What is LIGO?

13 min readJun 30, 2023

Nobel Prize in Physics laureate, Barry C. Barish

I’ll tell you about LIGO. This is what you call fundamental science, where we just have no real understanding of what we’re going to find. But in the, in our case, we had a particular mission. Einstein made a prediction in 1916, that there were something like electromagnetic waves, which is what’s lighting us up and makes our radio go and everything that has to do with gravity. And that was controversial for about 50 years. In fact, even at the time he died, it wasn’t an accepted idea. The idea was accepted when it kind of was derived right mathematically in about 1960. And since then, which is a long time, 60 more years, people have been trying to find it technically, and we finally hit the jackpot it’s about three years ago. So we saw it. He was right. And in addition, we saw it from something that itself is interesting, which is two black holes colliding on each other and creating. So those are a lot of big words, but it was quite an adventure.

Interviewer

What was it like seeing two black holes colliding?

Nobel Prize in Physics laureate, Barry C. Barish

Make it even stranger? This collision happened 1.3 billion years ago, when on earth, we were just converting from single cell to multicell 1.3 billion years to get here and we detected it here. So we saw something that happened when the earth was just beginning to have life.

Interviewer

What does that mean for us?

Nobel Prize in Physics laureate, Barry C. Barish

It means that the universe is pretty big and pretty complicated and pretty interesting.

Interviewer

What was your inspiration for Adam’s apples?

Nobel Prize in Physics laureate, Barry C. Barish

No, the film came about actually, it was a play and I have a theater company in New York after we had finished that season in the theater, and I’ve always wanted to work more in film and I’m sitting around and I’m trying to think about what to do because the economics in New York and the theater are not fun to deal with. And I said, well, you know, I’d love to make a movie. So I actually converted the play into a film and I raised enough money to do it. So the story really, I mean, checkoff as someone who has inspired a lot of people, when I looked at what I wanted to do, I said, well, if I really honored checkoff, I would have to write a film that was taking place. Now, not something that we’ll look back, like put it in the fifties or do something like that, which would have been a simple solution. Well, I felt I wanted to do

Interviewer

What inspired you to do this?

Nobel Prize in Physics laureate, Barry C. Barish

In fact, it’s the ultimate you know false information that was described on bathrooms at the beginning of the pandemic. Everyone started talking about the coronavirus, the origin of it. And how did it spread? The actually one of my colleagues had to look at my social media videos until me. My mommy would tell about to make this, you know, to our, the worst or, or use in Algeria. Let’s try to make it entertaining and like, yeah, that’s a good idea. And I met with a few colleagues in our creative department who we started discussing, how can we make this, this informative and entertaining. At the same time, we started looking at the academy article trying to write the script and try to make it storytelling. And that’s the way it started. Like, we were surprised with the amount of engagements we had with those types of videos.

People were eager to know the right information about the virus. How did it spread? Remember this? This was like almost a year ago when the pandemic started. So people needed to know the information, journalists need to take scientific information, just like what Verdi does and try to deliver it in a simpler way to the viewers, in order for them to understand the importance of science. I’m a very strong believer in science, and I believe we should educate or help educate people and deliver this information to them in a simple, the simplest way possible in order for them to understand what the task would be also in a storytelling way. And this is a big challenge, you know, to, to explain that the entire life cycle of divided,

Interviewer

How do you keep everything relevant? You

Nobel Prize in Physics laureate, Barry C. Barish

Know, that we don’t have much time to develop. The story has to be like an hourly matter and it’s really stressful. So the way we have to think about it is the production of this report will take weeks, not hours. Well, we have to look at a longer scientific data, a solid scientific data in order for us to, to build the story after three weeks or four weeks, it’s relatively, you know, a short-term for cinema, but it’s a very long time for the news. And so that was a question we had, we had to answer. And addition to that, you know, as you said, information keeps changing and what we didn’t discover everything about, about the coronavirus or the COVID-19 yet. It’s a legitimate question that it may be, you know developed in a lab, but we still need, it’s not, it’s not the right conclusion to go to. We have to ask the question and then look at evidence and we shouldn’t fall into confirmation bias by any means to stick to evidence what everyone wants to believe.

Interviewer

How do you know when you made a discovery

Nobel Prize in Physics laureate, Barry C. Barish

In pure science? We have a lot, we were taught by Newton. How did it follow the scientific method and asks the right questions afterwards to validate whether something’s true or not? So we, we often in modern science use statistics to tell, tell what the probability is, because you’d never know what the a hundred percent, but if you can assign a probability and have done it scientifically, you’ve done pretty well. That’s the best you can do. You ask the questions and then if you see something, you have a big task to see if it’s really right. And whether you can establish it as the truth. And we had that problem, it took us months after we made this observation to actually determine how to, how to tell whether it was right or wrong and then how to prove it.

