LIGO and Gravitational Waves II: Nobel Lecture, December 8, 2017

The Nobel Lectures on Gravitational Waves and LIGO

“…The 2017 award of the Nobel Prize in Physics to Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish, and Kip Thorne “for decisive contributions to the Laser Interferometer Gravitational‐Wave Observatory (LIGO) detector and the observation of gravitational waves” marks an important turning point, and this is well described in the Nobel Lectures by the three laureates, published in this volume . A century after the theoretical prediction, this important consequence of general relativity has been directly tested and verified, and the shadow left by Weber is gone.…”

“…Remarkably, Weiss' interest in the topic was sparked by his desire to explain gravitational waves to the students in a course that he was teaching, and his ideas about how to build gravitational wave detectors were stimulated by that. The second Lecture by Barish focuses on the organization of the LIGO project and the current status. Of particular interest was how his involvement in the short‐lived Superconducting Super Collider project provided the experience and some of the personnel for transforming the LIGO Laboratory.…”

“…How will the scientific community be organized for this? As described in Barish's Lecture, the current approach is adapted from the high‐energy physics model: a monolithic collaboration “owns” the instrument data, exploits it scientifically, and eventually releases it for broader use. This makes sense for high‐energy physics, because those data are too complex to be understood and used by outsiders, and are only of interest to that community.…”

The sonorous beat of optical waves in a Michelson interferometer

“…Barish and K.S. Thorne [4][5][6] , Traditionally in education, the fringe patterns are observed visually and indeed their beauty is impressive and flawless.…”