The Nobel Prize in Physics that wasn't

Once in a while one has to lift the gaze from the alleys and streets and set the eyes higher for a bigger view. Why not as big as the entire universe?

The Tuesday announcement of the Nobel Prize in Physics seemed like a good occasion to do takes this view, because it was widely expected to go to a team that used a very practical and beautifully architectural idea to prove Einstein's highly theoretical concept of gravitational waves. Exactly 100 years ago Einstein also cautioned that those waves could never be experimentally proven. Well, he was wrong, but so were those who were sure the proof what get the Nobel Prize.

Rainer Weiss (left) and Kip Thorne, right

Ligo, precision architecture

This is about the celebration of two pieces of architecture worth $505 million that had broken ground in 1994 and had to overcome a bunch of  scientific, financial and congressional hurdles until they were positioned as a perfect L each 2.5 miles (4km) long.

And not only is this a very large piece of symmetrical architecture, it also comes in duplicate. For scientific reasons and also for nice geopolitical balance, the facilities are a set of identical twins working in unison as a single “observatory”: one in Hanford in southeastern Washington State and the other in rural Livingston, Louisiana, collaboratively operated between CalTech and MIT. Both facilities also display symmetry a classic element of architecture. 

The architecture that so perfectly represents a set of x and y coordinates is known in scientific circles as LIGO, or Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.

In February this year the experimental verification of gravitational waves was officially announced. The effect had first seen by Italian researcher Marco Drago on his computer monitor as a less than half second flicker in far away Hannover, Germany on September 14, 2015. The laser beams didn't bounce back at their common origin in perfect synchronicity, but one was delayed ever so slightly by a wave of gravity that had hit it.

That signal caused Rainer Weiss, 84 to scream "Oh my God" so loudly, that his wife and son who at the time were on vacation with him, came running to see what happened. Weiss looked at the signal on a computer monitor, the moment that crowned over 40 years of his efforts.

Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne and Ronald Drever had worked since 1975 on the idea that gravitational waves could be tricked into showing up after all. Weiss had dreamed up the idea of actually building an Inferometer with students at MIT. He convinced theorist Thorne about the practicality of his idea in a hotel room inside Washington's beltway when Kip Thorne couldn't find a bed on his own and camped out with Weiss. It should take 40 years before the idea was vetted, funded, built, tested and a reality that actually worked. It worked because it obeyed tolerances that went far beyond what architects usually deal with.

The laser arrangement could show length deviations of a billionth of the diameter of an atom over a length of 4 km (2.48548 miles).  The two very precisely 4000 meter long tubes arranged in in a very exact 90 degrees, one of the larger pieces of architecture ever conceived by a humans, (The large Hadron collider is much bigger and more expensive, but it is underground and stuff below ground is often not considered architecture.) Rainer Weiss sees himself much more as a builder than a theorist, just like an architect. He received all kinds of science prizes this year, but, alas, not the Nobel. It may take longer as well.

The September 2015 observation needed 5 months of intense scrutiny before it could lead to an official post Mardi-Gras announcement. Too many external factors had to be safely eliminated, everything from the rumble of trucks to tectonic vibrations, fluctuations in the electric net and thermal movements of the atoms making up the mirrors.

The measurement had been obtained as a surprise before the official operation of the upgraded LIGO facility had begun. What was seen on the computer was the gravitational footprint of the spectacular collision of two black holes that had been super-suns 1.3 billion years ago which ended in an invisible black hole in a galaxy so far away that it would take its light to travel 1.3 billion years. Aside from black holes not emitting light, no human piece of equipment measuring light can detect anything that far back, which is why gravitational waves are such a discovery: Gravitational waves now allow to "listen" to the very early history of the universe in addition in detecting it through microwave background radiation.

what happens inside those long "legs" of the L

The US could use a little science booster after the Higgs Boson had been discovered in Switzerland, even though CERN and LIGO are, of course, international collaborations which both include the US.

Still, CERN is a manifestation of Europeans being able to build that collider whereas America's own Texas collider tunnel had been abandoned after it had been partially dug because it was deemed a too expensive boondoggle. So, as a kind of balancing justice the large scale inference detector was built in the US, not in Germany, the birthplace of Weiss and the home of Heinz Billing, who had an early prototype of the interferometric gravitational wave detector. who is now 102 years old.

Einstein in 1921, six years after describing General Relativity

There are plenty of articles that explain gravity as a weak force and why it is so hard to work it into the standard model of physics. Einstein needed the construct of "space-time" and a fourth dimension to describe gravity in a more complete manner than Newton had been able to do it. That fourth dimension is still pretty absent in the thinking of architects and urban designers, (many students struggle to think beyond two dimensions) but that could change eventually.

The detection of gravitational ripples opens also a new dimension to how humans can observe the universe. No longer limited to light and electromagnetic background radiation, now darkness comes into focus, specifically dark holes and through gravitational disturbances the first 400,000 years of the universe when it was still opaque and light couldn't travel.

The successful measurement is also as symbol for engineering perseverance. For the past 30 years, gravitational wave detectors were built, but failed to detect extra-galactic signals.  Scientists and engineers returned to the drawing board again and again to refine their instruments. 

But still, why should one care? 

The question of the practical utility of such expensive research has been asked time and again.

One response is, that what sets humans apart from the rest of nature is inquiry beyond the immediate needs of food, mating and defense. One could say that humans are condemned to acquire knowledge ever after eating from "the tree of knowledge" that got them expelled from "paradise" if we understand paradise as a term for of being in perfect sync with nature. Without better knowledge of natural systems including the universe humans will stand no chance to develop sustainable and resilient systems that can exist in harmony with nature.

Experimental physics has also become gigantic architecture
Virgo Collaboration/EGO, an Italian detector 
for gravitational waves near Pisa

LIGO tubes, installation of baffles

Another response: Without what was then also exceedingly esoteric research of Newton, Faraday, Maxwell and Einstein one  could not read this article on an electronic device, nor would there be electricity, without it there would be no radio, no telephone, no GPS and not much of what is called civilization today.

It isn't unreasonable to extrapolate this trajectory forward and assume that finding the Higgs or proof of gravitational ripples will become in due time equally useful building blocks in the grand human endeavor of gaining knowledge, a quest which will never be finished. Electricity, electromagnetism and GPS already have practical applications, if gravity research can one day help cities become better places, well, that is still "in the stars".

LIGO's infinitely small measurement is a big story for anybody who cares about knowledge and discovery with meaning far beyond expert physicists.

The former President of Israel Shimon Perez who died last week age 93, was interviewed when he was still president at age 91. What was his secret of staying young? "Curiosity" he said. Eager to move forward and see what's next. Learning new stuff, no matter what the age. This is a lesson very much in need in the current US election season in a world that at times seems to be dominated by fear and retrospection instead of curiosity and moving forward. Too bad LIGO didn't get the Nobel.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA

updated 10-5-16 in response to comments and suggestions  from Dr. David H. Shoemaker, Leader, Advanced LIGO Director, MIT LIGO Laboratory, Senior Research Scientist, MITKavli Institute

Shoemaker was part of a panel that in February of this year briefed the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology on the LIGO effort and how it is expected to benefit science and innovation in the future.
Got Gravitational Waves? Science
Gravitational Waves explained (video)
Gravity waves from black holes verify Einstein’s prediction, Science News

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