEAKER_01
the orbit being slightly wrong if you calculate it by Newton s theory.
1
SPEAKER_01
But so like most theories then in physics, you can have a wonderful one like Newton s theory.
1
SPEAKER_01
It isn t wrong, but you have to have an improvement on it to answer things that it can t answer.
1
SPEAKER_01
And in this case, Einstein s theory is the next step.
1
SPEAKER_01
We don t know if it s,
1
SPEAKER_01
anything like a final theory or even the only way to formulate it either.
1
SPEAKER_01
But he formulated this theory, which he released in 1915.
1
SPEAKER_01
He took 10 years to develop it, even though in 1905, he solved three or four of the most important problems in physics in a matter of months.
1
SPEAKER_01
And then he spent 10 years on this problem before he let it out.
1
SPEAKER_01
And this is called general relativity.
1
SPEAKER_01
It s a new theory of gravity.
1
SPEAKER_01
In 1916, Einstein wrote a little paper where he did not do some fancy derivation.
1
SPEAKER_01
Instead, he did what I would call, he used his intuition.
2
SPEAKER_00
which he was very good at too.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that is he noticed that if he wrote the formulas for general relativity in a particular way, they looked a lot like the formulas for electricity and magnetism.
2
SPEAKER_00
Being Einstein, he then took the leap that electricity and magnetism, we discovered only 20 years before that in the 1880s, have waves.
2
SPEAKER_00
Of course, that s light and electromagnetic waves, radio waves, everything else.
2
SPEAKER_00
So he said if the formulas look similar, then gravity probably has waves too.
2
SPEAKER_02
That s such a big leap, by the way.
2
SPEAKER_02
I mean, maybe you can correct me, but that just seems, that seems like a heck of a leap.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and so that, and it was considered to be a heck of a leap.
2
SPEAKER_00
So first that paper was, except for this intuition was,
2
SPEAKER_00
poorly written, had a serious mistake.
2
SPEAKER_00
It had a factor of two wrong in the strength of gravity, which meant if we use those formulas, we would.
2
SPEAKER_00
And two years later, he wrote a second paper.
2
SPEAKER_00
And in that paper, it turns out to be important for us because in that paper, he not only fixed his factor of two mistake, which he never admitted, he just wrote it, fixed it like he always did.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then he told us how you make gravitational waves, what makes gravitational waves.
2
SPEAKER_00
And you might recall in electromagnetism, we make electromagnetic waves in a simple way.
2
SPEAKER_00
You take a plus charge and minus charge, you oscillate like this, and that makes electromagnetic waves.
2
SPEAKER_00
And a physicist named Hertz made a receiver that could detect the waves and put it in the next room.
2
SPEAKER_00
He saw them and moved forward and backward and saw that it was wave-like.
2
SPEAKER_00
So Einstein said it won t be a dipole like that, it ll be a four-pole thing.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that s what is called a quadrupole moment that gives the gravitational wave.
2
SPEAKER_00
So he saw that again by insight, not by derivation.
2
SPEAKER_00
That set the table for what you needed to do to do it.
2
SPEAKER_00
At the same time, in the same year, Schwarzschild, not Einstein, said there were things called black holes.
2
SPEAKER_00
So it s interesting that that came the same.
2
SPEAKER_02
So what year was that?
2
1915.
2
SPEAKER_02
It was in parallel.
2
SPEAKER_02
I should probably know this, but did Einstein not have an intuition that there should be such things as black holes?
2
SPEAKER_00
That came from Schwarzschild.
2
SPEAKER_02
Oh, interesting.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so Schwarzschild, who was a German theoretical physicist, he got killed in the war, I think, in the First World War, two years later or so.
2
SPEAKER_00
He s the one that proposed black holes, that there were black holes.
2
SPEAKER_02
That feels like a natural conclusion of general relativity, no?
2
SPEAKER_02
Or is that not?
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, it may seem like it, but I don t know about a natural conclusion.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s a result of curved space-time, though.
2
SPEAKER_02
Right, but it s such a weird result that you might have to, it s a special.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s a special case.
2
SPEAKER_00
So, I don t know, anyway, Einstein then, an interesting part of the story is that Einstein then left the problem.
2
SPEAKER_00
Most physicists, because it really wasn t derived,
2
SPEAKER_00
He just made this, didn t pick up on it or general relativity much because quantum mechanics became the thing in physics.
2
SPEAKER_00
And Einstein only picked up this problem again after he immigrated to the U.S.
2
SPEAKER_00
So, he came to the U.S.
2
SPEAKER_00
in 1932.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I think in 1934 or 5, he was working with another physicist called Rosen who he did several important works with.
2
SPEAKER_00
And they revisited the question.
2
SPEAKER_00
And they had a problem that most of us as students always had that studied general relativity.
2
SPEAKER_00
General relativity is really hard because it s four-dimensional instead of three-dimensional.
2
SPEAKER_00
And if you don t set it up right, you get infinities, which don t belong there.
2
SPEAKER_00
We call them coordinate singularities.
2
SPEAKER_00
as a name, but if you get these infinities, you don t get the answers you want.
2
SPEAKER_00
And he was trying to derive now, from general relativity, gravitational waves.
2
SPEAKER_00
And in doing it, he kept getting these infinities.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so he wrote a paper with Rosen that he submitted to our most important journal, Physical Review Letters.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that when it was submitted to Physical Review Letters, it was entitled, Do Gravitational Waves Exist?
2
SPEAKER_00
A very funny title to write 20 years after he proposed they exist.
2
SPEAKER_00
But it s because he had found these singularities, these infinities.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so the editor at that time, and part of it that I don t know, is peer review.
2
SPEAKER_00
We live and die by peer review as scientists send our stuff out.
2
SPEAKER_00
We don t know when peer review actually started or what peer review Einstein ever experienced before this time.
2
SPEAKER_00
But the editor of Physical Review sent this out for review.
2
SPEAKER_00
He had a choice, he could take any article and just accept it, he could reject it, or he could send it for review.
2
SPEAKER_02
Right, I believe the editors used to have much more power.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah, and he was a young man, his name was Tate, and he ended up being editor for years.
2
SPEAKER_00
So, he sent this for review to a theoretical physicist named Robertson, who was also in this field of general relativity, who happened to be on sabbatical at that moment at Caltech.
2
SPEAKER_00
Otherwise, his institution was Princeton, where
2
SPEAKER_00
Einstein was.
2
SPEAKER_00
And he saw that the way they set up the problem, the infinities were like I make it as a student, because if you don t set it up right in general relativity, you get these infinities.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so he reviewed the article and gave an illustration that if they set it up in what are called cylindrical coordinates, these infinities went away.
2
SPEAKER_00
He s the editor of
2
SPEAKER_00
a physical review was obviously intimidated by Einstein.
2
SPEAKER_00
He wrote this really not a letter back like I would get saying, you know, you re screwed up in your paper.
2
SPEAKER_00
Instead, it was kind of, what do you think of the comments of our referee?
2
SPEAKER_00
Einstein wrote back, it s a well-documented letter, wrote back a letter to Physical Review saying, I didn t send you the paper to send it to one of your so-called experts, I sent it to you to publish.
2
SPEAKER_00
I withdraw the paper.
2
SPEAKER_00
And he never published again in that journal.
2
SPEAKER_00
That was 1936.
2
SPEAKER_00
Instead, he rewrote it.
2
SPEAKER_00
with the fixes that were made, changed the title, and published it in what was called the Franklin Review, which is the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, which is Benjamin Franklin Institute, which doesn t have a journal now, but did at that time.
2
SPEAKER_00
So the article is published.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s the last time he ever wrote about it.
2
SPEAKER_00
It remained controversial.
2
SPEAKER_00
So, it wasn t until close to 1960, 1958, where there was a conference that brought together the experts in general relativity to try to sort out whether there was
2
SPEAKER_00
whether it was true that there were gravitational waves or not.
2
SPEAKER_00
And there was a very nice derivation by a British theorist from the heart of the theory that gets gravitational waves.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that was number one.
2
SPEAKER_00
The second thing that happened at that meeting is Richard Feynman was there.
2
SPEAKER_00
And Feynman said, well, if there s, typical Feynman, if there s gravitational waves, they need to be able to do something.
2
SPEAKER_00
Otherwise, they don t exist.
2
SPEAKER_00
So they have to be able to transfer energy.
2
SPEAKER_00
So he made an idea of a Gedanken experiment that is just a bar with a couple of rings on it.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then if a gravitational wave goes through, it distorts the bar.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that creates friction on these little rings.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that s heat, and that s energy.
2
SPEAKER_00
So that meant- Is that a good idea?
2
SPEAKER_01
It sounds like a good idea.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it means that he showed that with the distortion of space-time, you could transfer energy, just by this little idea.
2
SPEAKER_00
And it was shown theoretically.
2
SPEAKER_00
So at that point, it was, you know,
2
SPEAKER_00
belief theoretically then by people that gravitational waves should exist.
2
SPEAKER_02
No, we should be able to detect them.
2
SPEAKER_00
We should be able to detect them, except that they re very, very small.
2
SPEAKER_02
So what kind of, there s a bunch of questions here, but what kind of events would generate gravitational waves?
2
SPEAKER_00
you have to have this what I call quadruple moment.
2
SPEAKER_00
That comes about if I have, for example, two objects that go around each other like this, like the earth around the sun or the moon around the earth, or in our case, it turns out to be two black holes going around each other like this.
2
SPEAKER_02
So how s that different than basic oscillation back and forth?
2
SPEAKER_00
Is it just more common in nature to have?
2
SPEAKER_00
Oscillation is a dipole moment.
2
SPEAKER_02
So it has to be in three-dimensional space kind of oscillation.
2
SPEAKER_00
So you have to have something that s three-dimensional that ll give what I call a quadrupole moment that s just built into this.
2
SPEAKER_02
And luckily in nature you have stuff.
2
SPEAKER_00
And luckily things exist.
2
SPEAKER_00
And it is luckily because the effect is so small that you could say, look, I can take a barbell
2
SPEAKER_00
and spin it, right, and detect the gravitational waves.
2
SPEAKER_00
But unfortunately, no matter how much I spin it, how fast I spin it, so I know how to make gravitational waves, but they re so weak, I can t detect them.
2
SPEAKER_00
So we have to take something that s stronger than I can make.
2
SPEAKER_00
Otherwise, we would do what Hertz did for electromagnetic waves, go in our lab, take a barbell, put it on something, spin it,
2
SPEAKER_02
Can I ask a dumb question?
2
SPEAKER_02
So a single object that s weirdly shaped, does that generate gravitational waves?
2
SPEAKER_02
So if it s rotating?
2
SPEAKER_00
Sure.
2
SPEAKER_00
But it s just a much weaker signal.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s weaker.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, we didn t know what the strongest signal would be that we would see.
2
SPEAKER_00
We targeted seeing something called neutron stars, actually, because black holes we don t know very much about.
2
SPEAKER_00
It turned out we were a little bit lucky.
2
SPEAKER_00
There was a stronger source, which was the black holes.
2
SPEAKER_02
Well, another ridiculous question.
2
SPEAKER_02
So you say waves.
2
SPEAKER_02
What does a wave mean?
2
SPEAKER_02
The most ridiculous version of that question is what does it feel like to ride a wave as you get closer to the source?
2
SPEAKER_02
or experience it?
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, if you experience a wave, imagine that this is what happens to you.
2
SPEAKER_00
I don t know what you mean by getting close.
2
SPEAKER_00
It comes to you.
2
SPEAKER_00
So it s like this light wave or something that comes through you.
2
SPEAKER_00
So when the light hits you, it makes your eyes detect it.
2
SPEAKER_00
I flashed it.
2
SPEAKER_00
What does this do?
2
SPEAKER_00
It s like going to the amusement park.
2
SPEAKER_00
and they have these mirrors.
2
SPEAKER_00
You look in this mirror, and you look short and fat, and the one next to you makes you tall and thin.
2
SPEAKER_00
Imagine that you went back and forth between those two mirrors once a second.
2
SPEAKER_00
That would be a gravitational wave with a period of once a second.
2
SPEAKER_00
If you did it 60 times a second, go back and forth, and then that s all that happens.
2
SPEAKER_00
It makes you taller and shorter and fatter back and forth as it goes through you.
2
SPEAKER_00
at the frequency of the gravitational wave.
2
SPEAKER_00
So the frequencies that we detect are higher than one a second, but that s the idea.
2
SPEAKER_00
And the amount is small.
2
SPEAKER_02
Amount is small, but if you re closer to the source of the wave, is it the same amount?
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it doesn t dissipate.
2
SPEAKER_02
It doesn t dissipate.
2
SPEAKER_02
Okay, so it s not that fun of an amusement ride.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, it does dissipate, but it doesn t, it doesn t, it s proportional to the distance.
2
SPEAKER_02
Right, it s not.
2
SPEAKER_02
It s not a big power.
2
SPEAKER_02
Right, gotcha.
2
SPEAKER_02
So, but it would be a fun ride if you get a little bit closer, or a lot closer.
2
SPEAKER_02
I mean, like, I wonder what the, okay, this is a ridiculous question, but I have you here.
2
SPEAKER_02
Like, the getting fatter and taller,
2
SPEAKER_02
I mean, that experience, for some reason, that s mind-blowing to me, because it brings the distortion of space-time to you.
2
SPEAKER_02
I mean, space-time is being morphed, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
Like, this is a way.
2
SPEAKER_02
That s right.
2
SPEAKER_02
That s so weird.
2
SPEAKER_00
And we re in space, so we re affected by it.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, we re in space, and now it s moving.
2
SPEAKER_02
I don t know what to do with it.
2
SPEAKER_02
I mean, does it, okay.
2
SPEAKER_02
How much do you think about the philosophical implications of general relativity?
2
SPEAKER_02
Like that we re in space time and it can be bent by gravity.
2
SPEAKER_02
Like, is that just what it is?
2
SPEAKER_02
Are we supposed to be okay with this?
2
SPEAKER_02
Because like Newton, even Newton is a little weird, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
But that at least like makes sense.
2
SPEAKER_02
That s our physical world.
2
SPEAKER_02
You know, when an apple falls, it makes sense.
2
SPEAKER_02
But like the fact that entirety of the space time we re in can bend.
2
SPEAKER_02
Well, that s really mind-blowing.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, let me make another analogy.
2
SPEAKER_02
This is a therapy session for me at this point.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, right, another analogy.
2
SPEAKER_00
Thank you.
2
SPEAKER_00
So imagine you have a trampoline.
2
SPEAKER_02
Yes.
2
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
2
SPEAKER_00
What happens if you put a marble on a trampoline?
2
SPEAKER_00
It doesn t do anything, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
No, maybe a little bit, but not much.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean, just if I drop it, it s not gonna go anywhere.
2
SPEAKER_00
Now imagine I put a bowling ball at the center of the trampoline.
2
SPEAKER_00
Now I come up to the trampoline and I put a marble on, what happens?
2
SPEAKER_02
It ll roll towards the bowling ball.
2
SPEAKER_00
All right, so what s happened is the presence of this massive object distorted the space that the trampoline did.
2
SPEAKER_00
This is the same thing that happens to the presence of the earth.
2
SPEAKER_00
the earth and the apple.
2
SPEAKER_00
The presence of the earth affects the space around it just like the bowling ball on the trampoline.
2
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, this doesn t make me feel better.
2
SPEAKER_02
I m referring from the perspective of an ant walking around on that trampoline.
2
SPEAKER_02
Then some guy just dropped a ball, and not only dropped a ball, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
It s not just dropping a bowling ball.
2
SPEAKER_02
It s making the ball go up and down.
2
SPEAKER_02
or doing some kind of oscillation thing where it s like waves.
2
SPEAKER_02
And that s so fundamentally different from the experience on being on Flatland and walking around and just finding delicious sweet things as Ant does.
2
SPEAKER_02
It just feels like to me from a human experience perspective.
2
SPEAKER_02
completely, it s humbling, it s truly humbling.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s humbling, but we see that kind of phenomenon all the time.
2
SPEAKER_00
Let me give you another example.
2
SPEAKER_00
Imagine that you walk up to a still pond.
2
SPEAKER_02
Yes.
2
SPEAKER_00
Okay?
2
SPEAKER_00
Now I throw, you throw a rock in it, what happens?
2
SPEAKER_00
The rock goes in, sinks to the bottom, fine, and these little ripples go out, and they travel.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s exactly what happens.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, there s a disturbance, which is easy to say the bowling ball or black holes.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then the ripples, they go out in the water.
2
SPEAKER_00
They don t have any, they don t have the rock, any pieces of the rock.
2
SPEAKER_02
But see, the thing is, I guess what s not disturbing about that is it s a, I mean, I guess a flat two-dimensional surface that s being disturbed.
2
SPEAKER_02
Like for a three-dimensional surface, three-dimensional space to be disturbed feels weird.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s even worse.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s four-dimensional because it s space and time.
2
SPEAKER_00
So that s why you need Einstein, is to make it four-dimensional.
2
SPEAKER_02
No, to make it.
2
SPEAKER_02
To make it four-dimensional.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, to take the same phenomenon and look at it in all of space and time.
2
SPEAKER_00
Anyway, luckily for you and I and all of us, the amount of distortion is incredibly small.
2
SPEAKER_00
So it turns out that if you think of space itself, now this is going to blow your mind too, if you think of space as being like a material like this table, it s very stiff.
2
SPEAKER_00
You know, we have materials that are very pliable, materials that are very stiff.
2
SPEAKER_00
So space itself is very stiff.
2
SPEAKER_00
So when gravitational waves come through it, luckily for us, it doesn t distort it so much that it affects our ordinary life very much.
2
SPEAKER_02
No, I mean, that s great.
2
SPEAKER_02
Wait, I thought there was something bad coming.
2
SPEAKER_02
No, this is great.
2
SPEAKER_02
That s great news.
2
SPEAKER_02
So, I mean, perhaps we evolved as life on Earth to be such that for us this particular set of effects of gravitational waves is not that significant.
2
SPEAKER_02
Maybe that s why.
2
SPEAKER_00
You probably used this effect today.
2
SPEAKER_02
or yesterday.
2
SPEAKER_00
So it s pervasive.
2
SPEAKER_02
You mean gravity or external?
2
SPEAKER_02
Curvature of space and time.
2
SPEAKER_02
Curvature of space, how?
2
SPEAKER_02
I only care personally as a human, right, the gravity of Earth.
2
SPEAKER_00
But you use it every day almost.
2
SPEAKER_00
Oh, it s curving.
2
SPEAKER_00
No, no, no.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s in this thing.
2
SPEAKER_00
Every time it tells you where you are, how does it tell you where you are?
2
SPEAKER_00
It tells you where you are because we have 24 satellites or some number that are going around in space and it asks how long it takes the being to go to the satellite and come back.
3
SPEAKER_02
the signal to different ones, and then it triangulates and tells you where you are.
3
SPEAKER_02
And then if you go down the road, it tells you where you are.
3
SPEAKER_02
Do you know that if you did that with the satellites and you didn t use Einstein s equations, you won t get the right answer?
3
SPEAKER_02
That s right.
3
SPEAKER_02
And in fact, if you take a road that s, say, 10 meters wide, I ve done these numbers, and you ask how long you d stay on the road if you didn t make the correction,
3
SPEAKER_02
for general relativity, this thing you re poo-pooing, that you re using every day, you d go off the road in about a minute.
3
SPEAKER_02
So you use it, so don t poo-poo it.
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, I think I m using an Android, and the GPS doesn t work that well, so maybe I m using Newton s physics, so I need to upgrade to general relativity.
3
SPEAKER_00
So gravitational waves and Einstein had, wait, Feynman really does have a part in the story?
3
SPEAKER_00
Was that one of the first kind of experimental proposed detect gravitational waves?
3
SPEAKER_02
Well, he did what we call a Gedanken experiment.
3
SPEAKER_02
That s a thought experiment.
3
SPEAKER_02
Okay, not a real experiment.
3
SPEAKER_02
But then after that, then people believed gravitational waves must exist.
3
SPEAKER_02
You can kind of calculate how big they are.
3
SPEAKER_02
There s tiny.
3
SPEAKER_02
And so people started searching.
3
SPEAKER_02
The first idea that was used was Feynman s idea.
3
SPEAKER_02
Oh, a variant of it.
3
SPEAKER_02
And it was to take a great big, huge bar of aluminum and then put around, and it s made like a cylinder, and then put around it some very, very sensitive detectors so that if a gravitational wave happened to go through it, it would go
3
SPEAKER_02
and you detect the extra strain that was there.
3
SPEAKER_02
And that was this method that was used until we came along.
3
SPEAKER_02
It wasn t a very good method to use.
3
SPEAKER_00
And what was the, so we re talking about a pretty weak signal here.
3
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, that s why that method didn t work.
3
SPEAKER_00
So what, can you tell the story of figuring out what kind of method would be able to detect this very weak signal of gravitational waves?
3
SPEAKER_02
So remembering what happens when you go to the amusement park, that it s gonna do something like stretch this way and squash that way, squash this way and stretch this way.
3
SPEAKER_02
We do have an instrument that can detect that kind of thing.
3
SPEAKER_02
It s called an interferometer.
3
SPEAKER_02
And what it does is it just basically takes usually light and the two directions that we re talking about, you send light down one direction and the perpendicular direction.
3
SPEAKER_02
And if nothing changes, it takes the same and the arms are the same length.
3
SPEAKER_02
It just goes down, bounces back.
3
SPEAKER_02
And if you invert one compared to the other, they cancel.
3
SPEAKER_02
So there s nothing happens.
3
SPEAKER_02
But if it s like the amusement park and one of the arms got shorter and fatter, so it took longer to go horizontally than it did to go vertically, then when the light comes back, it comes back somewhat out of time.
3
SPEAKER_02
And that basically is the scheme.
3
SPEAKER_02
The only problem is that that s not done very accurately in general, and we had to do it extremely accurately.
3
SPEAKER_00
So what s the difficulty of doing so accurately?
3
SPEAKER_02
Okay, so the measurement that we have to do is the distortion in time, how big is it?
3
SPEAKER_02
It s a distortion that s one part in 10 to the 21.
3
SPEAKER_02
That s 21 zeros and a one, okay?
3
SPEAKER_00
Wow, so this is like a delay in the thing coming back.
3
SPEAKER_02
It s one of them coming back after the other one, but the difference is just one part in 10 to the 21.
3
SPEAKER_02
So for that reason, we make it big.
3
SPEAKER_02
let the arms be long, okay, so one part in 10 to the 21.
3
SPEAKER_02
In our case, it s kilometers long, so we have an instrument that s kilometers in one direction, kilometers in the other, several.
3
SPEAKER_00
How many kilometers are we talking about, four kilometers?
3
SPEAKER_02
Four kilometers in each direction.
3
SPEAKER_02
If you take then one part in 10 to the 21, we re talking about measuring something to 10 to the minus 18 meters.
3
SPEAKER_02
Now, to tell you how small that is, the proton thing we re made of that you can t go and grab so easily is 10 to the minus 15 meters.
3
SPEAKER_02
So, this is one one-thousandth the size of a proton.
3
SPEAKER_02
That s the size of the effect.
3
SPEAKER_02
Einstein himself didn t think this could be measured.
3
SPEAKER_02
Have you ever seen?
3
SPEAKER_02
Actually, he said that, but that s because he didn t anticipate modern lasers and techniques that we developed.
3
SPEAKER_00
Okay, so maybe can you tell me a little bit what you re referring to as LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory?
3
SPEAKER_00
What is LIGO?
3
SPEAKER_00
Can you just elaborate kind of the big picture view here before I ask you specific questions about it?
3
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, so in the same idea that I just said, we have two long vacuum pipes, four kilometers long, okay?
3
SPEAKER_02
We start with a laser beam and we divide the beam going down the two arms.
3
SPEAKER_02
and we have a mirror at the other end, reflects it back.
3
SPEAKER_02
It s more subtle, but we bring it back.
3
SPEAKER_02
If there s no distortion in space-time and the lengths are exactly the same, which we calibrate them to be, then when it comes back, if we just invert one signal compared to the other, they ll just cancel.
3
SPEAKER_02
So, we see nothing, okay?
3
SPEAKER_02
But if one arm got a little bit longer than the other, then they don t come back at exactly the same time.
3
SPEAKER_02
They don t exactly cancel.
3
SPEAKER_02
That s what we measure.
3
SPEAKER_02
So to give a number to it, we have to do that to, we have the change of length to be able to do this 10 to the minus 18 meters to one part in 10 to the 12th.
3
SPEAKER_02
And that was the big experimental challenge that required a lot of innovation to be able to do.
3
SPEAKER_00
You gave a lot of credit to, I think, Caltech and MIT for some of the technical developments within this project.
3
SPEAKER_00
Is there some interesting things you can speak to, like at the low level of some cool stuff that had to be solved?
3
SPEAKER_00
Like what do we talk, I m a software engineer, so all of this, I have so much more respect for everything done here than anything I ve ever done.
3
SPEAKER_00
So it s just code.
3
SPEAKER_02
So I ll give you an example of doing,
3
SPEAKER_02
mechanical engineering, basically mechanical engineering and geology, maybe at a level.
3
SPEAKER_02
So what s the problem?
3
SPEAKER_02
The problem is the following, that I ve given you this picture of an instrument that by some magic I can make good enough to measure this very short distance, but then I put it down here, it won t work.
3
SPEAKER_02
And the reason it doesn t work is that the earth itself is moving all over the place all the time.
3
SPEAKER_02
You don t realize it, it seems pretty good to you, but it s moving all the time.
3
SPEAKER_02
So somehow it s moving so much that we can t deal with it.
3
SPEAKER_02
We happen to be trying to do the experiment here on earth, but we can t deal with it.
3
SPEAKER_02
So we have to make the instrument isolated from the earth.
3
SPEAKER_02
Oh no.
3
SPEAKER_02
At the frequencies we re at, we ve gotta float it.
3
SPEAKER_02
That s a mechanical, that s an engineering problem, not a physics problem.
3
SPEAKER_00
So when you actually, like we re doing, we re having a conversation on a podcast right now, there s, and people who record music work with this, you know, how to create an isolated room.
3
SPEAKER_00
and they usually build a room within a room, but that s still not isolated.
3
SPEAKER_00
In fact, they say it s impossible to truly isolate from sound, from noise and stuff like that.
3
SPEAKER_00
But that s like one step of millions that you took, is building a room inside a room.
3
SPEAKER_00
You basically have to isolate all
3
SPEAKER_02
No, this is actually an easier problem.
3
SPEAKER_02
You just have to do it really well.
3
SPEAKER_02
So, making a clean room is really a tough problem because you have to put a room inside a room.
3
SPEAKER_02
This is really simple engineering or physics.
3
SPEAKER_02
Okay, so what do you have to do?
3
SPEAKER_02
How do you isolate yourself from the earth?
3
SPEAKER_02
First, we work at, we re not looking at all frequencies for gravitational waves, we re looking at particular frequencies that you can deal with here on Earth.
3
SPEAKER_02
So what frequencies would those be?
3
SPEAKER_02
You were just talking about frequencies.
3
SPEAKER_02
We know by evolution, our bodies know, it s the audio band, okay?
3
SPEAKER_02
The reason our ears work where they work is that s where the Earth isn t going, making too much noise.
3
SPEAKER_00
Okay, so the reason our ears work the way they work is because this is where it s quiet.
3
SPEAKER_02
That s right.
3
SPEAKER_02
So if you go to one hertz instead of 10 hertz, the earth is really moving around.
3
SPEAKER_02
So somehow we live in what we call the audio band.
3
SPEAKER_02
It s tens of hertz to thousands of hertz.
3
SPEAKER_02
That s where we live, okay?
3
SPEAKER_02
If we re gonna do an experiment on the earth,
3
SPEAKER_00
You might as well do it in the city.
3
SPEAKER_02
It s the same frequency.
3
SPEAKER_02
That s where the Earth is the quietest.
3
SPEAKER_02
So we have to work in that frequency.
3
SPEAKER_02
So we re not looking at all frequencies, okay?
3
SPEAKER_02
So the solution for the shaking of the Earth to get rid of it is pretty mundane.
3
SPEAKER_02
If we do the same thing that you do to make your car drive smoothly down the road.
3
SPEAKER_02
So what happens when your car goes over a bump?
3
SPEAKER_02
Early cars did that, they bounced.
3
SPEAKER_02
But you don t feel that in your car.
3
SPEAKER_02
So what happened to that energy?
3
SPEAKER_02
You can t just disappear energy.
3
SPEAKER_02
So we have these things called shock absorbers in the car.
3
SPEAKER_02
What they do is they take the thing that went like that, and they basically can t get rid of the energy, but they move it to very, very low frequency.
3
SPEAKER_02
So what you feel isn t, you feel it go smoothly, okay?
3
SPEAKER_02
All right, so we also work at this frequency, so we basically, why do we have to do anything other than shock absorbers?
3
SPEAKER_02
So we made the world s fanciest shock absorbers.
3
SPEAKER_02
Okay?
3
SPEAKER_02
Not just like in your car where there s one layer of them.
3
SPEAKER_02
They re just the right squishiness and so forth.
3
SPEAKER_02
They re better than what s in the cars.
3
SPEAKER_02
And we have four layers of it, so whatever shakes and gets through the first layer, we treat it in a second, third, fourth layer.
3
SPEAKER_00
So it s a mechanical engineering problem.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s what I said.
3
SPEAKER_00
So it s a real thing.
3
SPEAKER_00
So there s no weird tricks to it, like a chemistry type thing?
3
SPEAKER_02
No, no.
3
SPEAKER_02
Just, well, the right squishiness, so you need the right material inside.
3
SPEAKER_02
And ours look like little springs, but they re, so.
3
SPEAKER_00
Springs, they re springs, so like legitimately like shock absorbers.
3
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
What?
3
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
3
SPEAKER_02
Okay.
3
SPEAKER_02
And this is now experimental physics at its limit.
3
SPEAKER_02
Okay, so you do this, and we make the world s fanciest shock absorbers, just mechanical engineering.
3
SPEAKER_00
Just mechanical genius, it s hilarious.
3
SPEAKER_02
But we weren t good enough to discover gravitational waves.
3
SPEAKER_02
So we did another, we added another feature, and it s something else that you re aware of, probably have one.
3
SPEAKER_02
and that is to get rid of noise.
3
SPEAKER_02
You ve probably noise, which is you don t like, and that s the same principle that s in these little Bose earphones.
3
SPEAKER_00
Noise canceling.
3
SPEAKER_02
Noise canceling, so how do they work?
3
SPEAKER_02
They basically, you go on an airplane and they sense the ambient noise from the engines and cancel it, because it s just the same over and over again.
3
SPEAKER_02
They cancel it, and when the stewardess comes and asks you whether you want coffee or tea or a drink or something, you hear her, fine, because she s not ambient, she s a signal, so.
3
SPEAKER_00
Are we talking about active canceling?
3
SPEAKER_02
Active canceling, so.
3
SPEAKER_00
This is, okay.
3
SPEAKER_00
Don t tell me you have active canceling on this, besides the shock absorbers.
3
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, so inside this array of shock absorbers, you asked for some interesting... This is awesome.
3
SPEAKER_02
So inside this, it s harder than the earphone problem, but it s just engineering.
3
SPEAKER_02
We have to see, measure not just the
3
SPEAKER_02
engines still made noise, but the earth is shaking, it s moving in some direction.
3
SPEAKER_02
So we have to actually tell not only that there s noise and cancel it, but what direction it s from.
3
SPEAKER_02
So we put this array of seismometers inside this array of shock absorbers and measure the residual motion and its direction.
3
SPEAKER_02
And we put little actuators that push back against it and cancel it.
3
SPEAKER_00
This is awesome.
3
SPEAKER_00
So you have the actuators and you have the thing that is sensing the vibrations and then you have the actuators that adjust to that and do so in perfect synchrony.
3
SPEAKER_02
What?
3
SPEAKER_02
If it all works right.
3
SPEAKER_02
And so how much do we reduce the shaking of the earth?
3
SPEAKER_02
One part in 10 to the 12th.
3
SPEAKER_00
One part in 10 to the 12th.
3
SPEAKER_02
So what gets through us is one part in 10 to the 12th.
3
SPEAKER_02
That s a pretty big reduction.
3
SPEAKER_02
You don t need that in your car, but that s what we do.
3
SPEAKER_02
And so that s how isolated we are from the Earth.
3
SPEAKER_02
And that was the biggest, I d say, technical problem outside of the physics instrument, the interferometer.
3
SPEAKER_00
Can I ask you a weird question here?
3
SPEAKER_00
You make it very poetically and humorously.
3
SPEAKER_00
You re saying it s just a mechanical engineering problem.
3
SPEAKER_00
But is this one of the...
3
SPEAKER_00
biggest precision mechanical engineering efforts ever.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, this seems exceptionally difficult.
3
SPEAKER_02
It is.
3
SPEAKER_02
And so it took a long time.
3
SPEAKER_02
And I think nobody seems to challenge the statement that this is the most precision, precise instrument that s ever been built, LIGO.
3
SPEAKER_00
I wonder what listening to Led Zeppelin sounds on this thing, because it s so isolated.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, this is like, I don t know.
3
SPEAKER_00
No background noise.
3
SPEAKER_00
No back, it s wow, wow, wow.
3
SPEAKER_00
So when you were first conceiving this, I would probably, if I was knowledgeable enough, kind of laugh off the possibility that this is even possible.
3
SPEAKER_00
I m sure,
3
SPEAKER_00
Like how many people believe that this is possible?
3
SPEAKER_00
Did you believe this was possible?
3
SPEAKER_02
Oh, I did.
3
SPEAKER_02
I didn t know that we needed, for sure that we needed active.
3
SPEAKER_02
When we started, we did just passive, but we were doing the...
3
SPEAKER_02
tests to develop the active to add as a second stage, which we ended up needing.
3
SPEAKER_02
But there was a lot of, you know, now there was a lot of skepticism.
3
SPEAKER_02
A lot of us, especially astronomers, felt that money was being wasted because we were all so expensive.
3
SPEAKER_02
Doing what I told you is not cheap.
3
SPEAKER_02
So it was kind of controversial.
3
SPEAKER_02
It was funded by the National Science Foundation.
3
SPEAKER_00
Can you just linger on this just for a little longer, the actuator thing, the active cancelling?
3
SPEAKER_00
Do you remember little experiments that were done along the way to prove to the team, to themselves, that this is even possible?
3
SPEAKER_00
Because I work with quite a bit of robots, and to me the idea that you could do it this precisely is humbling and embarrassing, frankly.
3
SPEAKER_00
Because this is another level of precision that I can t even imagine.
3
SPEAKER_00
because robots are a mess.
3
SPEAKER_00
And this is basically one of the most precise robots ever.
3
SPEAKER_00
Right, so like, is there, do you have any like small scale experiments that were done that just made this as possible?
3
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, and larger scale.
3
SPEAKER_02
We made tests,
3
SPEAKER_02
That also has to be in vacuum, too.
3
SPEAKER_02
But we made test chambers that had this system in it, our first mock of this system, so we could test it and optimize it and make it work.
3
SPEAKER_02
But it s just a mechanical engineering problem.
3
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
3
SPEAKER_00
Humans are just ape descendants.
3
SPEAKER_00
I gotcha.
3
SPEAKER_00
I gotcha.
