Mitt liv som Tobin

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.

We were based out of Cantwell, Alaska, a tiny town of something like 117 residents. One hundred seventeen—that's what it said on the sign. When we moved in, it was news in town. All the kids from the house next door ran over and sat on our porch.

We were living in a log cabin. Actually, we didn't live in it--we set up tents in the woods surrounding the cabin. Inside the cabin was a fancy Sun workstation with a flatscreen display (this was before you'd ever seen a flatscreen display, I'll bet) with fancy data analysis software on it, and our other fancy equipment. And not-so-fancy equipment: picks and shovels and so forth. (One time we broke a pick--after one too many whacks at the permafrost, its nose bent forward, "gonzo'd". We drove 300 miles to buy a new one.)

We did our cooking on the porch, always grilled. Doug was a die-hard carnivore, refusing to eat anything except meat. Meat and baby carrots, which he loved so much as to exclaim, "These are so good, they are like an honorary meat!"





Life in Cantwell wasn't half bad.

Remember that movie Twister? No, not the get-to-know-each-other party game, but the movie where a bunch of crazy guys goes driving around chasing tornadoes? Well, our job here is kind of similar. However, instead of driving around the midwest chasing tornadoes, we sit on the beach and chase earthquakes.

Yesterday started out rather amusingly. I came into Todd's office to ask some questions.

Todd: "Let's walk and talk.. we have to go on a venture."

Tobin: "Okay. I want you to tell me about the Vee-Orb Router."

Todd: "It uses the BGP protocol, just like routing on the internet. Hey, did you bring climbing gear today?"

Tobin: "Nobody told me to bring climbing gear.. anyway, how much of VORB router is implemented?"

Meanwhile Todd unloaded a couple full-body climbing harnesses and a hard-hat from his trunk.

Tobin: "Where are we going?"

Todd: "On a venture!"

We walked down to the lower building of the Scripps institute and took the stairs down the basement. We visited Jose who was pumping down a vacuum in a bell jar to test a new, ultra-sensitive seismometer that essentially uses a michelson interferometer to measure tiny vibrations, and air resistance has an effect on the spring constant, you see.. so the air had to be pumped out.

Todd opened a hatchway in the floor, and here we found a gigantic hole. Supposedly there was at the bottom of this hole a large room with a vibration-isolated floor. One-by-one we climbed down the ladder into this hole.. it reminded me very much of the entry to that cave in the X-Files movie.. you know, down to where the "alien life presense" was lurking.

Todd entering the abyss:

Todd: "I've reached the bottom... I don't see any .. passageways."

It turned out that the room we were told of did not exist, or at least we didn't find any evidence of it. Nonetheless it was a rather thrilling and unexpected adventure. Here's the hole -- that speck is the lamp at the bottom:

* * *

Usually the earthquakes we're chasing are small or far away. But yesterday there was an actual earthquake right here, and all hell broke loose -- albeit in an incredibly organised fashion. We were outside on the beach, drinking coffee at the time. In fact, I was slurping a delicious iced double mocha latte at the time and happily hacking away at some crazed C code from another decade (on my laptop computer which happens to be named "hacktop", by the way), when all of the sudden F and various other persons jumped up and exclaimed, "Tiiiiime to get to work!" as they all ran back towards the lab.

Tobin: "Wha-Whaa..? I am working!"

F: "Didn't you feel it??"

Tobin: "Feel what?"

I guess I was in another world, one full of hacktops and delicious fresh pressed espresso and that delightful color of the ocean shimmering in the sun, a world in which I was completely oblivious to this alleged earthquake.

So rather than calmly looking at the "wiggles" (as we so lovingly refer to the seismic signals) from hacktop, I ran inside with everybody else. But I'll paste in some wiggles here for your enjoyment:

Already the phone was ringing incessantly with various press enquiries. Already a betting pool as to the magnitude was set up. The big flatpanel display showing automatic earthquake locations attracted a whole crowd of people.

P:(urgently) "Have you got a solution yet?"

F: "Not yet.. Okay, looks like it was off the coast here.."

P: "USGS is reporting Mojave desert.. "

G: "No, we have a location off Pt. Loma .. out to sea. "

...

A pretty exciting day at the earthquake lab, all around.

* * * *

P.S. here's to the novelty of having my (almost) own office: