And so Dr. Brian O'Reilly is the lead scientist base at the LIGO Livingston Observatory in Louisiana. He received his BSC from Dublin City University in Dublin, Ireland in 1987, and his PhD from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois in 1995. His background is in high energy physics, but in 2002 he changed fields and joined the LIGO laboratory. He was the installation lead for the advanced LIGO upgrade in his current responsibilities include run management for their observation runs, which basically means that he knows everything that they're doing. So thank you very much, Dr. O'Reilly, for joining us and welcome. Thank you for the nice introduction. I'm going to share my screen. Can everybody see what I'm showing? Yeah, we can see the first observation of a binary neutron star merger. Oh, no, I give it away. Oh, gosh. All right, let me close this Q&A window. Okay, so thank you all for coming. It's nice to see so many people interested in what we're doing here. And so I'm going to talk to you about LIGO and about gravitational waves and what recent discoveries we've made. And hopefully it'll make sense and there'll be time for questions at the end. So people, I think everybody knows about Newton's gravity. It explains apples falling from the trees. It explains the orbit of the moon, planetary orbits. But one of the big problems with Newton's gravity and this is a picture of a tree, I think it observed, you know, at Cambridge, grown from the original Newton apple tree or the legendary one. One of the problems with Newton's theory is that it says that gravity is instantaneous, that if you change a mass somewhere, the effect is felt everywhere at once. Of course, relativity demands that it should be, the information should travel at the speed of light. There was also this procession of the perihelion of mercury that showed a behavior that Newton's theory could not explain. And I'll show that in a moment. The equation, which many of you probably know, the force of gravity, it depends on this universal gravitational constant and then just the product of the two masses in question divided by the square of the distance between them. Nice, simple theory, but today's standards, very successful, explained almost everything we cared about for many hundreds of years. So in 1915, Einstein generalized his special theory of relativity to include gravity. And Einstein's huge insight is that gravity is a little bit different from electromagnetic or other attractive and repulsive forces. It warps space and time.  So that means that you too, in your own small way, warped space in an undetectable way. This is a simplified picture. Three-dimensionally, it would look quite a bit different. But all the three-dimensional attempts to represent this look quite messy. Einstein's theory predicted several things. Gravity propagates at the speed of light in his theory, which was nice. And it also predicted gravitational waves. Let me say a little bit about this procession of the perihelion for Mercury. So this was first observed in 1859 by, and I'm probably mispronouncing this, but Arban la Verrier. And he's famous for actually discovering Neptune. And he did very precise mathematical calculations over many, many years to evaluate the effect of Newton's forces from all the planets and all the other planets, which is why he found an anomaly in the orbit of Uranus, which led him to predict where Neptune was. But it also showed that the change in the closest point of approach of Mercury to the sun was precessing or advancing at about 574 arc seconds per century. And Newton's theory could not explain this. It could explain it all up to about 47 or 45 arc seconds. Einstein's general theory of relativity predicts it almost exactly. And I haven't shown the errors here, but within errors it predicts exactly what's observed. So this was one of the big victories. The other famous tests proposed by Einstein himself took longer to observe cleanly the bending of starlight as it passed the sun and the gravitational redshift. So what are gravitational waves? So if you see here, I've drawn a ring of red dots and these represent test masses. So masses that are free falling in space. And as a gravitational wave passes through, it causes the space, space time itself to stretch and squeeze. And we measure that by calling, by measuring something called strain. We measure the change in length divided by the length. So the longer you make the measurement over, the larger distance, the more strain you will be able to observe. LIGO is designed to measure the strain. Gravitational waves are very weak. And I'll, yes. And so here's an example of the weakness of gravitational waves. So here on the right, I've written Einstein's famous general relativity equation.  And this tensor here, this energy momentum tensor represents basically the energy or in some way you can think of it as the tension in space time. And they're related by this constant. And this constant, which again includes this universal constant of gravitational and the speed of light is very, very small. It's about 10 to the minus 43 meters per joule. It's a very, very tiny number. That's like a decimal point, 43 zeros and a one. If you want to, based on this equation, make gravitational waves in the lab, you can design an experiment like a thought experiment where you have two one ton masses. You join them by some super strong bar that's two meters long. You rotate it at one kilohertz. So this thing would be spinning it 1,000 times per second. So you have to use some like unobtainium material to do this. And then you have to go 300 kilometers away so that you actually see the radiated waves and not the near field effects. And that will give you a strain of about 10 to the minus 38. And to put that in perspective, I've written here, the diameter of the Milky Way is approximately 10 to the power of 21 meters. If you take this strain of 10 to the minus 38, that means that the distance for a gravitational wave of this strain strength, the distance that the Milky Way diameter would change is 10 to the minus 17 meters. The proton diameter is 10 to the minus 15 meters. So the entire Milky Way for a gravitational wave of this strength would change by a hundred times smaller than the diameter of a proton in length. So it's a very tiny effect. So the conclusion is, it's not possible to do this on earth in any kind of an experiment we can dream up to detect, to generate detectable gravitational waves. Gravitational waves come in two polarizations. There's a plus polarization that I've shown here on the right and this cross polarization here on the left. You can see they're not like the usual waves on a string or waves on a pond that you've seen where they oscillate up and down. They do this strange quadrupole oscillation. Detectable gravitational waves come from huge masses. And by huge masses, I mean black holes which are many times the mass of the sun. Neutron stars which are one and a half times the mass of the sun and perhaps from supernovae and pulsars. And so for example, two 30 solar mass black holes at a distance of around one billion light years. When those two black holes merge so they orbit each other when they merge that final merger will produce a strain around 10 to the minus 21. So this is about 17 orders of magnitude better than what we get in the lab. So even though we've gone to astrophysics, we now have something that we may have some chance of detecting. The earth's sun distance for this strain changes by about the size of an atom. So this we call this easy compared to any other option. It's not really easy. In 1969, Einstein himself wrote in his paper. So this A in this equation here which I'm not going to explain is basically the strain we have talked about. And Einstein said, if one were to measure the time in seconds, the energy in earth, the numerical factor one over C4 would enter this expression. And this chi here is about 10 to the minus 27. And so Einstein himself said that in all practical cases that A or the strain must be practically have a vanishing value. Now, of course, Einstein didn't know about black holes. Einstein didn't know that there would be lasers. He couldn't envision LIGO. And even I think until 40 years ago when Raywise first had the idea, people did not envision LIGO. I can't actually see anybody. So let me check that people can hear me okay. And see the slides. Yeah, we're going, we're right along with you. All right, great. So Raywise, following some experiments by Joseph Weber who used a different technique to try to detect gravitational waves, a technique that did not work. He tried to make them cause a resonance in a very finely polished aluminum bar that weighed several tons. Raywise started thinking about this and he came up with this wonderful unpublished paper. It's a study he wrote for the National Science Foundation. And it contains so many things that we dealt with in the last two decades to make LIGO work. And even here on this side, and you probably can't read it that well, but he talks about black holes of certain masses and neutron stars and where you expect these gravitational waves to be in the frequency spectrum. Here, if you can see my mouse, is about a hundred hertz. And here is where you will see neutron stars merging and some black holes. So this is a great document. It's very foundational. Not only does he talk about the technique of detecting gravitational waves, he talks about the noise that will prevent you from doing so. So to the stars, but not really the stars. We want the dead stars, but they're kind of dead-ish stars because neutron stars, as many of you probably know, are pulsars and emit radio waves and they're quite dynamic objects.  There are black holes that exist in X-ray binaries where the companion is a star and they creep mass from that star and that's why you have this X-ray emission. I'll mention something about them later on. This is a video of a neutron, it's a supernova explosion. So when the supernova explodes, left at the center is this neutron star. It's about 15 kilometers in diameter. This is it compared to the San Francisco Bay Area. It's basically a giant atomic nucleus. Very little is known about the exact, what we call the equation of state, what the matter of it is in this object. We've observed them as pulsars, we've observed them in binary systems and those binary systems, we've never observed directly gravitational waves from neutron stars merging. So what we care about is, we care about binary systems and here is a reference to an article in Nature, which is in News and Views, so it's quite accessible, that talks about the implications of what LIGO measures and how some of these binary systems form. So not only do you need a binary system to form of black holes or neutron stars, in this case, we're talking about black holes, but you need them to form close enough so that they merge within what we call a Hubble time, basically within several million or billion years so that some will be merging now 13 billion years after the Big Bang. It's conceivable to form a binary that would merge, you know, never perhaps or very far from now in terms of time from the Big Bang. So there's this case where you've got two stars, one blows up, becomes a supernova, it turns into a black hole. If the star is enough mass, it becomes a black hole instead of a neutron star and then its companion is now going through this gas envelope which brings them close together. The companion blows up and now you have two black holes and the spins of these black holes tell you something. You can also have B where they're rotating very fast so that they don't expand, they just go straight to the black hole stage and now the spins will look very similar to each other.  