3
SPEAKER_00
Is there any video of this?
3
SPEAKER_00
Some kind of educational purpose visualizations of this act of canceling?
3
SPEAKER_02
I don t think so.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, does this live on?
3
SPEAKER_02
Well, for parts of it, for the active canceling, we worked with, for the instruments, for the sensor and instruments, we worked with a small company near where you are, because it was our MIT people that got them, that were interested in the problem because they thought they might be able to commercialize it for making stable tables to make microelectronics, for example, which are limited by how stable the table is.
3
SPEAKER_02
I mean, at this point, it s a little expensive.
3
SPEAKER_00
You never know, you never know where this leads.
3
SPEAKER_00
So maybe on the...
3
SPEAKER_00
Let me ask you, just sticking it a little longer, this silly old mechanical engineering problem.
3
SPEAKER_00
What was, to you, kind of the darkest moment of what was the hardest stumbling block to get over on the engineering side?
3
SPEAKER_00
Like, was there any time where there was a doubt, where it was like, I m not sure we ll be able to do this, a kind of engineering challenge that was hit?
3
SPEAKER_00
Do you remember anything like that?
3
SPEAKER_02
I think the one that,
3
SPEAKER_02
My colleague at MIT.
4
SPEAKER_01
Ray Weiss worked on so hard and was much more of a worry than this.
4
SPEAKER_01
This is only a question if you re not doing well enough, you have to keep making it better somehow.
4
SPEAKER_01
But this whole huge instrument has to be in vacuum.
4
SPEAKER_01
And the vacuum tanks are this big around.
4
SPEAKER_01
So it s the world s biggest high vacuum system.
4
SPEAKER_01
So how do you make it, first of all?
4
SPEAKER_01
How do you make this four meter long sealed vacuum system?
4
SPEAKER_01
It has to be made out of- Four kilometers long.
4
SPEAKER_01
Four kilometers long.
4
SPEAKER_01
What did I say?
4
SPEAKER_01
Something else.
4
SPEAKER_00
Meters.
4
SPEAKER_01
Four kilometers long.
4
SPEAKER_00
Big difference.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
But to make it, we started with a roll of stainless steel, and then we roll it out like a spiral, so that there s a spiral weld on it.
4
SPEAKER_01
Okay, so the engineering was fine.
4
SPEAKER_01
We did that.
4
SPEAKER_01
We worked through very good companies and so forth to build it.
4
SPEAKER_01
But the big worry was, what if you develop a leak?
4
SPEAKER_01
This is a high vacuum, not just vacuum system.
4
SPEAKER_01
Typically, in a laboratory, if there s a leak, you put helium around the thing you have, and then you detect where the helium is coming in.
4
SPEAKER_01
But if you have something as big as this, you can t surround it with helium.
4
SPEAKER_00
So you might not actually even know that there s a leak, and it will be affecting it.
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, we can measure how good the vacuum is, so we can know, but a leak can develop, and then we don t, how do we fix it, or how do we find it?
4
SPEAKER_01
And so that was, you asked about a worry, that was always a really big worry.
4
SPEAKER_00
What s the difference between a high vacuum and a vacuum?
4
SPEAKER_00
What is high vacuum?
4
SPEAKER_00
That s like some delta close to vacuum?
4
SPEAKER_00
Is it some threshold?
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, there s a unit.
4
SPEAKER_01
High vacuum is when the vacuum in the units that are used, which are TORs, so it s 10 to the minus nine.
4
SPEAKER_01
High vacuum is usually used in small places.
4
SPEAKER_01
The biggest vacuum system
4
SPEAKER_01
period is at CERN in this big particle accelerator, but the high vacuum, where they need really good vacuum so particles don t scatter in it, is smaller than ours.
4
SPEAKER_01
So ours is a really large high vacuum system.
4
SPEAKER_00
I don t know, this is so cool.
4
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I mean, this is basically by far the greatest listening device ever built by humans.
4
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The fact that like descendants of apes could do this, that evolution started with single cell organisms,
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, is there any more, I m a huge, theory is like, yeah, yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
But like bridges, when I look at bridges, from a civil engineering perspective, it s one of the most beautiful creations by human beings.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s physics.
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You re using physics to construct objects that can support huge amount of mass.
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And it s like structural, but it s also beautiful in that humans can collaborate to create that throughout history.
4
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And then you take this on another level.
4
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This is like,
4
SPEAKER_00
It s exciting to me beyond measure that humans can create something so precise.
4
SPEAKER_01
But another concept lost in this, you just said, you started talking about single cell.
4
SPEAKER_01
You have to realize this discovery that we made that everybody s bought off on happened 1.3 billion years ago.
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somewhere, and then the signal came to us.
4
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1.3 billion years ago, we were just converting on the earth from single-cell to multi-cell life.
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So when this actually happened, this collision of two black holes, we weren t here, we weren t even close to being here.
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We were going from single-cell to multi-cell life at that point.
4
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All to meet up at this point.
4
SPEAKER_00
Wow, that s like, that s almost romantic.
4
SPEAKER_00
It is.
4
SPEAKER_00
Okay, so on the human side of things, it s kind of fascinating, because you re talking about over 1,000 people team for LIGO.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
They started out with around 100, and you ve, for parts of the time at least, led this team.
4
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What does it take to lead a team like this of incredibly brilliant theoreticians and engineers and just a lot of different parties involved, a lot of egos, a lot of ideas?
4
SPEAKER_00
You had this funny example, I forget where,
4
SPEAKER_00
where in publishing a paper, you have to all agree on the phrasing of a certain sentence or the title of the paper and so on.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s a very interesting, simple example.
4
SPEAKER_00
I d love you to speak to that, but just in general, what does it take to lead this kind of team?
4
SPEAKER_01
Okay, I think the general idea is one we all know.
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SPEAKER_01
You want to get where the sum of something is more than the individual parts, is what we say, right?
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SPEAKER_01
So that s what you re trying to achieve?
4
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
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SPEAKER_01
Okay.
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How do you do that, actually?
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Mostly, if we take multiple objects or people, I mean, you put them together, the sum is less.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
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Why?
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Because they overlap.
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So you don t have individual things that, you know, this person does that, this person does that, then you get exactly the sum.
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SPEAKER_01
But what you want is to develop where you get more than what the individual contributions are.
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We know that s very common.
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People use that expression everywhere.
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And it s the expression that has to be kind of built into how people feel it s working.
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Because if you re part of a team,
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and you realize that somehow the team is able to do more than the individuals could do themselves, then they buy on kind of in terms of the process.
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SPEAKER_01
So that s the goal that you have to have is to achieve that.
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And that means that you have to realize parts of what you re trying to do that require
4
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that one person couldn t do it.
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It requires the combined talents to be able to do something that neither of them could do themselves.
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And we have a lot of that kind of thing.
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And I think I m going to build into some of the examples that I gave you.
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And so the key almost in anything you do is the people themselves, right?
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SPEAKER_01
So in our case, the first and most important was to attract, to spend years of their life on this, the best possible people in the world to do it.
4
SPEAKER_01
So the only way to convince them is that somehow it s
4
SPEAKER_01
better and more interesting for them than what they could do themselves.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so that s part of this idea.
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SPEAKER_01
I got you.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s powerful.
4
SPEAKER_00
But nevertheless, there s best people in the world, there s egos.
4
SPEAKER_00
Is there something to be said about managing egos?
4
SPEAKER_01
The human problem s always the hardest.
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SPEAKER_01
And so that s an art, not a science, I think.
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SPEAKER_01
I think the fact here that
4
SPEAKER_01
Combined, there was a romantic goal that we had to, you know, do something that people hadn t done before, which was important scientifically and a huge challenge.
4
SPEAKER_01
Enabled us to, say, take and get, I mean, what we did, just to take an example, we used the light to go in this thing, comes from lasers.
4
SPEAKER_01
we need a certain kind of laser.
4
SPEAKER_01
So, the kind of laser that we used, there were three different institutions in the world that had the experts that do this, maybe in competition with each other.
4
SPEAKER_01
So, we got all three to join together and work with us to work on this, as an example.
4
SPEAKER_01
So, you had Ann, they had the
4
SPEAKER_01
thing that they were working together on a kind of object that they wouldn t have otherwise, and were part of a bigger team where they could discover something that isn t even engineers.
4
SPEAKER_01
These are engineers that do laser, and they re part of our laser physicists.
4
SPEAKER_00
So could you describe the moment or the period of time when finally this incredible creation of human beings led to a detection of gravitational waves?
4
SPEAKER_01
It s a long story.
4
SPEAKER_01
Unfortunately, this is a part that...
4
SPEAKER_00
Lost failures along the way kind of thing, or what?
4
SPEAKER_01
All failures, that s all, it s built into it.
4
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If you re not a, if you re not, Just mechanical engineering.
4
SPEAKER_01
You build on your failures, that s expected.
4
SPEAKER_01
So we re trying things that no one s done before, so it s technically not just gravitational waves, and so it s built on failures.
4
SPEAKER_01
But anyway, we did, before Meve, and the people did,
4
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R&D on the concepts.
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SPEAKER_01
But starting in 1994, we got money from the National Science Foundation to build this thing.
4
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It took about five years to build it.
4
SPEAKER_01
So by 1999, we had
4
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built the basic unit.
4
SPEAKER_01
It did not have active seismic isolation at that stage, didn t have some other things that we have now.
4
SPEAKER_01
What we did at the beginning was
4
SPEAKER_01
stick to technologies that we had at least enough knowledge that we could make work or had tested in our own laboratories.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so then we put together the instrument.
4
SPEAKER_01
We made it work.
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SPEAKER_01
It didn t work very well, but it worked.
4
SPEAKER_01
And we didn t see any gravitational waves.
4
SPEAKER_01
Then we figured out what limited us.
4
SPEAKER_01
And we went through this every year for
4
SPEAKER_01
almost 10 years, never seen gravitational waves.
4
SPEAKER_01
We would run it, looking for gravitational waves for months.
4
SPEAKER_01
learn what limited us, fix it for months, and then run it again.
4
SPEAKER_01
Eventually, we knew we had to take another big step, and that s when we made several changes, including adding these active seismic isolation, which turned out to be a key.
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SPEAKER_01
And we
4
SPEAKER_01
fortunately got the National Science Foundation to give us another couple hundred million dollars, a hundred million more.
4
SPEAKER_01
And we rebuilt it, or fixed, or improved it.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then in 2015, we turned it on.
4
SPEAKER_01
And we almost instantly saw this first collision of two black holes.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then we went through a process of, do we believe what we ve seen?
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I think you re one of the people that went through that process.
4
SPEAKER_00
Sounds like some people immediately believed it, and then you were like, it s disgusting.
4
SPEAKER_01
So as human beings, we all have different reactions to almost anything, and so quite a few of my colleagues had a eureka moment immediately.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it s, the figure that we put in our paper,
4
SPEAKER_01
First, it s just data.
4
SPEAKER_01
We didn t have to go through, you know, fancy computer programs to do anything.
4
SPEAKER_01
And we show next to it the calculations of Einstein s equations.
4
SPEAKER_01
It looks just like what we detected.
4
SPEAKER_01
And we did it in two different detectors halfway across the U.S.
4
SPEAKER_01
So, it was pretty convincing, but you don t want to fool yourself.
4
SPEAKER_01
So, being a scientist, for me, we had to go through and try to understand the instrument itself, which was new.
4
SPEAKER_01
I said we had to rebuild it.
4
SPEAKER_01
couldn t somehow generate things that look like this.
4
SPEAKER_01
That took some tests, and then the second, you ll appreciate more, we had to somehow convince ourselves we weren t hacked in some clever way.
4
SPEAKER_00
Cyber security question.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, even though we re not on the internet.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, no, it can be physical access too.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s fascinating.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s fascinating that you would think about that.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, not enough,
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, because it matches prediction.
4
SPEAKER_00
So the chances of it actually being manipulated is very, very low.
