I always wanted to be an experimental physicist and was attracted to the idea of using continuing advances in technology to carry out fundamental science experiments that could not be done otherwise.
The ILC will go forward, but the U.S. will fall behind.
The most exciting science requires the most complex instruments.
We said that with initial LIGO, detections would be possible, and with Advanced LIGO, detections would be probable.
If we get to the design sensitivity and make no detections, then there are a lot of things that will have to go back to the drawing board theoretically. If we fail, we're not expecting that the NSF will help bail it out somehow.
It seems kind of nutty to send up something new when there's something already there that can do the job.
The first instrument is not the final instrument.
In a sense, the searches for both magnetic monopoles and gravity waves are very similar. But, theoretically, gravity waves are more solid.
In a small lab, if you make a mistake, you can go in the next day and fix it. But here, when you are committed to spending a hundred thousand or a million dollars, you can't fix it later. You need to have a system of checks and balances internally. In particle physics, that's just part of the structure.
If we are going to build an ambitious machine, then it's got to be a global machine.
The problem for large scientific projects is to do something that is being done for the first time, balanced against cost, schedule. and promises to the government. That is a hard balancing act.
Everything we know about the universe is studied by using telescopes or other instruments that look at visible light, infrared, ultraviolet or X-ray - different wavelengths of electromagnetic interactions. Only 4 percent of what's in the universe gives off electromagnetic radiation, so we don't have any handle on the rest.
When I was really young, my ambition wasn't to do science. I didn't really know that I could. It was to write a great novel.
The waves are subtle, altering spacetime and the distance between objects as far apart as the Earth and the Moon by much less than the width of an atom. As such, gravitational radiation has not been directly detected yet. We hope to change that soon.
It's very difficult to tell when you're successful, because it's so hard to make measurements.
It isn't obvious and it took us a while to demonstrate that we could actually design a machine that bends.