It basically pairs it up with another black hole. So these are three of the many possibilities that LIGO explores. So I said that we had observed neutron stars and we have, we've seen pulsars, we've seen this radio wave clocks emitted, you know, at very high frequency, several hundred hertz and a very precise and periodic. Hulse and Taylor studied the first of these binary pulsars which they discovered at the Aracibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and they followed it. If you look at this graph, these are measurements starting in like around 1975 and continuing to 2000. This graph of course has continued, people have continued to measure this pulsar. And what they're looking for is they're looking for how the orbit of this pulsar shrinks and again, how this closest point of approach precesses because that's calculable very precisely from general relativity. And so this Hulse and Taylor and Weisberg did this measurement over many years. This line here is a general relativity fit to the data. So this is convincing proof that gravitational waves do exist as Einstein predicted. It's not the same as direct detection of gravitational waves but it was worthy of I think the 1994 Nobel Prize. Okay, so as a reminder, here again is the test masses being stretched and squeezed by a gravitational wave. And so this naturally leads us to the creation of a detector for gravitational waves and we use something called an interferometer. So in this picture, the light comes in, it's split into two arms and then when it comes back, it recombines at this beam splitter and goes to the right there to the dark port. And when the waves of the light overlaps so that the peak of one overlaps the trough of another, you get cancellation. So you get no light at the dark port. When they overlap so that their peaks align, you get a very bright spot at the dark port. And LIGO, we set up our detector so that we have very little light at the dark port. When a gravitational wave passes through our detector, it makes one arm a little longer and one arm a little shorter. And that's that oscillation that you just saw in that picture. And then this light spot here, this light that we detect is our signature of a gravitational wave. So this is basically a transducer. It turns a gravitational wave strain, induced strain into a light signal, which we then turn into a digital signal with our electronics and detectors. So this is what advanced LIGO looks like in very, very schematic form. As you might imagine, it's quite a bit more complicated than this. We have a laser, very highly stabilized. It goes to this beam splitter and then a split into two long arms. These Fabry-Perot cavities they're called. We have a test mass at each end. The test masses are hung from a pendulum suspension, but they're basically free to move above one hertz. So above any frequency, but with a period of once per second, they basically move inertially in space. This is what this test mass structure looks like. We call this a quadruple suspension. It hangs from an isolation platform in our vacuum system. There's two stages of suspension up here and then there's two more down here. They look just like a pendulum. If you've ever seen a pendulum wall clock, it's basically the same principle. And then this output detector is where we will see the gravitational wave signal. So the light comes in, splits into two, reflects back, recombines at the beam splitter, and then at the output, you will either get darkness or bright light depending on the gravitational wave. So just to give you an idea of the size we're talking about, this is a person working in chamber on one of these suspensions. There's actually two people in here working on the alignment and installation of the suspension. You can see it's resting on a table. It hasn't been bolted to its platform above yet. And here in the lower right corner, we have some of the optics on the inputs. These actually sit on a single stage isolation table. You can see a person here working on those. So these chambers are smaller, but the scale is still quite large. In fact, it's one of the largest high vacuum systems in the world. I think NASA may have a system that's slightly bigger. It's about 10,000 cubic meters of vacuum at 10 to the minus nine torr. Atmospheric pressure is about 10 to the three torr. So it's about a trillion times, a trillion orders of magnitude below atmospheric pressure. The reason we have to keep it in vacuum is that the molecules in residual gas in our vacuum system would contribute noise to our measurement. They would cause the light to scatter and then the light would take, some of the light would scatter and disappear, which is okay. We have lots of light usually. So losing a small fraction is no big deal. But some of the light will hit a gas molecule and stay in the main beam.  The LIGO laboratory consists of two observatories, one in Hanford, Washington and the Hanford Nuclear Reservation near the Tri-Cities and one in Livingston, Louisiana, which is where I'm talking to you from tonight. I am here. MIT and Caltech jointly operate the LIGO experiment with funding from the National Science Foundation. The two detectors are located like this. It takes light about 10 milliseconds to travel the 3,000 kilometers or so between the sites. The reason we did it like this is that we want to see a signal at one detector and then within the slight travel time. So within 10 milliseconds, we want to see the same signal at the other detector. That will tell us that we have seen something real and not just an artifact of our electronics or the local environment because the local environment here is not like the local environment 3,000 kilometers away and things that might correlate between the two, we have instruments that can measure those and correct. LIGO is not the only gravitational wave detector in the world. We have four operating detectors. The Geo 600 detector is in Germany. It's a British or UK-German collaboration. It's mainly a test bed for new technologies. It's where the advanced LIGO suspensions were designed and tested. We have the two LIGO detectors and then in Italy, we have Virgo which also just completed an upgrade and it joined an observation run with LIGO on the 1st of August of this year. And I'll talk more about that later. There's a detector being built in Japan which is still a few years away from operation. They've decided to build an underground to get away from some seismic noise that afflicts the other observatories that are built on the surface. They're also going to cool down their test masses to reduce the molecular vibration in the coating on the optics themselves. This molecular vibration, this Brownian motion, this thermal noise, again, also affects our measurement. And then LIGO India, which we hope will come online in the mid 2020s, is a clone of LIGO Hanford and LIGO Livingston. The reason we want to network is we want to have something looking all the time so we don't miss anything, but it also allows us to triangulate the position of an event. And that's important and I'll talk about that later too. The LIGO scientific collaboration of which the LIGO lab is a member contains, I think it must be over a hundred institutions by now. And I see lots of people joined from all over the country. There's probably a university near you with a LIGO group and many of these groups do outreach activities related to LIGO. So we're quite a large collaboration. I think there's something like 800 authors from LIGO on the papers, maybe more at the stage. Virgo has about 280 members. It's made up of scientists from six European countries and these institutions. And it's built in Caschina. It's near Pisa, the famous leaning tower of Pisa Pisa in Italy. Okay, so what have we seen? So some of you have probably heard the story already, but I will tell it again. So 1.3 billion years away, like light years away. So 1.3 billion years ago, we had two black holes. Their orbit decays due to the radiation of gravitational waves and they're going to merge into a bigger black hole. And when they merge, they're going to radiate gravitational waves, powerful gravitational waves. About three solar masses of energy goes into radiating these waves. And at the peak of the merger, this is the brightest object in the universe. It emits more power in that brief instant than the power from all the visible stars in the universe. It's quite amazing. Of course, the signal takes a while to get to earth. And when it does, I hope people can hear this. This is what it sounds like without a frequency. And then we've upped the frequency a little bit in the second one. So you can hear that blip sound. That's what we call a chirp. And a chirp is the signal as the two masses rotate faster and faster until they merge somewhere around here. This is the final moments. This is less than two-tenths of a second, the final moments of the star of this binary black hole system. Existence. And so let me just play this again. So this, and I'll mention the website later, is available on the website. You can hear it much better if you have better speakers than my computer, especially the normal low frequency one. So how do we learn from the strain? I call it HT here. This is the strain as a function of time. So this waveform here is the strain signal as a function of time detected by LIGO. So there's different phases. There's the in spiral where the two black holes are circling each other, slowly losing energy by radiating gravitational waves. And therefore coming closer together, there's the merger phase where they finally collide. This is the most violent part of the process and gives you the maximum amplitude of strain. And then there's this ring down at the end where the final object rings like a bell. It's like a vibration, which is quite hard to see and has not yet been definitively seen. So the phase evolution of these initial waveforms gives you the chirp mass. The chirp mass is something, it's a quantity that's derived from the masses of both of the black holes. And it tells you how fast the object will coalesce. The higher the chirp mass, the faster the final coalescence stage will be. The amplitude of this signal will be modulated by the non-aligned spin components. So if the black holes are spinning, but their spin axes are not aligned with each other, then that will show up here. The ring down frequency, so the frequency of this ring down stage and the cue, like how sharp it is, how damp it is, tell us the mass and spin of the final black hole. And so here on the left is the Hanford, Washington signal that we observed. And here on the right is the Livingston signal overlaid with the inverted Hanford signal. The second row here are the numerical relativity predictions. The third row are the residuals. And I think I say that in text, so let me say that. So there's the time trace from Hanford. Signal is in band for about 0.2 seconds and it's an amplitude of about 10 to the minus 21. So if you remember from earlier in the talk, we said 10 to the minus 21 was easy or at least detectable. We could imagine detecting this. You can see when we invert the Hanford trace because the orientation of the detectors is differs by a minus sign. So we have to invert one signal to match, which is a nice proof that this is a real signal. And then we shifted by 7.1 milliseconds. So the signal arrived at Livingston first and then arrived at Hanford within this light travel time window. Another proof that this was a real signal. These are the best fit waveforms using analytical calculations and numerical relativity. The same fit to the waveform matches the signal at both observatories. The residual shows no evidence of signal if you subtract out the best fit waveform. And then you see this chirp signal. This is a frequency here and this is time. So as time passes, the frequency goes from low to high as these objects go faster and faster in that final two tenths of a second before they merge into a new black hole. This was an important discovery. I'm pleased to say that the 2017 Nobel Prize in physics, half of the prize was awarded to Ray Weiss who really is the father, I think, of this field. And then Barry Barish, the first director of the LIGO lab and Kipthorne who did a lot of the theoretical work that formed the basis for what LIGO does. So after the first detection during our first observation run, we saw a second clear event and a third event which is quite likely to be a BBH, a binary black hole merger. In our just finished second observation run, we have so far, and I've emphasized so far because analysis is still ongoing, we've published three more binary black hole events and the first observation of a binary neutron star merger. Now this binary neutron star merger was one of the class of events that we really built LIGO to observe. LIGO is most sensitive at the frequencies where we expect to see the signal. And so what happened is that there was a neutron star merger on the 17th of August and it was observed by the two LIGO observatories and the Virgo Observatory was also online. And not as sensitive as the LIGO observatories but still able to make a significant contribution as I'll show you in a moment. One of the dreams of gravitational wave physics is that we would see an event that other astronomers could see. These astronomers would then be able to localize the event more precisely than we could and allow us to do more with our signal. It would also tell us a host of other information about what happened. So we call this multi-messenger astronomy to see something in x-rays, gamma rays, neutrinos, radio waves, visible in infrared light and of course gravitational waves. So it had long been speculated that some gamma ray burst signals were from neutron star mergers but had not been proven. This is the signal we saw at Hanford and you can see here, I hope you can see my cursor tracing out this chirp shape at the very end here. The Livingstone detector was more sensitive at the time and so you can see for much longer for the whole width of this graph basically, you can see this gradually curving chirp signal and in Virgo you can't see anything by eye. One thing to note here is that this bottom axis starts at minus 28 seconds. So we see the signal in this graph for close to 30 seconds. It actually was in band for the LIGO detectors for about a hundred seconds. Most of our black holes are a few tenths of a second in time for the signal. This one was a hundred seconds. It's 50 times longer than anything we've seen before. That's because the mass of a neutron star is 1.4 times the mass of our sun. The smallest black hole we've detected is about nine times the mass of our sun and its companion was heavier. So those coalesced much more rapidly in a couple of seconds compared to the neutron stars which took a long time to coalesce, which meant the signal was there but weak for a very long time. But then we were able to accumulate signal for a long period of time and this ended up being the loudest gravitational wave event ever seen at a signal to noise of about 33, 34. We learned that the Fermi gamma ray burst monitor, this is a satellite orbiting the Earth, detected a gamma ray burst two seconds after our signal. You can see here, this is the light curve from the gamma ray burst monitor. Down here at the third panel is from integral another satellite. And so this was a clear signal of a faint gamma ray burst. Normally in LIGO to triangulate to find the position of an object, each detector can basically make this annulus in the sky of where the object might be. And so LIGO Hanford and LIGO Livingston on their own can carve out an annular patch of the sky. Usually it's two disjoint patches because we can use amplitude information to get rid of some pieces. But it's usually many hundreds of square degrees in size. When we use Virgo information, we can shrink this rapidly. And so here I'm showing you this a purplish quasi-circular or elliptical patch on the sky is the localization from the Fermi satellite. This gray band is the localization from the integral satellite. This small green ellipse is from the LIGO and Virgo collaborations localization of the event. Whereas before, I think our best localization had been something like 230 square degrees. The size of this patch of sky is about 30 square degrees. It means that astronomers can look and have a decent chance of finding something. And so we sent an alert to many astronomers who have collaborated with LIGO for this purpose, telling them that we had found this neutron star signal. And I'm showing you again, so this you won't be able to hear, I think even with good speakers for quite a while. This is the neutron star signal compared to five of the previously discovered signals. Just to give you an idea of how long this coalescence takes. So we had a solid, clear, unambiguous neutron star signal associated with the gamma ray burst. We informed the astronomers and the astronomers started pointing their telescopes to this patch of sky and going down through the list. And as I'll show you in a few moments, they quickly discovered, I think we're about to hear something again. I hope people could hear that, especially at the end. That's that chirp sound again. But again, as I said, much longer than the black hole signal and a much cleaner chirp, excuse me, sound at the end. So the probability that the gamma ray and the gravitational wave were within two seconds of each other is a few parts in terms of the minus eight. So, you know, tiny. So almost guaranteed to not be an accidental coincidence. That tells us that binary neutron stars are indeed the progenitors of at least some of the short hard gamma ray bursts which people have been observing for decades now. And this time delay was 1.74 seconds. And that tells us something important as well. We don't know exactly what the delay is between the gamma ray burst or between the gravitational wave from the merger and the gamma ray burst which comes from some of the matter that's been torn apart in that process. But this 1.74 seconds for something that's basically 130 million light years away tells us that gravitational waves and light basically travel at the same speed. Because this, even if there's some physics that has to happen for the gamma ray burst to come, it's going to be of the order of this two seconds. So you can get the speed of light and the speed of gravity to be the same to like a few parts in 10 to the 16. This is a plot showing all of the observatories that did follow-up analysis. The event arrived during the morning in Livingston. It was a little before 8 a.m. local time. So a lot of the Chilean telescopes had to wait basically for nightfall, the next nightfall. There were some problems in Western Australia, actually from a computer hacker that stopped them from controlling their telescopes or they might have been able to observe right away. But six teams found the source of the gravitational waves about 12 hours later. And you can see here where this reticule is. You can see this source. It's in a galaxy, I think NGC 4993. It's about 40 megaparsecs, 130 million light years away. It's in that localized ellipse that LIGO and Virgo gave. And then it fades very fast. You can see it goes away in two weeks. This is one of the companion papers that we published with this discovery, showing all the lines show observations that were made by various detectors. Anytime there's a circle, it means that there was an observation. So you can see we have the gravitational waves and the gamma rays, of course. The X-rays didn't show up until nine days later, seen by the Chandra satellite. We saw UV. This is a logarithmic scale, by the way. It's not linear. So we saw UV and optical and infrared quite soon. And then we finally saw radio about 16 days after the event. And the radio people continue to monitor this. And you can see here the six different discoveries. When we published this paper, about 70 other papers, and I think the archive, which collects physics papers, but something like 130 papers on the day of the announcement, all related to this event. It's one of the most studied astrophysical events ever, if not the most study. GRB 170817A, shown here as the green star. It's the closest short GRB that we've ever observed. Now, it was pretty weak. And one of the reasons it was weak is that we didn't see the gamma ray burst full on. We saw it kind of from an angle from the side. We think the inclination of the orbital plane of the merging binary was about something like 30 degrees to our line of sight. So we didn't see the full jets. Now, that's bad in the sense that you don't get a very strong gamma ray signal, but it's good in other ways. You don't get blinded by that jet that comes out of the merger and you can look behind it. So, I think I put this one in the wrong place. This is just the detector again. So let me... This is it. Yes, it's working. So you can see, I'll pause this a couple of times. You can see this gamma ray burst jet because now the two neutron stars are made of matter. And so when they collide together, they're going to form a radioactive cloud, if you like, from ejected matter. They're going to tear each other apart before they merge and either make a heavy neutron star or a black hole. We can't really tell which the expectation is that they'll make either a low mass black hole or a heavy neutron star. And so this part here, and I maybe should have paused at this part, this central part, people call this the cocoon. This is a very dense area of matter, region of matter after the merger. So we can't see inside because either a black hole or a neutron star is in there, but this is the ejecta from the merger. And in here, something very interesting is going on. It's called an R process where neutron capture is happening at a very, very rapid rate. And this is responsible for the production, and I'll show you the periodic table in a minute, of many of the heavy elements that we're familiar with. Having a NASA satellite be part of your detection, so the NASA people, of course, are very good friends. So this is a periodic table of the elements showing you which of these elements and how much of them, if you like, are produced in this R process after a neutron star merger. And so most of gold, most of iodine, surprisingly, a lot of the lanthanides and the transuranic, well, the uranium, palladium. So these elements come from this process. It's for some of them, it's the only means of production, except maybe for a few like small tens of a percent that may come from elsewhere, but small enough that they don't appear in this graph. So this is, again, an important part of physics that comes from observing this and knowing how it came about and formed this what people call a kilonova or a macronova, and being able to study the light emitted by this promptly after the merger and look for the signature of these elements being formed. So this is the masses, so the smaller ones here, of course, you can see merging into the bigger ones. These are the binary systems that merge that we've discovered so far. There's six of them, including this one with the dotted line which had weaker evidence, but we're about 88% sure that it's a black hole merger. You can see the masses range all the way from up in the mid-60s, around 60, down to less than 10. So the lightest one was one of the ones we detected from the second observation run. And one of our hopes is to fill in this mass spectrum because the stellar graveyard, as people call it, where stars go to die, we have black holes, or if they're not completely done, they can merge with each other and make bigger black holes. These purple circles are the black holes that are part of these X-ray binaries. These are the only black holes in this mass range that were known before LIGO. And you can see we're expanding this mass spectrum and learning more about it. There were many known neutron stars, you can see here at the bottom, but then these two orange dots go into a question mark because we're not exactly sure what it forms, is the merging neutron star system that we discovered. And we hope this is one of many that we will find as LIGO proceeds. What else might we hear? We say hear because the chirps happen in the 100 to 200 Hertz region, which is audio frequency. Well, we're going to have more coalescing binary systems. We're hoping to see something from an asymmetric core collapse supernova, although that has to be pretty close by. There's an object called a cosmic string, which is fairly speculative, which if it develops a kink can emit gravitational waves. Neutron stars that spin very fast, if they have some kind of a deformity on their surface, can emit gravitational waves, maybe continuously. And then of course, what we'd really like is to be able to go back to the first picosecond after the Big Bang. So the cosmic microwave background radiation comes from about 300,000 years after the Big Bang. If we can ever see the gravitational wave background from the Big Bang, that will take us back to the first like instant basically after the Big Bang, to the period of what we believe is inflation. For more information, you can look at www.ligo.caltech.edu, especially the gallery has lots of these pictures and videos more than I've shown you today, and educational resources. So there's lots of nice things there. You can also go to the LIGO scientific collaboration webpage, which again has educational resources on multimedia and information on the detections that we've made so far. So I think that's all I had for you this evening. So here's the... Thank you for passing. Thank you so much. I know everybody's laughing wherever they are. So Dr. O'Reilly, I need to ask here real quickly. And so we were running a little bit late. Do you mind going a little over past our normal time so that we can get to a few more of the questions? Do you mind? That's fine. Okay. So we'll try to be protective of your time because I know it's later there and later still for some of our members on the East Coast. So we do have quite a few questions.  We had several people asking whether or not you will make your PowerPoint available to us. We can put it on the website for people to download if that's possible. If not, we understand. Yes, I intend to make it public in our DCC, but yes, there's nothing proprietary in here so I can share that. Okay, fantastic. Thank you so much. And so you and I can touch base about that later. So a long time ago, we had that. Let's see.  But it looks like in one of those last slides, perhaps you can do it with the ground-based ones. Well, some of the, so LIGO, Advanced LIGO is currently what we call a second-generation detector. It's an upgrade from the initial detectors, quite a bit more sophisticated. There are plans, people are already thinking about third-generation ground-based detectors. Some of those might be able to probe the stochastic background, this hiss of noise that comes from the Big Bang. I think the real promise for that though will be something like LISA, which is a space-based gravitational wave detector. And I saw, I think somebody said something about a Lagrange point. This actually orbits the sun. It's about 30 degrees behind the Earth orbit. It's designed to orbit the sun with like arms that are several million kilometers long. And that should be able to probe down to very low frequencies and directly see this stochastic background. Advanced LIGO itself may see incoherent sum of unresolved black holes and neutrons to our mergers. So we don't see the individual ones, but there's this kind of a buzz for many faint ones going off all of us. Okay, well, kind of related to that, or at least it seems somewhat related, if gravitational waves shrink or expand space-time, wouldn't the speed of light in the LIGO arms vary as the space-time changes? This is from Bruce. Light goes at a finite speed, but if the mile is shorter, wouldn't the second be shorter as well? Yeah, so this is a tricky point and came up quite often in the, and there's still people out there who, I think we've all seen the websites where Einstein is wrong, Newton is wrong, that we'll never believe that we can detect anything. But it's a good question. The short answer is that the wavelength of the gravitational waves is much larger than the size of the detector. And we can see the stretching and squeezing is a much larger effect in the spatial components of the metric than in the time components. And so what we're actually measuring is we're measuring the time it takes to go down each arm. You can think of it as the gravitational wave, in this case, is only stretching and squeezing space in these two polarizations. And that's effectively the right answer. If you get to very high frequencies, very high frequency gravitational waves, like 37 kilohertz, then LIGO can't actually see those because the time it takes the wave to transit the detector basically overlaps with itself and we can't distinguish the two. So for the wavelengths we're looking at, we can measure the time delay, just because the wavelengths are so much longer than the size of the detector. Okay, so Alan asked a question, and I'm not entirely certain that I understand what it is, but I'm guessing you will. So Alan asked regarding the resolution for displacement or change in the length of the arms, that it's a very small fraction of the size of a proton, how might one reconcile that with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle? So the distance measurement that we make comes from, if you want to think in terms of quanta, it's trillions of photons hitting the test mass optic. So it's basically an average of the position measured by a large ensemble of photons in our laser beam. So while individually each photon cannot give you a precise measurement, the mean of all of those photons actually gives you a precise measurement. So the average position is what you look at. And that's what of course changes as well when the gravitational wave comes through. And so that's the reason why we can go to these incredibly small distances like 10 to the minus 18 meters. I saw some cool questions about how we determine the size and distance of these objects. Can you talk a little about that? So the size is a prediction of general relativity. The mass of the black holes comes from the wave form. And I don't know, am I still sharing my screen? No. So the way we detect gravitational waves is we do something called matched filtering. So we basically make a template bank of thousands and thousands of waveforms for all conceivable combination of black hole masses, for example, between one solar mass and 99 solar masses. And so when we analyze our data, we basically compare that template to our data and we see if any of them match what's in the data. And so when we find one that matches, and usually we find several dozen that match when we look at what we call our low latency analysis when we're analyzing in real time. But then we go back and we do many, many analysis runs and we find which waveform best matches the signal we've seen. And then we can look and we can say, okay, this waveform which comes from some combination of analytical calculation and numerical relativity had these masses as input parameters. So they had two black holes say of 30 solar masses each and they had spender, they didn't have spin and the orbit was aligned this way and not that way. And so you basically take the best match waveform and that tells you what your signal was to begin with. Does that make sense? Yeah, that's pretty incredible. That's a lot of options when you're looking at it. How about the distance? Is that from other observations that are not gravitational waves? So the distance, if you look at the papers is fairly poorly determined. So the amplitude of the gravitational wave decreases linearly with distance. It doesn't decrease as R squared, it's an amplitude not an intensity. So the amplitude of the gravitational wave that we see because we know, again, if we were close to the merger, we know what the amplitude of the gravitational waves are from our calculations. So that gives us some idea of how far away it is. What we don't know is we don't know what the orientation is. So if the orientation is such that we're looking at it basically down on top of the orbital plane, that's the maximum signal. Whereas if we're looking at an edge on, that can be a minimal signal. And so there can be some angle in there. We don't know that very well. And that contributes. So as you rotate the orbital plane, the signal gets stronger or weaker, which is the same as the object's been closer or further away. So there's quite a large uncertainty in the distance. The really nice thing about the neutron star merger is that it was observed by the astronomers. And now you have light. And so we know the galaxy it was in. And so we have a very, very precise measurement of the distance. And it turns out that, again, with some assumptions about the inclination angle, you can actually do a measurement of the Hubble constant using gravitational waves that doesn't require using any of these, it's called a cosmic distance ladder. It's how people determine the distance to objects. Many of you probably have heard of this in astronomy. How do you know how far away a quasar is? How do you step out to larger and larger distances? Well, gravitational waves can do this in a model-independent way in one step. And one of the papers that came from this neutron star merger is a measurement of the Hubble constant. It's not competitive with the people who do the supernova measurements. Not yet. May never be quite as precise with them, but it does agree with those measurements. And it's a completely different way of getting that answer. One of the questions, and so there's so many questions here. And so this one is interesting. And so with the multi-modal, I guess, detection of this, why no detection of neutrinos? Well, I think we don't know how beamed any neutrinos are from this. We don't know how energetic. We wouldn't expect very many neutrinos anyway. I mean, for supernova 1987A, we might have seen about a dozen neutrinos. We have better neutrinos detectors now. They're difficult to detect. And it could be that there's very few produced in this process. It could be that they're produced in their low energy. It could be that they're isotropic. So your chances of seeing one are very small. If they go in the jet, then they would have been pointed away from us. So that's still an open question. People still hope to see, and they do look, several of the neutrino detectors are part of our alert system. And when we see a gravitational wave, they look for neutrinos in coincidence. All right. I think we have time for maybe one more because it's getting quite late for a lot of you on the East Coast. Okay, it's a two-parter. I can't help myself. I can't help myself. So, Ron Schmitz asking, why does gravity travel at the speed of light? And kind of as a final thought on that, Stuart Myers had a great question about, can this studying gravitational waves help us learn about the true nature of gravity? Okay, so why does gravity travel at the speed of light? I think so the best way of, well, so one way of thinking about it is that gravity interacts with all mass and energy. And if it traveled slower than the speed of light, you would quickly have a lot of contradictions. It's very hard to build a