4
SPEAKER_01
But nevertheless... We still could have disgruntled all the graduate students who had worked with us earlier.
4
SPEAKER_00
I want you to, I don t know how that s supposed to embarrass you.
4
SPEAKER_00
I suppose, yeah, I suppose I see.
4
SPEAKER_00
But about what I think you said, within a month, you kind of convinced yourself officially.
4
SPEAKER_01
Within a month we convinced ourselves.
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SPEAKER_01
We kept 1,000 collaborators quiet during that time.
4
SPEAKER_01
Then we spent another month or so trying to understand what we d seen.
4
SPEAKER_01
so that we could do the science with it instead of just putting it out to the world and let somebody else understand that it was two black holes and what it was.
4
SPEAKER_00
The fact that a thousand collaborators were quiet is a really strong indication that this is a really close-knit team.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and they re around the world.
4
SPEAKER_01
Or either strong knit or tight knit or a strong dictatorship or something.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, either fear or love.
4
SPEAKER_00
You can rule by fear or love.
4
SPEAKER_00
Or you can go back to Machiavelli.
4
SPEAKER_00
All right, well, I mean, this is really exciting that that was
4
SPEAKER_00
That s a success story, because it didn t have to be a success story, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, eventually, perhaps you could say it ll be an event, but it could have taken it over a century to get there.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it s only downhill now, kind of.
4
SPEAKER_00
What do you mean it s only, you mean with gravitational waves?
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, we re, yeah, we ve, we ve now, we now, well, now we re off because of the pandemic, but when we turned off, we were seeing some sort of gravitational wave event each week.
4
SPEAKER_01
And now we re fixing, we re fixing, we re adding features where it ll probably be, when we turn back on next year, it ll probably be every one, every couple of days.
4
SPEAKER_01
and they re not all the same.
4
SPEAKER_01
So it s learning about what s out there in gravity instead of just optics.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so it s all great.
4
SPEAKER_01
We re only limited by the fantastic thing other than that this is a great field and it s all new and so forth is that experimentally, the great thing is that we re limited by
4
SPEAKER_01
technology and technical limitations, not by science.
4
SPEAKER_01
So another
4
SPEAKER_01
A really important discovery that was made before ours was what s called the Higgs boson, made on the big accelerator at CERN.
4
SPEAKER_01
You know, this huge accelerator, they discovered a really important thing.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s, you know, we have Einstein s equation, E equals MC squared.
4
SPEAKER_01
So energy makes mass or mass can make energy and that s the bomb.
4
SPEAKER_01
But the mechanism by which that happens, not fission, but how do you create mass from energy?
4
SPEAKER_01
was never understood until there was a theory of it about 70 years ago now.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so they discovered it s named after a man named Higgs.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s called the Higgs boson.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so it was discovered, but since that time, and I worked on those experiments, since that time, they haven t been able to progress very much further.
4
SPEAKER_01
A little bit, but not a lot further.
4
SPEAKER_01
And the difference is that we re really lucky in what we re doing, in that there you see this Higgs boson, but there s a tremendous amount of other physics that goes on, and you have to pick out the needle in the haystack kind of physics.
4
SPEAKER_01
You can t make the physics go away, it s there.
4
SPEAKER_01
In our case, we have a very weak signal, but once we get good enough to see it, it s weak compared to where we ve reduced the background.
4
SPEAKER_01
But the background is not physics.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s just technology.
4
SPEAKER_01
You know, it s getting ourselves better isolated from the earth or getting a more powerful laser.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so since 2015, when we saw the first one, we continually can make improvements that are enabling us to turn this into a real science to do astronomy, a new kind of astronomy.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s a little like astronomy.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, Galileo started the field.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, he basically took lenses that were made for classes.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he didn t invent the first telescope, but made a telescope, looked at Neptune, and saw that it had four moons.
4
SPEAKER_01
That was the birth of not just using your eyes to understand what s out there.
4
SPEAKER_01
And since that time, we ve made better and better telescopes, obviously, and astronomy thrives.
4
SPEAKER_01
And in a similar way, we re starting to be able to
4
SPEAKER_01
for, you know, crawl, but we re starting to be able to do that with gravitational waves, and it s gonna be more and more that we can do as we can make better and better instruments, because, as I say, it s not limited by picking it out of others.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s not limited by the physics.
4
SPEAKER_00
So you have an optimism about engineering, that as human progress marches on,
5
SPEAKER_01
and engineering will always find a way to build a large enough device, accurate enough device to detect the signal.
5
SPEAKER_00
As long as it s not limited by physics, yeah, they ll do it.
5
SPEAKER_01
So you, two other folks, and the entire team won the Nobel Prize for this big effort.
5
SPEAKER_01
There s a million questions I can ask for, but looking back, where does the Nobel Prize fit into all of this?
5
SPEAKER_01
If you think hundreds of years from now, I venture to say that people will not remember the winners of a prize, but they ll remember creations like these.
5
SPEAKER_01
Maybe I m romanticizing engineering.
5
SPEAKER_01
but I guess I wanna ask how important is the Nobel Prize in all of this?
5
SPEAKER_00
Well, that s a complicated question.
5
SPEAKER_00
As a physicist, it s something, if you re trying to win a Nobel Prize, forget it, because they give one a year.
5
SPEAKER_00
So, there s been 200 physicists who have won the Nobel Prize since 1900.
5
SPEAKER_00
And so, things just have to fall right.
5
SPEAKER_00
So, your goal cannot be to win a Nobel Prize.
5
SPEAKER_00
It wasn t my dream.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s tremendous for science.
5
SPEAKER_00
I mean, why the Nobel Prize for a guy that made dynamite and stuff is, you know, what it is, it s a long story.
5
SPEAKER_00
But it s the one day a year where actually the science that people have done is all over the world and so forth.
5
SPEAKER_00
Forget about the people again, you know, it is really good for science.
5
SPEAKER_01
Celebrating science.
5
SPEAKER_00
It celebrates science for, you know, several days, different fields, you know, chemistry, medicine, and so forth.
5
SPEAKER_00
And everybody doesn t understand everything about these, they re generally fairly abstract, but then it s, you know,
5
SPEAKER_00
on the front page of newspapers around the world.
5
SPEAKER_00
So it s really good for science.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s not easy to get science on the front page of the New York Times.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s not there.
5
SPEAKER_00
It should be, but it s not.
5
SPEAKER_00
And so the Nobel Prize is important in that way.
5
SPEAKER_00
Otherwise, you know, I have a certain celebrity that I didn t have before.
5
SPEAKER_01
And now you get to be a celebrity that advertises science.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s a mechanism to remind us how incredible, how much credit science deserves in everything we have.
5
SPEAKER_00
Well, it has a little bit more.
5
SPEAKER_00
One thing I didn t expect, which is good, is that we have a government,
5
SPEAKER_00
I m not picking on ours necessarily, but it s true of all governments, are not run by scientists.
5
SPEAKER_00
In our case, it s run by lawyers and businessmen.
5
SPEAKER_00
And at best, they may have an aide or something that knows a little science.
5
SPEAKER_00
So, our country is, and all countries, hardly take into account science in making decisions.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
5
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
5
SPEAKER_00
Having a Nobel Prize, the people in those positions actually listen.
5
SPEAKER_00
So you have more influence.
5
SPEAKER_00
I don t care whether it s about global warming or what the issue is.
5
SPEAKER_00
There s some influence which is lacking otherwise.
5
SPEAKER_00
And people pay attention to what I say.
5
SPEAKER_00
If I talk about global warming, they wouldn t have before I had the Nobel Prize.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, this is very true.
5
SPEAKER_01
You re like the celebrities who talk.
5
SPEAKER_01
Celebrity has power.
5
SPEAKER_00
Celebrity has power.
5
SPEAKER_01
And that s a good thing.
5
SPEAKER_01
That s a good thing, yeah.
5
SPEAKER_00
Singling out people, I mean, on the other side of it, singling out people
5
SPEAKER_00
has all kinds of, you know, whether it s for Academy Awards or for this, have unfairness and arbitrariness and so forth and so on.
5
SPEAKER_00
So, you know, that s the other side of the coin.
5
SPEAKER_01
Just like you said, especially with the huge experimental projects like this, you know, it s a large team, and it does, the nature of the Nobel Prize is it singles out a few individuals to represent the team.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah.
5
SPEAKER_01
Nevertheless, it s a beautiful thing.
5
SPEAKER_01
What are ways to improve LIGO in the future, increase the sensitivity?
5
SPEAKER_01
I ve seen a few ideas that are kind of fascinating.
5
SPEAKER_01
Are you interested in them?
5
SPEAKER_01
I m not speaking about five years.
5
SPEAKER_01
Perhaps you could speak to the next five years, but also the next hundred years.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so let me talk to both the instrument and the science, okay?
5
SPEAKER_00
They go hand in hand.
5
SPEAKER_00
I mean, the thing that I said is if we make it better, we see more kinds of weaker objects and we do astronomy, okay?
5
SPEAKER_00
We re very motivated to make a new instrument, which will be a big step, the next step, like making a new kind of telescope or something.
5
SPEAKER_00
And the ideas of what that instrument should be haven t converged yet.
5
SPEAKER_00
There s different ideas in Europe.
5
SPEAKER_00
They ve done more work to kind of develop the ideas, but they re different from ours, and we have ideas.
5
SPEAKER_00
But I think over the next few years, we ll develop those.
5
SPEAKER_00
The idea is to make an instrument that s at least 10 times better than what we have
5
SPEAKER_00
what we can do with this instrument, 10 times better than that.
5
SPEAKER_00
10 times better means you can look 10 times further out.
5
SPEAKER_00
10 times further out is 1,000 times more volume, so you re seeing much, much more of the universe.
5
SPEAKER_00
The big change is that if you can see far out, you see further back in history.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, you re traveling back in time.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and so we can start to do what we call cosmology instead of astronomy or astrophysics.
5
SPEAKER_00
Cosmology is really the study of the evolution of the universe.
5
SPEAKER_01
Oh, interesting, yeah.
5
SPEAKER_00
And so then you can start to hope to get to the important problems having to do with how the universe began, how it evolved, and so forth, which we really only study now with optical
5
SPEAKER_00
instruments or electromagnetic waves.
5
SPEAKER_00
And early in the universe, those were blocked because basically it wasn t transparent, so the photons couldn t get out when everything was too dense.
5
SPEAKER_01
What do you think, sorry on this tangent, what do you think an understanding of gravitational waves from earlier in the universe can help us understand about the Big Bang and all that kind of stuff?
5
SPEAKER_01
But it s a non, it s another perspective on the thing.
5
SPEAKER_01
Is there some insights you think could be revealed just to help a layman understand?
5
SPEAKER_00
First, we don t understand.
5
SPEAKER_00
We use the word Big Bang.
5
SPEAKER_00
We don t understand the physics of what the Big Bang itself was.
5
SPEAKER_00
And in the early stage, there were particles, and there was a huge amount of gravity and mass being made.
5
SPEAKER_00
So, I ll say two things.
5
SPEAKER_00
One is,
5
SPEAKER_00
How did it all start?
5
SPEAKER_00
How did it happen?
5
SPEAKER_00
And I ll give you at least one example that we don t understand, but we should understand.
5
SPEAKER_00
We don t know why we re here.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yes, no, we do not.
5
SPEAKER_00
I don t mean it philosophically.
5
SPEAKER_00
I mean it in terms of physics, okay?
5
SPEAKER_00
Now, what do I mean by that?
5
SPEAKER_00
If I go into my laboratory at CERN or somewhere and I collide particles together or put energy together, I make as much antimatter as matter.
5
SPEAKER_00
antimatter then annihilates matter and makes energy.
5
SPEAKER_00
So in the early universe, you made somehow a lot of matter and antimatter, but there was an asymmetry.
5
SPEAKER_00
Somehow there was more matter and antimatter.
5
SPEAKER_00
The matter and antimatter annihilated each other, at least that s what we think, and there was only matter left over, and we live in a universe that we see that s all matter.