Interviewer

What is our understanding of time? We

Nobel Prize in Physics laureate, Barry C. Barish

Don’t understand. Time is one of the one thing that physicists barely understand. For example, we have no idea really why time goes in only one direction, why it can’t go backwards. There’s no physics law that we have that says that, except it’s something we call causality, that everything that happens was caused by something that happened before. But that’s not really a law. It’s an observation. We don’t understand very much about time. It’s of course of time. I just talked about 1.3 billion years. So it’s something that we have a big wish that we could cross time barriers and go a long ways. There’s some little escape routes and quantum mechanics and so forth. It give you some glimmer that you might be able to avail just time flowing in this regular way. But for the most part, it seems to go straight on

Interviewer

What was your family life like? Growing up?

Nobel Prize in Physics laureate, Barry C. Barish

I grew up, my mother kept telling me that we were special and I kept telling her things that I won’t say right now, because I didn’t want to. Well, I think I idolized as, as a person and not just as an actor was actually my godfather who was French or tone Francho was a Renaissance man. When I was young, he would take me to, they had a place up in Canada and we would go up there and we would go hunting and fishing and canoeing. And it was a world that was totally different from the world that I grew up in, because I felt stuck that it’s more real, but there’s something I need to be in nature. I need to be in that. And I grew, I’m a city kid, so that’s something that I, you know, now we’re, we’re in France and I’m a couple of minutes from the ocean and I’ve just feel better when I’m in New York.

I know I’m okay. If I remember to look out the window and see the river, if I forget, then I know I’m in trouble. Yeah. You know, it’s just, I always felt that I marched to a different drum in a way, even growing up in a world where a lot of the people were, were extraordinary human beings. You know, sometimes I don’t know why. I know what I know. I was just surrounded by things. And, you know, my sister would say, we learned by osmosis. You know, I just, I want to say this whole thing about time, which is fascinates me. I actually, I think I do travel in time and I can just go into, sometimes I’m in other worlds, I could be sitting wherever I’m sitting and I’m somewhere else. And I can’t explain that, you know, and certainly I’m not a scientist, so I can’t explain it on a scientific level, but there is something about an artistic process in which once imagination perceives realities does later come to be true.

And I think that that’s true in science also, you know, it was Einstein talked about imagination all the time. He thought that he could do what he did because he thought like a child, the whole idea about, you know, seeing two black holes and things like that. It’s just extraordinary to me. I have difficulty conceiving it. A conception of what time are spaces is really hard. There’s definitely four dimensions, but some people do physics have this theory called string theory. You’ve probably heard the name and it has a, it’s hard to know what the truth is. It’s a very difficult thing. You change your perspective on the world and the truth changes. And I’ve always wanted to know what is the deepest truth? What is the universe as universal the truth as possible? And I know that sometimes in my work, the things that I do that play the movie, I’m driving underneath to try to say, well, what are we actually like? Not just what we think we’re like, what we actually are alike. And, and it’s my passion in life is just to know as much as I can about people and the world. I actually think that I that’s what I do. I think I express it in an artistic domain, but I think what I really do is I’m trying to find out what reality really is.

Interviewer

How do you handle the job?

Nobel Prize in Physics laureate, Barry C. Barish

It’s sometimes difficult and in tough situations, you have to split your emotions, human emotions from, you know, what what’s, what’s going on the news. We see a lot of, a lot of bad news, unfortunately, and this is just the industry. So what you have to do first is first, you have to take a step back and then you need to look at the things from a different perspective. You have to, to stay to stick to your guidelines as much as you can, you will have to try to take that third party position and say, okay, what is the information I can deliver to those people and tell them the story of this event that’s going on without placing my own opinion into it, or trying to, you know, take things into a, a bias situation. This is something that we can’t always be successful at.

Sometimes it’s really tough not to do this, but I strongly believe that journalists need to take that position. They have to be extremely cautious. They have to stick to, to, to be, have to be factual. The moment you stick to facts as much, as much as you can, when you build your story. And then this is what can distinguish you from, you know other type of information that’s spread throughout. You know, we have a, we have a huge problem with digital platforms, information straight, take, take news, straight out, a lot easier than track. This is something we need, we need to tackle. And we face challenges every single day with this, you know, how does it work? And you know, that sticking to the facts is always, you know, LIS juicy or, or the people who are, they would like to, to, to believe in more of a conspiracy theory. And it’s not always factual inquiry. So we have to give those facts. I’m entertaining, dark dimension to it.

I think that people are actually desperate to know what the truth is. And I think that it’s very hard. It’s a dangerous thing actually, to be truthful in the world that we live in, people do much better when things are half-truths and you know, and a half-truth to me is fundamentally a lie because you’re distorting reality. I worked years ago, I worked for several years at the national film board of Canada. I would deal with a lot of guys that were making documentary films. And I would say, I would have arguments. I took the other side. I said, it’s almost impossible to be neutral about what you’re doing. And the older I get, what I actually feel is that objectivity is not a distance observation. It’s a clarity of perception with your senses. You have to feel what’s true. And this is very hard because we’re not raised to trust our feelings.

We need to deliver such an amazing discovery to the audience in a very informative, entertaining way in order for them to appreciate science more and try, we need as humans to invest more than unfortunately, we, as humans, we learned from tragedies, we started investing so much in bio love your biological research when we got the pandemic. But that started when we had SARS, the biological research centers started communicating with each other, Anthony sort of a platform to communicate the research. Now with this pandemic, it’s the first time in history. For example, we’ll use the MRI made vaccine. The technology will be modern, or the theory of it was, was placed or discussed tens of use the goal. But because of the pandemic, we’re trying to move forward. We need to support initiatives, scientific initiatives. It’s our responsibility as Jordan to try to deliver this information, correct information and the importance of science to, to the audience.

Interviewer

What does the lack of interest in stem field related jobs mean for society?

Nobel Prize in Physics laureate, Barry C. Barish

If, if they see and hear science in their everyday life, they’ll respond to it more when it’s part of your life. Or if it’s something off to the side, then it’s something that you don’t do. I also think there’s a point and that is that we’ve learned from the pandemic. And that is that science is not national, it’s international and its worldwide. And the sooner we learn that the better we’re able to handle things and handling the pandemic as all these problems, how you deliver the vaccine worldwide, for example, doing science itself, it shouldn’t be competitive between nations and scientists realize this, but there’s a lot of obstacles.

Interviewer

What are you working on right now?

Nobel Prize in Physics laureate, Barry C. Barish

I’m teaching right now; this has opened up the possibility of really doing astronomy. I mean, what we did is prove something of Einstein’s and it’s something very interesting physics wise, but because what we observed or things in the universe, it gives us a totally new way to look at the sky. Everything we know about the sky first came with our eyes and then we developed telescopes of various kinds. But all of that is some, some form of light or electricity, and this is totally different. It’s gravity. So we can look at the universe totally new way, looking at gravitational effects, that’s, what’s open. And so we’re trying to make these detectors. It’s a little bit like Galileo 400 years ago, it was the first one to take lenses that have been made for glasses and put them in a telescope. He didn’t invent the telescope, but he was the first one to point to Jupiter. And he discovered there were four modes. And that was the beginning of modern astronomy. And since then we built instruments of all kinds and learned a tremendous amount about the universe that we live in. And now we have a completely different we’re in the birth of it. Or we have a completely new way to look at the universe.

Interviewer

Do you have other fields of study?

Nobel Prize in Physics laureate, Barry C. Barish

I’m a computer engineer. I just worked in journalism by, you know, some of my family are, you know, all engineers that you know, that’s why we, we love science. I mean, we love math. We love to look into the, the, the information as we try to when working in journalism told us how to simplify the information that we thought, oh, making it more complicated. It sounds more interesting. Actually. It’s not because the, the, the opposite, it just one point I wanted to, to, to lazier about how about the global collaboration around the world, international collaboration? I think we as humans, unfortunately, we, we, we stopped working together when we see an eminent threat to all of us or the Southern, and we, then we start like, listen, we need to collaborate in order for us to face this pandemic. And that created a huge shift.

I believe in, in, in, in the past couple of years that we didn’t see in the past, you know, 50 years, again, I believe that is a project was a great thing to point to spot at. One of the ways you all Devorah about how can we do this? How can we make this more interesting to do to, to people we can support investigative journalist and we can support documentary is to make projects back barely more accessible to people. We need to make this in a more story telling way to make people love science. I remember reading this post back at the beginning of the pandemic one of the biologists said, listen, those famous people you paid them millions and millions of dollars, and you pay your biologist 2,500 doodles, gold net. Those famous people developed the vaccine. And that was, you know, striking for me when I read that I’m like this you’re so right. We sometimes under evaluate or great time on those people who work for us. And we need to point to have the, the, the, the Scouts on you and make our, the next generation inspired by you work. It’s for the greater benefit for all of us.

LIGO won Best STEAM at 12th https://www.newmediafilmfestival.com

What is LIGO?

Written by Susan Johnston