consistent theory of massive gravity, which interacts with itself and still satisfies the tenets of relativity. Namely that no matter what your coordinate system is, you see the same physics happen. So that's kind of one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is that the graviton is massless, that when you do the field equations for gravity, the propagator of that field, the thing that carries the force. And if there were a quantum particle called the graviton, it would be required to be massless. If something is massless, it has to travel at the speed of light. Again, if it doesn't travel at the speed of light and it has zero mass, it would quickly violate the tenets of special relativity. The second question, can you learn about the nature of gravity? So what we will learn is we will learn how good Einstein's theory is in the very strong field. So it's very difficult for us to do any tests of gravity where the fields are really strong. So gravity is really weak or space is really stiff, whichever way you want to look at it. So anything you would do in the solar system, for example, is weak field gravity. And so if you're trying to look for discrepancies between Einstein's theory and experimental data, you want to go to where the gravitational forces are really strong and then test the theory there. There are some speculations where people are trying to tie in what we see and maybe some after effects now that we can directly see a black hole form and try to advance some quantum gravity ideas. But that's quite speculative and there's people who think that there's no such thing as quantum gravity, that gravity is just an emergent, if you'd like, force from space time itself. But what we will really learn for sure and what we are already learning is we're testing the general theory of relativity in the strong field limit. All right. Well, thank you very much, Dr. O'Reilly. This is unfortunately we've got a, I apologize to everyone whose questions that we weren't able to get to, but we're run quite long here. And so thank you very much, Dr. O'Reilly, for sharing an evening with us. This is fantastic. I think that we generated a lot of excitement about what you're doing and the future of looking and understanding more about the universe through.


Fy nesaf, Y NGW, yr yng Nghymru yn adeiladol y ffrindigol yw'r gwahanol. Mae'r gweithio gyda chi'n bwysig i'r cefnodol i ddweud'n dweud o ffair hynny, ac mae'r ddweud o'ch gwaith yn enwedig yn yng Nghymru a'r ddweud o'r llun. Mae'n ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud o'r ddweud o ffair hynny. Last October and November, data was gathered from 7,700 people across Wales about their experiences in our hospitals and community care settings. I was very pleased to see that 98% of them said they were treated with dignity and respect, that they were given privacy while in hospital and that they were helped to be independent. Of course, we should not be complacent even though these are excellent results. Many of the patients found it difficult to sleep while in hospital. These are noisy places and it gives us an indication of the area we should focus our attention to make improvements. I would strongly recommend you have a look at the report as it comes online on the Welsh Government website this month. As it tells you much about what it is like to receive care in NHS Wales.


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The final item of business today is a member's business debate on motion number 14128 in the name of Sandra White on, as Gaza whithers its people perish. This debate will be concluded without any questions being put, and I would be grateful for those members who wish to speak in the debate. I could press a request to speak buttons now, please. I call on Sandra White to open the debate, seven minutes please. Thank you very much, Presiding Officer. I am aware that previous debates we have had involving Palestine and Israel tend to become somewhat polarised or conflated with wider issues rather than focus on the motion at hand. I understand that as people are so passionate about this issue. However, when I tabled this motion for debate, it was primarily in response to the United Nations Trade and Development Board's report into developments in the economy of the occupied Palestinian territories. I acknowledge that, since the publication of the report, other events have inflamed an already volatile situation, I would ask the members, who are contributing this evening, to remain mindful of the motion at hand rather than perhaps some of the wider issues that we all acknowledge do exist. Presiding Officer, let us be clear that this is about people. This is about a humanitarian crisis that has been unfolding, is unfolding before our eyes. Regardless of where we sit in the debate, regarding the on-going situation between the State of Palestine and the State of Israel, we cannot ignore or turn a blind eye to their plight. For the record, Presiding Officer, and for the avoidance of doubt, I reference the State of Palestine in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 1397, adopted in 2002, in which it is a firm division of a Palestinian and Israeli two-state solution. Before the publication of the UN report, the World Bank in May published its economic monitoring report into the Palestinian territories, which also provided some grim and damning reading. In the section on the destruction of Gaza's economy, human consequences and the way forward, the World Bank states that it has been tremendously damaged by repeated and conflicts, the blockade and internal divide. It goes on to state that income is 31 per cent lower than it was 20 years ago. Its manufacturing sector, which some may find unusual, was once very, very significant in Gaza. It shrunk by 60 per cent and that Gaza's exports have virtually disappeared since the imposition of the blockade. Nothing can explain this other than war and blockade. The report goes on to say that the human costs of Gaza's economic malaise are enormous. Compared to that of other economies, unemployment in Gaza would be the highest in the world, and poverty in Gaza is also extremely high. However, those numbers fail to portray the degree of suffering of Gaza's citizens due to poor electricity, water and sewage availability, war-related psychological trauma, limited movement and other adverse effects of wars and the blockade. According to the World Bank, the way forward requires a unified Palestinian Government in both West Bank and Gaza, which can be a partner to multilateral and bilateral donors and substantial donor support to rebuild Gaza's infrastructure and homes. It requires the lifting of the blockade on the movement of goods and people to allow Gaza's tradable sectors to recover. It is important to note that those are not my words, but are taken directly from the World Bank report. That is what we must remember when we debate those issues. It is not simply a question of individuals stating these facts but of authoritative world bodies that are stating those facts. The UN report paints a similar bleak picture highlighting the dramatic effect of Israel's withholding of Palestinian clearance revenues, which are vat and important duties, collected by the Government of Israel on behalf of the Palestinian Authority, and normally remitted monthly minus charges for electricity, water, sewage, health, referrals and a 3 per cent administration fee. Those essential revenues, which represent 75 per cent of total revenue, were once again withheld for the first four months of 2015, causing severe financial difficulties for the Palestinian authorities and, of course, the people of Palestine. We might ask ourselves or, indeed, we might believe that this revenue was withheld for good reason by the Government of Israel. However, it was, as a result of the Palestinian national authorities' application by the state of Palestine for membership of the international criminal court. Some may see this as a collective punishment for the exercising international rights, but could it be an isolated incident? The answer is yes and no. Yes, it was collective punishment and no, it was not isolated. In 2000, revenue was withheld for two years following the start of the second Intifada. In 2006, it was withheld for one and a half years following Palestinian elections. In May 2011, it was withheld for one month following efforts at Palestinian national reconciliation, and the list could go on. The report also acknowledges that, despite claims to the contrary, much of the hardship faced are not as a result of inadequate leadership, as, in fact, the economy of Palestine is one of unoccupied territory and is undermined by occupation rather than policies pursued or poor donor co-ordination. As a motion states, the UN reports notes that three Israeli military operations in the past six years, in addition to eight years of economic blockade, have ravaged the already debilitated infrastructure of Gaza. Shatters at its productive base left no time for meaningful reconstruction or economic recovery and impoverished the Palestinian population in Gaza, rendering their economic wellbeing worse than the level of two periods decades before. In October 2014, during a visit to Gaza, the Secretary General of the United Nations stated that the destruction was beyond description. For me, that is the true cost of the Israeli Government's policies towards Gaza, the cost of the people living there. It is estimated that 360,000 are in dire need of treatment for mental health conditions, and with regard to children, Gaza's future, 400,000 are in need of immediate psychosocial support and psychological support as well. The Middle East process, when the UN special co-ordination visited there in April, said, that no human being who visits can remain untouched by the terrible devastation that one sees here in Gaza. As shocking as the devastation of the buildings might be, the devastation of the people is 10 times more shocking. That is why I am heartened by the number of Israelis, Palestinians, Jews and non-Jews alike, who wish to see a peaceful resolution to this situation and to condemn violence and extremism in any form as do I. However, it is vital and important that we continue to speak out against these injustices and that we continue to strive for a real peace deal. I know that the Scottish Government has today been strong and being one of those voices and I commend it for doing so. However, can we do more? I do think so. I think that Scotland is in a unique situation to offer its services to both sides should we wish it. There is nothing stopping us from looking to bring representatives together to discuss in an informal and neutral setting how we can go forward in order to achieve a just and lasting peace. I would be happy to work with the minister and anyone else, and I am sure that others would too, to look at ways of bringing Scotland's wise council to the table and stop the terrible destruction in Gaza and in Palestine. Many thanks. We now turn to the open debate. A number of members are indicating they would wish to speak. Speakers of four minutes, please. Claudia Beamish to be followed by John Finnie. It is essential that the Scottish Parliament plays its part in keeping injustice of the Palestinian plight in the public eye. I very much thank Sandra White for bringing this wide-ranging motion to the chamber and for her comprehensive analysis today. In the short time I have, I want to focus on one part of her motion. It supports those Israelis, Palestinians, Jews and non-Jews alike from Glasgow, Scotland and around the world who believe in mutual respect and understanding as cornerstones to a just solution in Palestine and Israel. When re-elected in 2013 speaking to Parliament, Mr Netanyahu repeated a pledge to