LIGO is the big science program that's attempting to detect gravity waves that are predicted to still be floating around from the Big Bang and while the program has been in development for around twenty years they are just getting ready fir the first run of data later this year. The head of LIGO for most of the time was Kip Thorne, a contemporary of Stephen Hawking and the science advisor on the recent movie, Interstellar. As fate would have it, Kip Thorne was also the one who convinced Carl Sagan that a worm hole would be far preferable to a black hole for interstellar travel (doh!) in Sagan's book Contact, which was made into a movie starring Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey, star of Interstellar., here twenty years later. Anyway, LIGO requires the greatest sensitivity, thus the 20 year development, of any previous science experiment in order to have a snowball's chance in hell of detecting the really really faint gravity waves left over from the Big Bang, as one might expect. The vibration isolation devices are enough to make an engineer weep. In the article I'm linking below I'm reasonably sure Michael will get a Big Kick out of the use of the word TUNING as it pertains to LIGO.
The latest LIGO news:
https://www.advancedligo.mit.edu/adligo_news.html
Geoff Kait
Machina Dynamica
LIGO is the big science program that's attempting to detect gravity waves that are predicted to still be floating around from the Big Bang and while the program has been in development for around twenty years they are just getting ready fir the first run of data later this year. The head of LIGO for most of the time was Kip Thorne, a contemporary of Stephen Hawking and the science advisor on the recent movie, Interstellar. As fate would have it, Kip Thorne was also the one who convinced Carl Sagan that a worm hole would be far preferable to a black hole for interstellar travel (doh!) in Sagan's book Contact, which was made into a movie starring Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey, star of Interstellar., here twenty years later. Anyway, LIGO requires the greatest sensitivity, thus the 20 year development, of any previous science experiment in order to have a snowball's chance in hell of detecting the really really faint gravity waves left over from the Big Bang, as one might expect. The vibration isolation devices are enough to make an engineer weep. In the article I'm linking below I'm reasonably sure Michael will get a Big Kick out of the use of the word TUNING as it pertains to LIGO.
The latest LIGO news:
https://www.advancedligo.mit.edu/adligo_news.html
Geoff Kait
Machina Dynamica