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John Baez visits LIGO

Tumbleweeds massed on the LIGO beamtube

Awesomely, theoretical physicist and old-school (usenet!) blogger John Baez describes a visit to LIGO Livingston Observatory in the latest posting of his "This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics." This describes where I will be working for a year starting in August 2007, and is an apt description, too, of the LIGO observatory in Hanford, Washington where I spent the last week.

The place was pretty lonely. During the week lots of scientists work here, but this was Saturday, and on weekends there's just a skeleton crew of two. There's usually not much to do now that the experiment is up and running.

Yup. For the last couple days, one of those two was me.

As Joe Giaime later said, there have been no "Jodie Foster moments" like in the movie Contact, where the scientists on duty suddenly see a signal, turn on the suspenseful background music, and phone the President.

Hilariously, a email recently went out urging everyone to be careful about writing too explicitly about suspected gravitational wave detections in our log books, since those log books are readable by the public and any suspected discovery must be carefully checked, a process likely to take months. The idea that we would see a gravitational wave detection, in real time, from the control room—it seems ridiculously outlandish.

There's just too much data analysis required to see any signal in real time: data from both Livingston and Hanford is sent to Caltech, and then people grind away at it. So, about the most exciting thing that happens is when the occasional tiny earthquake throws the laser beam out of phase lock.

Too true! Earthquakes and storms cause much of the excitement. There are lots of seismometers at each LIGO observatory to monitor them, and I entertain myself processing data from the seismometers, as they are guaranteed to detect events every couple of minutes. I made a nifty contraption that shows where seismic waves are coming from:


See nibot_lab for an explanation

My arrival at LIGO Livingston is to coincide with the end of the current science run, this period of quiet listening and continuous recording. The place should become a hive of activitiy: the current LIGO will be partially disassembled, and during the year I'm there, a series of upgrades will make it much more sensitive. Instead of sitting in the dark listening for a faint signal from space, I'll be hacking on lasers and optics and all that jazz.

As for John Baez—he's a bit of a hero. I actually wrote to him when I was applying to grad school and he encouraged me to apply there at UC Riverside where he is a professor. In the end I didn't—it was late in the game, Riverside's not so appealing, and applying to a math department seemed a tad far-fetched. But I still read This Weeks Finds with a bit of a bittersweet sense of a path not taken.