make, I quote, a historic compromise in order to make peace with the Palestinians, and I further quote, with a Palestinian partner who is willing to conduct negotiations in good faith, Israel will be prepared for a historic compromise that will end the conflict for the Palestinians forever. The coalition in Israel includes Mr Netanyahu's party, the centrist Yesadid party and the right-wing Jewish Home party. The line-up includes a strong showing of pro-settlement ministers. This shows the irresolvable tension within the Israeli Government and the sending of mixed messages. There is an ancient Chinese expression, wu zi bu li, which means, without trust, nothing stands. Trust must of course be based on truth. I first learnt the plight of the Palestinians from my father who was a regular soldier in the British Army based in Bethlehem during the mandate. Because he witnessed the injustice of the settlement, he was an advocate for the Palestinian state and for the support of refugees throughout his political life as an MP. Sixty years later, there is a collective amnesia still about the historic facts by many Israelis, though of course not all, as demonstrated by the Governments that they elect. Indeed, too often other Governments and people across the world fail to understand this truth. Here in the Scottish Parliament, the Balfour project held an exhibition recently and will host a conference in Durham at the end of this week promoting their film, The British in Palestine, 1917 to 1948, to continue to raise awareness of the British mandate. I quote the words of the project, a homeland for the Jewish people has been achieved, but the League, that's the League of Nations, trust to facilitate Palestinian independence is still to be fulfilled. Another film on the side of the road, directed and written by Leah Chakakansky, focuses on the collective denial of the events of 1948. She is an Israeli who grew up in a settlement in the West Bank and now has come to understand the Israeli occupation and its implication for Palestinians. As well as telling of her awakening, the film tells the story of Trevor Tong, Parnas and Enon Oynman, two war veterans, as they tackle their denial of their actions in the war against Palestine. Sandra White and I were interviewed here in the Scottish Parliament by the director for an introduction to the film and as co-conveners of the cross-party group for Palestine along with Jim Hume and Sandra Urquhart. I know that the CPG is determined to contribute to exposing the truth of the injustice too. Initiatives to build the mutual respect and understanding are essential and there are many. One such is the West Eastern Divan Orchestra founded by Daniel Barenboin and Edward Seid. The aim of the orchestra is to promote the understanding between Israelis and Palestinians and pave the way for a peaceful and fair solution. In these and so many other ways, which we don't have time to go into today, young people in Israel can surely start to understand the essence of that Chinese proverb. They are the Israeli electorate of the future. Of course this is only a small part of working towards a just solution, but I believe that it is a significant one. Without trust, nothing stands, but the trust must be based on truth. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I congratulate Sandra White on this motion. Here we are again discussing Gaza, and it is not in the positive terms that we would like to be. Of course we welcome the UN report. It is an authoritative world body, as Sandra White referred to, but I have to say that the content will surprise no one. This discussion should be about people and the effect. Eight years of blockade, as has been alluded to, is three wars in six years, and the strange phrase accelerated de-development of Gaza Strip. Clearly there are human consequences. It was talked about often in abstract terms, but the blockade is very real. There are 1.8 million Palestinians, and that is expected to grow to 2.1 million by 2020. The motion talks about justice, and that is what I would like to focus on. I am going to talk briefly about the investment programme. I first want to talk about the arms trade. The arms trade that the world over has a pernicious effect on humanity. It is not an issue for others. It is an issue for Scotland. It is an issue for now. Sandra White asked what we can do more. We can commend the Scottish Government for the support that is shown to Gaza, but we can also legitimately criticise the Scottish Government who last month gave £2.5 million to a military co-operation that made $3.614 billion profit. That is what the co-operation is called Lockheed Martin. I looked at its website today and it says, Lockheed Martin is proud of the significant role it has fulfilled in the security of the state of Israel. The company is proud of the C-130 and F-16 aircraft that are faithfully serving the Israel Air Force since the 1970s and 1980s. £2.5 million could have done a lot of good in Gaza. I looked at one of the many aid organisations that were providing assistance there. Many families in Gaza are literally on the bread line, unable to cover the basic costs of living. Our family sponsorship project will help 120 displaced families with rent, food and medical expenses and encourage them to sponsor a family a month for £200. That sum of money would be nine years of support for that group, nine years of support for those families. Of course, it is not alone with that particular company that we have the Raytheon and Glenrothes and its involvement there. Although some of us will be uncomfortable with the talk of that and the arms trade and the fact that the white paper mentioned the growth of the arms trade in Scotland, we must link our fine words about peaceful resolution of humanity with our deeds. I encourage people to effectively support Gaza through boycott, divestment and sanctions. That is a movement that started in 2005 and was inspired by South Africa. There is an example of where you can see positive development. Israel's regime is one of occupation, colonialism and apartheid, and it is attacking the basics of living. Actions speak louder in words, so let us speak by our actions. Shamefully, our own parliamentary pension scheme has increased 35 per cent in the last two years. Its investment is now over half a million in arms companies, so that is something that we need to do. We need to continue to condemn the collective punishment and we must stop. I have to say the side that I am on. I am on the side of proper housing for everyone, proper health and including the mental health for everyone, proper water supply for everyone, a positive future for everyone. That is nothing to do with race, religion or geography. I am happy to condemn violence and I think that it is discussion in words and debate like this that will move things forward. I congratulate Sandra White for bringing the debate. I congratulate Sandra White for bringing the debate. I know that she has been a relentless campaigner for the cause of the Palestinian people, both here and indeed visiting there, but I also think that it is important that she raises this particular report. It is not a report from those who would be accused of being standard bearers for the Palestinian cause. It is not simply a United Nations organisation, but it is a trade and development board. People who are looking at it are not necessarily from the point of view of the rights and wrongs that go back over generations in the Middle East, but are coming at the point of view from an economic involvement, from the practical developments that it has upon the civic structure, the civic society and the humanity that lives there. Therefore, it has to be taken cognisance of, it deserves far more reporting than it has to date, and I think that she does a great service in ensuring that it is raised in this Parliament. I want to concentrate on two particular issues. First of all, the nature of the conflict that we are seeing in Gaza, because what we have is a low intensity war in a high density population. The nature of the conflict is ebdon flowed as into fardas have come and gone, as rockets have rained down. Sometimes it has been very low intensity, sometimes it has been very high intensity, but it has been waged upon people, not simply from land, but by sea and by air, because Gaza is surrounded on all sides and dealt with quite harshly by Israeli defence forces. We also have to remember that it is a very small area, as John Finnie mentioned, 1.8 million people living in 360 square kilometres, 25 miles long at its highest and between 3.7 and 7.5 miles wide at its widest points. Those people are suffering as a war is pursued at whatever level. It varies in intensity, but it has been on-going when the deaths and injuries are significant. There are, of course, bases in which Israel will say that they are attacked and rockets come out. I put on record my condemnation of the rockets that are fired into Israeli civilian areas by those from there, but it has to be said that, first of all, the response by Israel is entirely disproportionate and goes way beyond what could ever be countenanced. Secondly, as anybody can tell you, if you put a cat in a corner then it will scratch and if you treat the people in Gaza like that then nothing else can be expected. However, it is not just the damage and the loss of life. That report that Sandra White has raised here, in 2014 the operation carried out there resulted in 18,000 housing units destroyed or severely damaged, 26 schools destroyed, 122 damaged, 15 hospitals and 45 primary health centres damaged. They are wiping out the infrastructure that civic society requires in Gaza to be able to survive. That takes me on to the second point, because what Israel has created there is in all intents and purposes a bantu stan. It is a society that cannot be expected to live as it is because it requires to have access to areas beyond its borders that have been encroached upon by Israel. It is not simply the access to employment because unemployment is massive there. 80 per cent for young women and 44 per cent for the whole of the society. However, it is access for basic matters such as water because the water does not come from within the Gaza area but it comes from without. That is why, as I am conscious of time, we have to realise that civic society in the limited space that Israel has allowed the Palestinian people in Gaza cannot be sustained. The final warning from that Trade and Development Board report for the United Nations was that, if that continues and the Palestinian population rises to 2.1 million, by the time we get to 2020, and that is only five years away, then life will not be tolerable in Gaza. Things have to change. Israel has to allow Gaza to be able to live, develop and breathe and to have a civic society that can be maintained. I now call Jamie McGregor to be followed by Malcolm Chisholm. Thank you very much, Deputy Presiding Officer. I too congratulate Sandra White on securing today's debate. Like the UK Government, I readily recognise the severe suffering of the inhabitants of Gaza and want to see urgent action to alleviate the impact of occupation and improve the humanitarian situation. All of us must feel real sympathy for their plight. The UK is one of the leading international donors in terms of supporting the much needed reconstruction efforts in Gaza and providing significant amounts of emergency assistance. We have provided 350 million from the UK to build Palestinian institutions, deliver essential services and relieve the humanitarian situation. I am not saying that this is enough. We believe that other international donors should fulfil in full the financial pledges they have made to provide support to Gaza as the UK is doing. It is hugely disappointing that only about a third of the international aid promised at the 2014 Cairo Conference in Palestine, reconstructing Gaza, as it was called, has so far been delivered. We are pleased that Israel has taken some steps to ease the restrictions in Gaza, but we want to see more done to allow an increase in exports from Gaza, expand water supplies, which Kenny MacAskill just mentioned, and ease further the restrictions on the movement of people, fishing, electricity and water waste treatment. It cannot be acceptable to anybody that power outages in Gaza last for up to 12 hours per day and 120,000 are still without a water supply, but we can believe too that some action is needed from both sides and so we continue to call on the Palestinian Authority, led by President Abbas, to take steps to return to Gaza and advance reconciliation. The Palestinians must also take steps to address Israel's significant and legitimate security concerns. We should all recognise Israel has faced an unacceptable barrage of rockets from Hamas and other militant groups, and that it is unsustainable.  