5
SPEAKER_00
We don t have any idea.
5
SPEAKER_00
We have ideas, but we don t have any way to understand that at the present time with the physics that we know.
5
SPEAKER_01
Can I ask a dumb question?
5
SPEAKER_01
Does antimatter have anything like a gravitational field to send signals?
5
SPEAKER_01
So how does this asymmetry of matter, antimatter, could be investigated or further understood by observing gravitational fields or weirdnesses in gravitational fields?
5
SPEAKER_00
I think that in principle, if there were anti-neutron stars instead of just neutron stars, we would see different kind of signals, but it didn t get to that.
5
SPEAKER_00
We live in a universe that we ve done enough looking, because we don t see antimatter, antiprotons anywhere, no matter what we look at, that it s all made out of matter.
5
SPEAKER_00
There is no antimatter except when you go in our laboratories.
5
SPEAKER_00
So, but when we go in our laboratories, we make as much antimatter as matter.
5
SPEAKER_00
So there s something about the early universe that made this asymmetry.
5
SPEAKER_00
So we can t even explain why we re here, that s what I meant.
5
SPEAKER_00
Physics-wise, not in terms of how we evolved and all that kind of stuff.
5
SPEAKER_01
So- So there might be inklings of,
5
SPEAKER_01
of some of the physics that gravitational waves.
5
SPEAKER_00
So gravitational waves don t get obstructed like light.
5
SPEAKER_00
So I said light only goes to 300,000 years.
5
SPEAKER_00
So it goes back to the beginning.
5
SPEAKER_00
So if you could study the early universe with gravitational waves, we can t do that yet.
5
SPEAKER_00
Then it took 400 years to be able to do that with optical.
5
SPEAKER_00
But then you can really understand the very, maybe understand the very early universe.
5
SPEAKER_00
So in terms of questions like why we re here or what the Big Bang was, we should be, we can in principle study that with gravitational waves.
5
SPEAKER_00
So to keep moving in this direction, it s a unique kind of way to understand our universe.
5
SPEAKER_01
So you think there s more Nobel Prize level ideas to be discovered in relation to
5
SPEAKER_00
I d be shocked if there isn t, not even going to that, which is a very long-range problem, but I think that we only see, with electromagnetic waves, 4% of what s out there.
5
SPEAKER_00
There must be... We looked for things that we knew should be there.
5
SPEAKER_00
There should be... I would be shocked if there wasn t
5
SPEAKER_00
physics, objects, science, and with gravity that doesn t show up in everything we do with telescopes.
5
SPEAKER_00
So I think we re just limited by not having powerful enough instruments yet to do this.
5
SPEAKER_01
Do you have a preference?
5
SPEAKER_01
I keep seeing this,
5
SPEAKER_01
e-LISA idea.
5
SPEAKER_01
Do you have a preference for Earth-bound or space-faring mechanisms for?
5
SPEAKER_00
They re complementary.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s a little bit like, it s completely analogous to what s been done in astronomy.
5
SPEAKER_00
So astronomy from the time of Galileo was done with visible light.
5
SPEAKER_00
The big advances in astronomy in the last 50 years are because we have instruments that look at the infrared, microwave, ultraviolet, and so forth.
5
SPEAKER_00
So looking at different wavelengths has been important.
5
SPEAKER_00
Basically, going into space means that we ll look at, instead of the audio band, which we look at, as we said, on the Earth s surface, we ll look at lower frequencies.
5
SPEAKER_00
So it s completely complementary.
5
SPEAKER_00
And it starts to be looking at different frequencies, just like we do with astronomy.
5
SPEAKER_01
It seems almost incredible to me, engineering-wise, just like on Earth, to send something that s kilometers across into space.
5
SPEAKER_01
Is that harder to engineer?
5
SPEAKER_00
It actually is a little different.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s three satellites separated by hundreds of thousands of kilometers.
5
SPEAKER_00
and they send a laser beam from one to the other, and if the triangle changes shape a little bit, they detect that from a passage.
5
SPEAKER_01
Sorry, did you say hundreds of thousands of kilometers?
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_01
Sending lasers to each other.
5
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s just engineering.
5
SPEAKER_01
Is it possible, though, is it doable?
5
SPEAKER_00
Yes, yes.
5
SPEAKER_01
That s just incredible, because they have to maintain, I mean, the precision here is probably, there might be some more, what is it, maybe noise is a smaller problem?
5
SPEAKER_01
I guess there s no vibration to worry about, like seismic stuff.
5
SPEAKER_01
So getting away from Earth, maybe you get away from seismic stuff.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, those parts are easier.
5
SPEAKER_00
They don t have to measure it as accurately at low frequencies.
5
SPEAKER_00
But they have a lot of tough engineering problems.
5
SPEAKER_00
In order to detect that the gravitational waves affect things, the sensors have to be what we call free masses, just like ours, are isolated from the earth.
5
SPEAKER_00
They have to isolate it from the satellite.
5
SPEAKER_00
And that s a hard problem.
5
SPEAKER_00
They have to do that pretty, not as well as we have to do it, but very well.
5
SPEAKER_00
And they ve done a test mission and the engineering seems to be, at least in principle, in hand.
5
SPEAKER_00
This ll be in the 2030s when it flows.
5
SPEAKER_00
2030s?
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_01
This is incredible.
5
SPEAKER_01
This is incredible.
5
SPEAKER_01
Let me ask about black holes.
5
SPEAKER_01
So what we re talking about is observing orbiting black holes.
5
SPEAKER_01
I saw the terminology of like binary black hole systems.
5
SPEAKER_01
That s when they re dancing?
5
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
5
SPEAKER_00
They re going around each other just like the earth around the sun.
5
SPEAKER_01
Okay, is that weird that there s black holes going around each other?
5
SPEAKER_00
So, the finding binary systems of stars is similar to finding binary systems of… Of black holes?
5
SPEAKER_00
Well, they were once stars.
5
SPEAKER_00
So we haven t said what a black hole is physically yet.
5
SPEAKER_00
So black hole is, first it s a mathematical concept or a physical concept, and that is a region of space, so it s simply a region of space where the curvature of space-time, meaning the gravitational field, is so strong that nothing can get out, including light.
5
SPEAKER_00
And there s light gets bent in gravitation, if the spacetime is warped enough.
5
SPEAKER_00
And so even light gets bent around and stays in it.
5
SPEAKER_00
So that s the concept of a black hole.
5
SPEAKER_00
So it s not a, and maybe you can make, maybe it s, so that s a concept that didn t say how they come about.
5
SPEAKER_00
And there could be different ways they come about.
5
SPEAKER_00
The ones that we are seeing,
5
SPEAKER_00
We re not sure.
5
SPEAKER_00
That s what we re trying to learn now is what they, but the general expectation is that they come, these black holes happen when a star dies.
5
SPEAKER_00
So what does that mean that a star dies?
5
SPEAKER_00
What happens?
5
SPEAKER_00
A star like our sun basically makes heat and light by fusion.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s made up.
5
SPEAKER_00
And as it burns, it burns up the hydrogen, and then the helium, and slowly works its way up to the heavier and heavier elements that are in the star.
5
SPEAKER_00
And when it gets up to iron, the fusion process doesn t work anymore.
5
SPEAKER_00
And so the stars die, and that happens to stars, and then they do what s called a supernova.
5
SPEAKER_00
What happens then is that a star is a delicate balance between an outward pressure from fusion and light and burning, and an inward pressure of gravity trying to pull the
5
SPEAKER_00
masses together.
5
SPEAKER_00
Once it burns itself out, it goes, and it collapses, and that s a supernova.
5
SPEAKER_00
When it collapses, all the mass that was there is in a very much smaller space.
5
SPEAKER_00
And if a star, if you do the calculations, if a star is big enough, that can create a strong enough gravitational field to make a black hole.
5
SPEAKER_00
Our sun won t.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s too small.
5
SPEAKER_00
And we don t know exactly what, but it s usually thought that a star has to be at least three times as big as our sun to make a black hole, but that s the physical way you can make black holes.
5
SPEAKER_00
That s the first explanation that one would give for what we see, but it s not necessarily true.
5
SPEAKER_00
We re not sure yet.
5
SPEAKER_01
What we see in terms of, for the origins of black holes?
5
SPEAKER_00
No, the black holes that we see in gravitational waves.
5
SPEAKER_01
So, but you re also looking for the ones who are binary solar systems.
5
SPEAKER_00
So, they re binary systems, but they could have been made from binary stars, so there s binary stars around, so that s... Gotcha.
6
SPEAKER_00
So the first explanation is that that s what they are.
6
SPEAKER_00
But what we see has some puzzles.
6
SPEAKER_00
This is kind of the way science works, I guess.
6
SPEAKER_00
We see heavier ones than up to, we ve seen one system that was 140 times the mass of our own sun.
6
SPEAKER_00
Wow, yeah.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s not believed to be possible with the parent being a big star, because big stars can only be so big or they are unstable.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s just the fact that they live in an environment that makes them unstable.
6
SPEAKER_00
So, the fact that we see bigger ones, they maybe come from something else, it s possible that they were
6
SPEAKER_00
made in a different way by little ones eating each other up, or maybe they were made, or maybe they came with a big bang, what we call primordial, which means they re really different, they came from that.
6
SPEAKER_00
We don t know at this point.
6
SPEAKER_00
If they came with a big bang, then maybe they account for what we call dark matter or some of it.
6
SPEAKER_01
Like there was a lot of them, if they came with, because there s a lot of dark matter.
6
SPEAKER_01
but will gravitational waves give you any kind of intuition about the origin of these oscillating?
6
SPEAKER_00
We think that if we see the distributions enough of them, the distributions of their masses, the distributions of how they re spinning, so we can actually measure when they re going around each other, whether they re spinning like this.
6
SPEAKER_00
The direction of the spin?
6
SPEAKER_00
Or no, the orientation.
6
SPEAKER_00
Whether the whole system has any wobbles.
6
SPEAKER_01
What?
6
SPEAKER_01
So this is now, okay.
6
SPEAKER_00
We re doing that.
6
SPEAKER_01
And then you re constantly kind of crawling back and back in time.
6
SPEAKER_00
And we re crawling back in time and seeing how many there are as we go back.
6
SPEAKER_00
And so, do they point back?
6
SPEAKER_01
So you re like, what is that discipline called, cartography or something?
6
SPEAKER_01
You re like mapping the early universe via the lens of gravitational waves.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, not yet the early universe, but at least back in time.
6
SPEAKER_01
Earlier, right.
6
SPEAKER_00
So black holes are this mathematical phenomenon, but they come about in different ways.
6
SPEAKER_00
We have a huge black hole at the center of our galaxy and other galaxies.
6
SPEAKER_00
Those probably were made some other way, we don t know.
6
SPEAKER_00
When the galaxies themselves had to do with the formation of galaxies, we don t really know.
6
SPEAKER_00
So the fact that we use the word black hole, the origin of black holes might be quite different depending on,
6
SPEAKER_00
how they happen, they just have to in the end have a gravitational field that will bend everything in.
6
SPEAKER_01
How do you feel about black holes as a human being?
6
SPEAKER_01
There s this thing that s nearly infinitely dense, doesn t let light escape.
6
SPEAKER_01
Isn t that kind of terrifying?
6
SPEAKER_01
Feels like the stuff of nightmares.
6
SPEAKER_00
I think it s an opportunity.
6
SPEAKER_01
To do what exactly?
6
SPEAKER_00
Like the early universe is an opportunity.
6
SPEAKER_00
If we can study the early universe, we can learn things like I told you.
6
SPEAKER_00
And here again, we have an embarrassing situation in physics.
6
SPEAKER_00
We have two wonderful theories of physics.
6
SPEAKER_00
One based on quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, and we can go to a big accelerator like a CERN and smash particles together and almost explain anything that happens beautifully using quantum field theory and quantum mechanics.
