The field equations and the whole history of general relativity have been complicated.
We were looking almost one-tenth of the way to the edge of the universe. We're planning to use the facilities we have to make improvements by another factor of 10... a strain sensitivity that is 10 times smaller. This means looking 10 times further out into the universe.
Gravitational waves, because they are so imperturbable - they go through everything - they will tell you the most information you can get about the earliest instants that go on in the universe.
Over years, the noise level will be brought down, and LIGO will be three times better and see three times farther.
Receiving money for something that was a pleasure to begin with is a little outrageous.
We're going to be seeing things from regions in the universe where Einstein is the whole story. Newton you can forget about.
The concept of what we're looking for is so important. The fact that the effect is tiny is just our misfortune.
The triumph is that the waveform we measure is very well represented by solutions of these equations. Einstein is right in a regime where his theory has never been tested before.
This is the first real evidence that we've seen now of high gravitational field strengths: monstrous things like stars moving at the velocity of light, smashing into each other, and making the geometry of space-time turn into some sort of washing machine.
It's a spectacular signal. It's a signal many of us have wanted to observe since the time LIGO was proposed. It shows the dynamics of objects in the strongest gravitational fields imaginable, a domain where Newton's gravity doesn't work at all, and one needs the fully non-linear Einstein field equations to explain the phenomena.
The whole idea of gravity curling up space, that is the epitome of what is going on in a black hole. I would've loved to have seen Einstein's face if he were presented with the data that we actually discovered such a thing, because he himself probably didn't believe in much of it.
I said, suppose you take a light - I was thinking of just light bulbs because, in those days, lasers were not yet really there - and sent a light pulse between two masses. Then you do the same when there's a gravitational wave. Lo and behold, you see that the time it takes light to go from one mass to the other changes because of the wave.
The waves from all the different parts of a sphere would cancel each other out. You need motion that's nonspherical.
The rule has been that when one opens a new channel to the universe, there is usually a surprise in it. Why should the gravitational channel be deprived of this?
When we initially proposed LIGO, the only sources that we were really contemplating were supernovae. We thought we would see something like one a year, maybe even ten a year.
Over and over in the history of astronomy, a new instrument finds things we never expected to see.
We'll have all sorts of crazy signals. And you'd be a damned fool if you didn't look for things you weren't expecting, because that's probably what you're going to see first.