At the end of the day, the aspirations of the Palestinian people cannot be fully realised until there is an end to the occupation, and that will come only through negotiations, however hard that might be, however far away from a negotiated settlement we might be, and I recognise recent events, suffering and violence on both sides make it seem an even harder task. A negotiated two-state solution and a resolution through peaceful means is the only way of achieving any sustainable long-term outcome for the region, making progress towards the two-state solution remains a foreign policy priority for the UK. The international community must strive harder than ever to work with both sides to find a comprehensive peace agreement that delivers an independent Palestine alongside a safe and secure Israel. We must not lose sight of this aim, and all of us, including members in this parliament, should support it and urge both sides to commit to meaningful talks. There is no alternative, and, like Sandra White, I pray that the wise council of solemnonic proportions will prevail and that the mutual respect and understanding that she mentions in her motion do lay the cornerstones for a happier future. Many thanks. Before I continue with the debate, I am due to the number of members who still wish to speak. I am minded to accept a motion under rule 8.14.3 from Sandra White that the debate will be extended by up to 30 minutes. Would you care to move the motion? I am going to put this motion to the chamber. I do not think that we will need 30 minutes, but I do not want to curtail the debate, so is that agreed? It is, thank you. I now call Malcolm Trism to be followed by John Maye. I am first to apologise for having to leave very soon, because I am chairing the cross-party group on rare diseases, which was due to start at 5.30, but I cannot start till I am there. I congratulate Sandra White on bringing forward the motion and reminding us once again of the desperate situation in Gaza. It is graphically described in the UN conference on trade and development report. Many of the facts have already been described, but it is important to keep stating those facts and to remind people of them, because many people wish to put them from their minds. 1.8 million Palestinians live in Gaza, and more than 80 per cent are aid-dependent living and poverty, and 61 per cent are food insecure. There is no chance to grow a viable economy as the vital materials needed to plant crops and rebuild infrastructure are stocked at the checkpoints. For example, Glober, Shelter and Cluster, who work with bodies such as UNCHR to house displaced people, estimate that less than 1 per cent of the construction materials required to rebuild houses destroyed and damaged during hostilities have so far entered Gaza. There is no growth, no renewal and no jobs. In 2014, the unemployment rate was 43 per cent, the highest in the world, and youth unemployment exceeded 60 per cent. That should not have been allowed to continue for so long, and it is a crime against multiple articles in the Geneva Convention that Israel has perpetuated those conditions. As an occupying force, they have used the policy of separation and the illegal blockade to rip apart the economy, severing the links between Gaza and the West Bank, and blocking off the important economic and cultural ties that once defined a vibrant people. Under article 33 of the 4th Geneva Convention, it states that the collective punishment of a civilian population is a war crime. What we are seeing now with the population on the brink of starvation has been described as such by the EU and the UN. It is in contravention of Israel's obligations under international humanitarian law, and it is a mark of shame on the international community that many do not turn their heads to it until the next rocket is fired or the next aerial assault is launched. The crisis in Gaza is a slow daily march towards utter devastation, with each war bringing unlivable reality closer. Those bright and hopeful children deserve better, and their voices must be heard in making the case for change. There is a different story to be told of Gaza and her people, one of potential of resilience and a tenacity to grasp hope in the ruins of despair. Gaza's children are among the most literate in the Arab world, and they are imbued with a passion for learning. The culture and tradition of their land, the close connection to the sea and to the tending of their crops, survives in the pages of their books. The height of their ambition is matched only by the height of the walls that lock them in. Such is the nature of this conflict. Natural gas is just one area that could help to rebuild Gaza's economic structure. There are many other examples in the agricultural sector, in housebuilding, in teaching, in medicine and fishing. There is nothing more heartbreaking than seeing the old men at the waterfront of Gaza City looking out to the sea where they have fished for generations. They stare out to sea knowing that the maritime blockade at three nautical miles is marked with Israeli military vessels that have been known to shoot at boats and destroy nets. The fear and sadness is worn into their faces. They are losing hope for themselves and for future generations. Israel must lift the blockade immediately. They must honour their obligations as an occupying force in the occupied Palestinian territories. They must then allow a sustainable economy to grow and lift the land out of its current crisis. If they do not, then further political deterioration and conflict will be inevitable. The enormity of this crisis cannot be overestimated. I join with others in this chamber today, calling for the international community to put pressure on Israel as a matter of immediate priority. Many thanks. I now call John Mason to be followed by Kara Hilton. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I thank Sandra White for bringing this debate today. I have to say that I think I slightly more considerate of the tone in her speech than I had detected in the debate in the motion itself. I have to say that I was not particularly wanting to speak in this debate because I have spoken before on Israel and Palestine and I think I have made my position fairly clear. That position is that I believe we should be doing all we can, whether that be Scotland, the UK or the EU, to bring about peace in the Middle East. I do not believe that peace will be brought about by giving unqualified support to either side. I also do not think that we can achieve peace in the region without involving other players such as Iran and Egypt to suggest that the problems in Gaza are solely linked to Israel and Palestine is just not the case. However, in reading this motion, I did feel that I should speak with the hope of giving a slightly different angle from the back benches. This is a subject that stirs a lot of emotion on both sides, but, hopefully, we are mature enough as a Parliament to accept that there are two sides to this argument and both sides have a degree of validity in their cause. I would just like to focus on a few words that appear in the motion. One is justice or a just solution, and I certainly hope that we do all support justice. Justice in its own can be quite a harsh concept. It is one of the words on our mace in this Parliament, but it is not the only word. Compassion is another word on the mace, and I think that we need both of them when we are talking about Israel and Gaza. With ourselves, I think that we should be looking at the situation of seeking both justice with compassion, and I think that we should be encouraging both sides to be seeking justice along with compassion for the other side. The second word and perhaps the key word why I felt that I had to speak today was the use of the word genocide in the motion. It is a strong word, and I do not think that we should use it lightly. I think that we are all prepared to use it of the Nazis during the Holocaust in relation to their treatment of both Jews and other groups. Thank you very much for taking the intervention. I just wanted to read out what the dictionary definition of genocide is. It is deliberate killing or elimination of all of part of racial, ethnic, religious, cultural or national group. I think that that is what has been happening in Gaza, and I make no excuse or apology for using the word genocide in this manner. I will continue what I was going to say, which I think will answer or at least respond to Sandra White's point. I myself did use the word genocide in a motion that I lodged about its minions in Turkey in 1915, and that provoked a strong response from the Turkish Consulate in Scotland. It is a word that we can and should use where appropriate, but I think that we need to be careful not to use it too loosely. Genocide is also defined in article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide from 1948 as, quote, any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. The Nazis did intend to destroy the Jews, but I do not think that there is any evidence or serious suggestion that Israel intends to destroy the Palestinians. That is not just an academic debate that we are engaged in today. Criticism of Israel may not be intended to be an attack on the Jews, but in practice it can be perceived that way. The Jews in Glasgow in the west of Scotland tell us that they feel more threatened at the present time than they have done in living memory. I am not here today to defend the Israeli Government in its actions. They are well able to do that themselves, but I think that we need to decide what our aim is when we are having debates like this and more generally when we are considering the Middle East situation. I hope that we want to do all that we can to bring peace to that region, and I hope that we want to be as supportive as we can be towards Jews living in Scotland. The final word that I very much agree with is the final phrase in the motion that talks about why the council will prevail. Wisdom is also one of the words in our mace, and I very much hope that we can see more of that in relation to both Israel and Gaza. I congratulate Sandra White on securing tonight's debate and also declaring interest as a member of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity campaign. Last week, Sandra White and I met Jim Malone and representatives of the Fire Brigades Union to discuss his current situation in Gaza and across Palestine. I would like to begin by wishing Jim and his colleagues well on their trip to Palestine later this week to support Palestinian firefighters in Nablus, Ramallah and Hebron and Israeli firefighters in west Jerusalem and to complete their documentary, Firefighters Under the Occupation. I know that the minister and indeed the Scottish Government are supportive of their visit, and I hope that all across the chamber will wish them well. It's just over a year since the Israeli Government's Operation Protective Edge destroyed the lives, homes, schools, hospitals and livelihoods of thousands of men, women and children in Gaza. After eight years of Israeli blockades, the United Nations Development Agency report says that almost all the population of Gaza have been left destitute, warning that Gaza could be uninhabitable within just five years.  It displaced half a million people and left much of Gaza in ruins. According to the report, 20,000 Palestinian homes were destroyed or damaged, 148 schools, 15 hospitals, 48 healthcare centres, 247 factories, 300 commercial centres, fully or partially destroyed. Gaza's only power station sustained severe damage. Israel's three military operations over just six years, together with the economic blockade of Gaza, mean that the economic recovery is simply impossible. It's therefore no surprise to learn that Gaza now has its highest unemployment rate in the world, standing at 43 per cent. Kenny MacAskill highlighted the point before about eight out of 10 women being out of work as a result of this. A staggering 95 per cent of the population in Gaza don't have access to clean, safe drinking water. 72 per cent of households are affected by food insecurity, with more than half receiving food aid. The economic blockade imposed by Israel has devastated Gaza, isolating its people from the outside world, forcing Gaza and its population to rely on international aid. More than half of the population in Gaza are under the age of 18, and thanks to the blockade, those children who should have everything to look forward to have been denied the very basic essentials of life, collectively punished for being Palestinians and denied the basic human rights that every child should have and does have under international law. The time has come for Governments to take effective economic and political action to ensure compliance with international law, to force the Israeli Government to lift the blockade in Gaza and to halt the illegal settlements in the bulldozing of Palestinian homes, to end their apartheid policies that are destroying people's lives, and to start respecting the rights and the dignity of the Palestinian people to take real action to ensure a two-state solution that respects the security, peace and freedom of both the Palestinian and Israeli population. Sadly, the comments that we have seen by President Netanyahu in recent days and weeks does not inspire me with much hope of progress. One of my constituents, Mia Oday, has hit the headlines in the Herald in the national today with a powerful letter to J.K. Rowling highlighting why a campaign on boycott, disinvestment and sanctions is essential of her to peacefully encourage Israel to comply with international law. I would urge all members who have not already read it to read her letter today. I hope that the Scottish Government will look at using the powers of procurement and divestment to support the Palestinian people and to address the issues raised by John Finnie in relation to the arms trade, to our pension funds and to support companies such as Raytheon in Fife. I would encourage consumers to use their purchase and power to boycott Israeli goods and to send a message to Israel just as we did to South Africa that is enough. This is not about taking sides, this is about human rights, it is about justice and it is about peace. Every day that we do not act, both the Palestinian and the Israeli people are paying the price of that failure. We have to use every influence that we have to make it clear to Israel that the blockades, the settlements, the collective punishment and the breaches of international law have got to stop. My time is running out in the debate, just as time is running out for the people of Gaza unless we act. I thank again to Sandra White for securing this important debate tonight. Many thanks and can I now call on Homza Yousaf to respond to the debate please, minister? Seven minutes or so please. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I thank Sandra White for the motion that she brought to Parliament. I also congratulate her on her speech, which I thought was very measured in the tone and sticking, of course, to that important issue of the UN report. I also congratulate members across the chamber who I thought took a very measured tone on what can be an often, quite rightly and understandably, emotive issue. Attempts to resolve the situation in Israel and Palestine have been underway for more than twice the time that I have been alive—60 years—and the argument could be made, unfortunately, that we are as far away and as distant as ever to a peaceful resolution. That is a damning indictment on the international community and a damning indictment on us all. The deadlock brings devastating human consequences, as many members here have highlighted. We have seen, of course, the incitement and the upsurge in that violence in the last few weeks. Dozens of people have been killed, hundreds wounded in the latest wave of hostilities alone. The Scottish Government unreservedly condemns all acts of violence, which have a party that is perpetrated by Muslim, Christian, Jewish, atheist, Palestinian or Israeli. It does not matter that the death of an innocent person, of course, is to be condemned and mourned in equality. Palestinians in Israel deserve peace and stability, but Isandra White's motion highlights that, even during periods of relative calm, that is not the reality for hundreds of thousands of people in the region. The UN report, which the motion focuses on, cites and makes for troubling reading. Gaza's economy has been battered by years of blockade and successive military offences. Social economic conditions are at their lowest point since 1967. Unemployment in Gaza is at its highest level on record. Hamas is, of course, not a blameless party at all, with a recent UN report accusing them of war crimes for which they must answer, but the bleakness of the situation is undoubtedly exacerbated by the fact that last summer's military assault did enormous damage to Gaza's infrastructure and to the very assets that could help local people to rebuild their economy and move towards self-sufficiency. Hospitals, health centre schools, sewage infrastructure homes have been destroyed or damaged in significant number, causing living conditions to deteriorate further. As Cara Hylta and others have said, making Gaza almost uninhabitable. I agree with Isandra White that the situation in Gaza is unsustainable. I would go as far as this Government believes. In fact, Gaza has been turned into an open air prison, the largest in the world. The Scottish Government unequivocally condemns, in the strongest possible manner, the collective punishment of the people of Gaza. The UN report underlines the urgent need for political progress. There has been some high-level progress since the report was published in July. Last month, for example, St Lucia became the latest country to recognise Palestine as a state, which means that 136 of the 193 UN members now recognise Palestine. Two thirds of the world's countries recognise Palestine as a state. It is no secret that the Scottish Government believes that the UK should join that number. It is the logical fallacy and inconsistency of the highest order to say that you believe in a two-state solution while refusing to recognise one of the states involved. The UK Government should change that stance immediately. Those might be viewed as symbolically important steps, but they do not, in themselves, improve necessarily the situation on the ground for those in Gaza. To secure a lasting peace in Israel and Palestine and thereby stability and prosperity for the people who live there, a sustainable negotiated settlement is needed. Yet meaningful peace talks have stalled in faith that they can deliver as faltering amongst local people. I read with interest, according to a survey carried out last month by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research, that fewer than half the people in Gaza support the peace process, and fewer than 27 per cent believe that negotiations are the most effective approach to secure a Palestinian state. Those are developments that the international community must do, and it is utmost to reverse, to help to convince people in both Palestine and Israel that their interests are far better served by a negotiation than by violence. I therefore welcome last week's intervention by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who acknowledged the real anger and fear on both sides, but emphasised that only returning to the peace process can prevent the current crisis from worsening. In terms of the Scottish Government's own actions, which a number of members have raised in question, we have consistently condemned obstacles to progressing the peace process, like the continued expansion of illegal settlements. We use that term deliberately. We view the settlements as illegal. We have strongly discouraged trade and investment from legal settlements and, last year, published guidance for public purchasers on dealing with companies that may be involved in legal settlements, where Kara Hilton asked about our procurement guidelines. That is certainly one step in the right direction. We have also directly supported the people of Gaza. Last year, we gave £0.5 million to the UN's Gaza flash appeal to help to provide water, food, shelter and medical assistance. We stood ready to provide medical assistance as well and put in place plans for casualties of violence in Gaza to receive specialist care in Scottish hospitals. While doing that, what we can within the limitations of our devolved competence, we have also repeatedly called on the UK Government to use its influence to help to relieve the suffering in Palestine, whether by taking in refugees or indeed calling for a ban on exports of arms to Israel. That includes, I should say, to John Finnie and to Kara Hilton, those companies that will be based in Scotland. I am about to address his point on Lockheed Martin, if he wishes me to do that, because I thought that his points were well made. I do not know 100 per cent about the issue, but I think that criticism may well be fair enough that, of course, as a Government, we would strive to do our utmost in terms of the highest standards of ethical business. If there is still work for us to do that, I am more than happy to discuss that with the member. Within Scotland, the Scottish Government does not tolerate violence or extremism in any form, just as we condemn it in Israel and Palestine. We condemn it here in Scotland when it is directed to any of our own Palestinian, Israeli, Jewish or Muslim communities. We all hope, Presiding Officer, for peace in Israel and Palestine, but the anger and frustration that fuels much of the current violence will not subside unless there is hope for a better future. It is hard to see how such hope can exist when the conditions in Gaza described in the UN report make the prospects for the people of Palestine so bleak. We urge all sides to work together to bring an end to the violence, to allow the people of Gaza and wider Palestine to build the kind of prosperous future so vital for a long-term sustainable peace. I think that Kara Hilton said it well when she said that this is not an issue of being pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli. This is about being pro-human rights and pro-international law, and that is where the Scottish Government lies. Thank you Minister, and that concludes Sandra White's debate as Gaza, whether it is people perish. I now close this meeting of Parliament.