6
SPEAKER_00
Then we have another theory of physics called general relativity, which is what we ve been talking about most of the time, which is fantastic at describing things at high velocities, long distances, you know, and so forth.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s not the way it s supposed to be.
6
SPEAKER_00
We re trying to create a theory of physics, not two theories of physics.
6
SPEAKER_00
So we have an embarrassment that we have two different theories of physics.
6
SPEAKER_00
People have tried to make a unified theory, what they call a unified theory.
6
SPEAKER_00
You ve heard those words for decades.
6
SPEAKER_00
They still haven t.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s been primarily done theoretically, or people actively do that.
6
SPEAKER_00
My personal belief is that, like much of physics, we need some clues.
6
SPEAKER_00
So, we need some experimental evidence.
6
SPEAKER_00
So, where is there a place?
6
SPEAKER_00
If we go to CERN and do those experiments, gravitational waves or general relativity don t matter.
6
SPEAKER_00
If we go to study our black holes, elementary particle physics doesn t matter.
6
SPEAKER_00
We re studying these huge objects.
6
SPEAKER_00
So where might we have a place where both phenomenon have to be satisfied?
6
SPEAKER_00
An example is black holes.
6
SPEAKER_01
Inside black holes.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_00
So we can t do that today.
6
SPEAKER_00
But when I think of black hole, it s a potential treasure chest of understanding the fundamental problems of physics, and maybe can give us clues to how we bring to the embarrassment of having two theories of physics together.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s my own romantic idea.
6
SPEAKER_01
What s the worst that could happen?
6
SPEAKER_01
It s so enticing.
6
SPEAKER_01
Just go in and look.
6
SPEAKER_01
Do you think, how far are we away from figuring out the unified theory of physics, the theory of everything?
6
SPEAKER_01
What s your sense?
6
SPEAKER_01
Who will solve it?
6
SPEAKER_01
Like what discipline will solve it?
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_00
I think so little progress has been made
6
SPEAKER_00
without more experimental clues, as I said, that we re not, we re just not able to say that we re close without some clues.
6
SPEAKER_00
The best, the closest, the most popular theory these days that might lead to that is called string theory.
6
SPEAKER_00
The problem with string theory is it works – it solves a lot of beautiful mathematical problems we have in physics.
6
SPEAKER_00
And it s very satisfying theoretically.
6
SPEAKER_00
but it has almost no predictive, maybe no predictive ability because it is a theory that works in 11 dimensions.
6
SPEAKER_00
We live in a physical world of three space and one time dimension.
6
SPEAKER_00
In order to make predictions in our world with string theory, you have to somehow get rid of these other seven dimensions.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s done mathematically by saying they curl up on each other on scales that are too small to affect anything here.
6
SPEAKER_00
But how you do that — and that s okay, that s an okay argument — but how you do that is not unique.
6
SPEAKER_00
So that means if I start with that theory and I go to our world here, I can t uniquely go to it.
6
SPEAKER_00
And if I can t, it s not predictive.
6
SPEAKER_01
And that s a killer, that s a killer.
6
SPEAKER_01
And string theory is, it seems like from my outsider s perspective, has lost favor over the years, perhaps because of this very idea.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s a lack of predictive power.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, science has to connect to something where you make predictions, it s beautiful.
6
SPEAKER_00
as it might be, so I don t think we re close.
6
SPEAKER_00
I think we need some experimental clues.
6
SPEAKER_00
It may be that information on something we don t understand presently at all, like dark energy, or probably not dark matter, but dark energy or something might give us some ideas, but I don t think we re, I can t envision right now in the short term, meaning, you know,
6
SPEAKER_00
the horizon that we can see how we re gonna bring these two theories together.
6
SPEAKER_01
A kind of two-part question, maybe just asking the same thing in two different ways.
6
SPEAKER_01
One question is, do you have hope that humans will colonize
6
SPEAKER_01
the galaxy, so expand out, become a multi-planetary species.
6
SPEAKER_01
Another way of asking that, from a gravitational and a propulsion perspective, do you think we ll come up with ways to travel closer to the speed of light, or maybe faster than the speed of light, which would make it a whole heck of a lot easier to expand out into the universe?
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_00
Well, I think, you know, we re not, that s very futuristic.
6
SPEAKER_00
I think we re not that far from being able to make a one-way trip to Mars.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s then a question of,
6
SPEAKER_00
whether people are willing to send somebody on a one-way trip.
6
SPEAKER_01
But- Oh, I think they are.
6
SPEAKER_01
I think there s a lot of, the explorers burn bright within their hearts.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
6
SPEAKER_01
There s a lot of people willing to die for the opportunity to explore new territory.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_00
So, you know, this recent landing on Mars is pretty impressive.
6
SPEAKER_00
They have a little helicopter, they re gonna fly around.
6
SPEAKER_00
You can imagine.
6
SPEAKER_00
You can imagine in the not-too-distant future that you could have, I don t think civilizations colonizing.
6
SPEAKER_00
I can envision, but I can envision something more like the South Pole.
6
SPEAKER_00
We haven t colonized Antarctica, because it s all ice and cold and so forth, but we have stations.
6
SPEAKER_00
So we have a station that s self-sustaining at the South Pole.
6
SPEAKER_00
I ve been there.
6
SPEAKER_00
It has- Wow, really?
6
SPEAKER_01
What s that like?
6
SPEAKER_01
Because there s parallels there to go to Mars.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s fantastic.
6
SPEAKER_01
What s the journey like?
6
SPEAKER_00
The journey involves going, the South Pole Station is run in the U.S.
6
SPEAKER_00
by the National Science Foundation.
6
SPEAKER_00
I went because I was on the National Science Board that runs the National Science Foundation.
6
SPEAKER_00
and so you get a VIP trip if you re healthy enough to the South Pole to see it, which I took.
6
SPEAKER_00
You fly from the U.S.
6
SPEAKER_00
to Australia, to Christ Church in southern Australia, and from there you fly to McMurdo Station, which is on the coast, and it s the station with about a thousand people right on the coast of Antarctica.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s about
6
SPEAKER_00
seven or eight hour flight, and they can t predict the weather.
6
SPEAKER_00
So when I flew from Christchurch to McMurdo Station, they tell you in advance, you do it in a military aircraft, they tell you in advance that they can t predict whether they can land, because they have to land on ice.
6
SPEAKER_01
That s reassuring.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and so about halfway, the pilot got on and said, sorry, this is a, they call it a boomerang flight.
6
SPEAKER_00
You know, a boomerang goes out and comes back.
6
SPEAKER_00
So we had to stay a little while in Christchurch, but then we eventually went to McMurdo Station and then flew to the South Pole.
6
SPEAKER_00
The South Pole itself is, when I was there, it was minus 51 degrees.
6
SPEAKER_00
That was summer.
6
SPEAKER_00
It has zero humidity and it s about
6
SPEAKER_00
11,000 feet altitude because it s never warm enough for anything to melt, so it doesn t snow very much, but it s about 11,000 feet of snowpack.
6
SPEAKER_00
So you land in a place that s high altitude, cold as could be, and incredibly dry, which means you have a physical adjustment.
6
SPEAKER_00
The place itself is fantastic.
6
SPEAKER_00
They have this great station there.
6
SPEAKER_00
They do astronomy at the South Pole.
6
SPEAKER_01
Nature-wise, is it beautiful?
6
SPEAKER_01
What s the experience like?
6
SPEAKER_01
Or is it like visiting any town?
6
SPEAKER_00
No, it s very small.
6
SPEAKER_00
There s only less than 100 people there, even when I was there.
6
SPEAKER_00
There were about 50 or 60 there, and in the winter, there s less, half of that.
6
SPEAKER_01
It gets real cold.
6
SPEAKER_00
It gets really cold, yeah.
6
SPEAKER_00
But it s a station.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, we haven t gone beyond that.
6
SPEAKER_00
On the coast of Antarctica, they have greenhouses and they re self-sustaining in McMurdo Station.
6
SPEAKER_00
But we haven t really settled more than that kind of thing in Antarctica, which is a big
6
SPEAKER_00
a country or, you know, a big plot, a big piece of land.
6
SPEAKER_00
So I don t, I can t envision kind of colonizing it, people living so much, as much as I can see
6
SPEAKER_00
the equivalent of the South Pole Station.
6
SPEAKER_01
Well, in the computing world, there s an idea of backing up your data, and then you want to do off-site backup to make sure that if your whole house burns down, that you can have a backup off-site of the data.
6
SPEAKER_01
I think the difference between Antarctica and
6
SPEAKER_01
And Mars is Mars is a offsite backup, that if we have nuclear war or whatever the heck might happen here on Earth, it d be nice to have a backup elsewhere.
6
SPEAKER_01
And it d be nice to have a large enough colony where we sent a variety of people except like a few silly astronauts in suits, you know, have an actual vibrant,
6
SPEAKER_01
Get a few musicians and artists up there, get a few, maybe like one or two computer scientists, those are essential.
6
SPEAKER_01
Maybe even a physicist, but I m not sure.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, maybe not.
6
SPEAKER_00
So that comes back to something you talked about earlier, which is the paradox, Fermi s paradox.
6
SPEAKER_00
because you talked about having to escape.
6
SPEAKER_00
And so the missing one number you don t know how to use in Fermi s calculation or Drake, who s done it better, is how long do civilizations last?
6
SPEAKER_00
We ve barely gotten to where we can communicate with electricity and magnetism, and maybe we ll wipe ourselves out pretty soon.
6
SPEAKER_01
Are you hopeful in general?
6
SPEAKER_01
Like you think we ve got another couple hundred years at least?
6
SPEAKER_01
Or are you worried?
6
SPEAKER_00
Well, no, I m hopeful, but I don t know if I m hopeful in the long term.
6
SPEAKER_00
You know, if you say, you know,
6
SPEAKER_00
Are we able to go for another couple thousand years?
6
SPEAKER_00
I m not sure.
6
SPEAKER_00
I think we have where we started, the fact that we can do things that don t allow us to kind of keep going, or there can be, whether it ends up being a virus that we create or ends up being the equivalent of nuclear war or something else.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s not clear that we can control things well enough.
6
SPEAKER_01
So speaking of really cold conditions and not being hopeful and eventual suffering and destruction of the human species, let me ask you about Russian literature.
6
SPEAKER_01
You mentioned, how s that for a transition?
6
SPEAKER_01
I m doing my best here.
6
SPEAKER_01
You mentioned that you used to love literature when you were younger and you even were hoping to be a writer yourself, that was the motivation.
6
SPEAKER_01
And some of the books I ve seen that you listed that were inspiring to you was from Russian literature, like I think Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, right.
6
SPEAKER_01
Maybe in general you can speak to your fascination with Russian literature or in general what you picked up from those.
6
SPEAKER_00
I m not surprised you picked up on the Russian literature.
6
SPEAKER_00
I m sorry.
6
SPEAKER_00
With your background, but that s okay.
6
SPEAKER_01
You should be surprised I didn t make the entire conversation about this.
6
SPEAKER_01
That s the real surprise.
6
SPEAKER_00
I didn t really,
6
SPEAKER_00
become a physicist or want to go in science until I started college.
6
SPEAKER_00
So when I was younger, I was good at math and that kind of stuff, but I didn t really, I came from a family, nobody went to college and I didn t have any mentors.
6
SPEAKER_00
So, but I d like to read when I was really young.
6
SPEAKER_00
And so when I was very young,
6
SPEAKER_00
I read, I always carried around a pocketbook and read it.
6
SPEAKER_00
And my mother read these mystery stories and I got bored by those eventually.
6
SPEAKER_00
And then I discovered real literature.
6
SPEAKER_00
I don t know at what age, but about 12 or 13.
6
SPEAKER_00
And so then I started reading good literature.
6
SPEAKER_00
And there s nothing better than Russian literature, of course.
6
SPEAKER_00
And reading good literature.
6
SPEAKER_00
I read quite a bit of Russian literature at that time.
6
SPEAKER_00
And so you asked me about, well, I don t know, I ll say a few words, Dostoevsky.
6
SPEAKER_00
So what about Dostoevsky?
6
SPEAKER_00
For me, Dostoevsky was important
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I ve read a lot of literature because it s kind of the other thing I do with my life.
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And he made two incredible, in addition to his own literature, he influenced literature tremendously by having, I don t know how to pronounce, polyphony.
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So he s the first real serious author that had multiple narrators.
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And that s a,
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He absolutely is the first.
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And he also was the first, he began existential literature.
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So the most important book that I ve read in the last year when I ve been forced to be isolated was existential literature.
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I decided to reread Camus  The Plague.
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Oh yeah, that s a great book.
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It s a great book, and it s right now to read it.
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It s fantastic.
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I think that book is about love, actually.
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Love for humanity.
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It is, but it has all the, if you haven t read it in recent years, I had read it before, of course.
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to read it during this, because it s about a plague.
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So it s really fantastic to be done.
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But that reminds me of, you know, he was a great existentialist, but the beginning of existential literature was Dostoevsky.
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So in addition to his own, you know, great novels, he had a tremendous impact on literature.
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And there s also, for Dostoevsky, unlike most other existentialists, he was at least in part religious.
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I mean, religiosity permeated his idea.
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I mean, one of my favorite books of his is The Idiot, which is a Christ-like figure in there.
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Well, there s Prince Mishkin, is that his name?
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Prince Mishkin, yeah.
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Yeah, Mishkin.
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Yeah, Mishkin.
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That s one thing about, so you write it in English, I presume?
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Yeah, yeah.
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Yeah, so that s the names, that s what gets a lot of people, is there s so many names, so hard to pronounce, you have to remember all of them.
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It s like, you have the same problem.
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But he was a great character, so that, yeah.
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I kind of,
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I have a connection with him, because I often, the title of the book, The Idiot, is I kind of, I often call myself an idiot, because that s how I feel.
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I feel so naive about this world, and I m not sure why that is.
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Maybe it s genetic or so on, but I have a connection, a spiritual connection to that character.
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To Mishkin?
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To Mishkin, yeah.
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But he was far from an idiot.
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No, in some sense, in some sense.
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But in another sense, maybe not of this one.
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In another sense, he was.
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Yeah.
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I mean, he was a bumbler, bunker.
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Yeah.
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But you also mentioned Solzhenitsyn.
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Yes.
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Very interesting.
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And he always confused me.
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Of course, he was really, really important in writing about the,
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Stalin and first getting in trouble.
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And then later he wrote about Stalin in a way, I forget what the book was, in a way that was very critical of Lenin.
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Yeah, he s evolved through the years and he actually showed support for Putin eventually.
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It was a very interesting
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a transition he took, no, a journey he took through thinking about Russia and the Soviet Union.
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But I think what I get from him is basic, it s like Viktor Frankl has this Man s Search for Meaning.
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I have a similar kind of sense of,
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of the cruelty of human nature, cruelty of indifference, but also the ability to find happiness in the small joys of life, that s something, there s nothing like a prison camp that makes you realize you could still be happy with a very, very little.
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Well, yeah, his description of kind of how to make a,
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how to go through a day and actually enjoy it in a prison camp is pretty amazing.
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Oh, and some prison camp.
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I mean, it s the worst of the worst.
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The worst of the worst.
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And also just, you know, you do think about the role of authoritarian states and
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in you know like a hopeful idealistic system somehow leading to the suffering of millions and i you know it this may be arguable but i think a lot of people believe that stalin i think genuinely believe that he s doing good for the world and uh... he wasn t and this is a very valuable lesson that uh... even evil people think they re doing good
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Otherwise it s too difficult to do the evil.
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The best way to do evil is to believe framing in a way like you re doing good.
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And this is a very clear picture of that, which is the Gulags.
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Solzhenitsyn is one of the best people to reveal that.
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The most recent thing I read, it isn t actually fiction, was the woman, I can t remember her name, who got the Nobel Prize within the last five years.
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I don t know whether she s Ukrainian or Russian, but there are interviews, have you read that?
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Interview of Ukrainian survivors of
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Well, I think she may be originally Ukrainian.
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The book s written in Russian and translated into English, and many of the interviews are in Moscow and places.
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But she won the Nobel Prize within the last five years or so.
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But what s interesting is that these are people of all different ages, all different occupations and so forth, and they re reflecting on their reaction to
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basically the present Soviet system, the system they lived with before.
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There s a lot of looking back by a lot of them with, well, it being much better before.
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Yeah, I don t know.
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In America, we think we know the right answer, what it means to build a better world.
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I m not so sure.
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I think we re all just trying to figure it out.
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We re doing our best.
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I think you re right.
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Is there advice you can give to young people today, besides reading Russian literature at a young age, about how to find their way in life, how to find success in career or just life in general?
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I just, my own belief, it may not be very deep, but I believe it, I think you should follow your dreams, and you should have dreams, and follow your dreams if you can, to the extent that you can.
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And we spend a lot of our time doing something with ourselves, in my case, physics, in your case, I don t know, whatever it is, machine learning and this.
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We should, yeah, should have fun.
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What was, wait, wait, wait, wait, follow your dreams.
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What dream did you have?
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Because there s... Well, originally I was... Because you didn t follow your dream.
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I thought you were supposed to be a writer.
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Well, that changed along the way.
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I was gonna be, but I changed.
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What happened?
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That was, what happened?
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Oh, I decided to take the most serious literature course in my high school, which was a mistake.
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I d probably be a second-rate writer now.
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And...
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Could be a Nobel Prize winning writer.
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And the book that we read, even though I had read Russian novels, I was 15 I think, cured me from being a novelist.
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Destroyed your dream?
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Yes.
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Cured you.
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Okay, what was the book?
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Moby Dick.
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Okay.
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So why Moby Dick?
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Yeah, why?
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And so I ve read it since, and it s a great novel.
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Maybe it s as good as the Russian novels.
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I ve never made it through.
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Well, it was too boring, it was too long.
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Okay, your words are gonna...
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mesh with what I say.
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And you may have the same problem at an older age.
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Maybe that s why I m not a writer.
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It may be.
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So the problem is, Moby Dick is, what I remember was there was a chapter that was maybe 100 pages long, all describing this, why there was Ahab,
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and the white whale.
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And it was the battle between Ahab with his wooden peg leg and the white whale.
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And there was a chapter that was 100 pages long in my memory, I don t know how long it really was, that described in detail the great white whale and what he was doing and what his fins were like and this and that.
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And it was so incredibly boring, the word you used, that I thought, if this is great literature, screw it.
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Oh, fascinating.
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Okay.
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Now, why did I have a problem?
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I know now, in reflection, because I still read a lot, and I read that novel after I was 30 or 40 years old, and the problem was simple.
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I diagnosed what the problem was.
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That novel, in contrast to the Russian novels, which are very realistic,
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you know, point of view, is one huge metaphor.
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At 15 years old, I probably didn t know the word, and I certainly didn t know the meaning of a metaphor.
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Yeah, like why do I care about a fish?
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Why are you telling me all about this fish?
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Exactly.
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It s one big metaphor.
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So, reading it later as a metaphor,
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I could really enjoy it.
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But the teacher gave me the wrong book, or maybe it was the right book, because I went into physics.
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But it was truly, I think, I may oversimplify, but it was really that I was too young to read that book.
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Not too young to read the Russian novels, interestingly, but too young to read that, because I probably didn t even know the word, and I certainly didn t understand it as a metaphor.
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Well in terms of fish, I recommend people read Old Man and the Sea, much shorter, much better.
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It s still a metaphor though.
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But you can read it just as a story about a guy catching a fish and it s still fun to read.
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I had the same experience as you, not with Moby Dick, but later in college I took a course on James Joyce, don t ask me why.
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I was majoring in computer science, I took a course on James Joyce.
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And I was kept being told that he is,
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widely considered by many considered to be the greatest literary writer of the 20th century.
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And I kept reading, I think, so his short story is The Dead, I think it s called, it was very good.
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Well, not very good, but pretty good.
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And then Ulysses.
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It s actually very good.
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It is very good.
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I mean, The Dead, the final story still rings with me today.
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But then Ulysses was, I got through Ulysses with the help of some Cliff Notes and so on.
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And so I did Ulysses and then Finnegan s Wake.
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The moment I started Finnegan s Wake,
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I said, this is stupid.
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That s when I went full into like, I don t know, that s when I went full Kafka, Bukowski, like people who just talk about the darkness of the human condition in the fewest words possible and without any of the music of language.
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So it was a turning point as well.
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I wonder when is the right time to appreciate the beauty of language.
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Like even Shakespeare, I was very much off-put by Shakespeare in high school, and only later started to appreciate its value in the same way.
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Let me ask you a ridiculous question.
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Okay.
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I mean, because you ve read Russian literature, let me ask this one last question.
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I might be lying, there might be a couple more, but what do you think is the meaning of this whole thing?
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You got a Nobel Prize for looking out into the, trying to reach back into the beginning of the universe, listening to the gravitational waves, but that still doesn t answer the why.
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Why are we here?
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Beyond just the matter and antimatter.
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The philosophical question.
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The philosophical question about the meaning of life I m probably not really good at.
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I think that,
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The individual meaning, I would say rather simplistically, is whether you ve made a positive difference, I d say, for anything besides yourself.
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meaning you could have been important to other people, or you could have discovered gravitational waves that matters to other people or something, but something beyond just existing on the earth as an individual.
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So your life has meaning if you have affected either knowledge or people or something beyond yourself.
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That s a simplistic statement, but it s about as good as I can have.
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That may, in all of its simplicity, it may be very true.
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Do you think about, does it make you sad that this ride ends?
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Do you think about your mortality?
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Yeah.
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Are you afraid of it?
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I m not exactly afraid of it, but saddened by it.
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And, you know, I m old enough to know that I ve lived most of my life, and I enjoy being alive.
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I can imagine being sick and not wanting to be alive, but I m not.
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And so I m...
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It s been a good ride.
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Yeah, and I m not happy to see it come to an end.
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I d like to see it prolong.
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But I don t fear the dying itself or that kind of thing.
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It s more I d like to prolong what is, I think, a good life that I m living and still living.
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It s sad to think that the fineness of it is the thing that makes it special.
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And also sad to, to me at least, it s kind of, I don t think I m using too strong of a word, but it s kind of terrifying, the uncertainty of it.
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The mystery of it, you know.
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The mystery of death.
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The mystery of it, yeah, of death.
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When we re talking about the mystery of black holes, that s somehow distant, that s somehow out there.
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And the mystery of our own.
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But even life, the mystery of consciousness, I find so hard to deal with, too.
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I mean, it s not as painful.
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I mean, we re conscious, but the whole magic of life we can understand, but consciousness, where we can actually think and
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so forth it s pretty it s such it seems like such a beautiful gift that it really sucks that we get to let go of it we ll have to let go of it yeah what do you hope your legacy is as i m sure they will uh aliens when they visit and humans have destroyed all of uh human civilization aliens read about you in an encyclopedia that will leave behind what do you hope it says well i would i would hope they
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to the extent that they evaluated me, felt that I helped move science forward as a tangible contribution and that I served as a good role model for how humans should live their lives.
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And we re part of creating one of the most incredible things humans have ever created.
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So yes, there s the science, that s the Fermi thing, right?
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There s- And the instrument, I guess.
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And the instrument.
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The instrument is a magical creation, not just by a human, by a collection of humans.
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The collaboration is, that s humanity at its best.
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I do hope we last quite a bit longer, but if we don t, this is a good thing to remember humans by.
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At least they built that thing.
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That s pretty impressive.
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Barry, this was an amazing conversation.
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Thank you so much for wasting your time and explaining so many things so well.
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I appreciate your time today.
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Thank you.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Barry Barish.
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To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now, let me leave you with some words from Werner Heisenberg, a theoretical physicist and one of the key pioneers of quantum mechanics.
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Not only is the universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.
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Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.