Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS April Meeting 2017
Volume 62, Number 1
Saturday–Tuesday, January 28–31, 2017; Washington, DC
Session U8: History of the Search for Gravitational WavesInvited Undergraduate
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Sponsoring Units: FHP Chair: Alan Chodos, The American Physical Society (retired) Room: Delaware B |
Monday, January 30, 2017 3:30PM - 4:06PM |
U8.00001: WIRED BY WEBER: The Story of the First Searcher and Searches for Gravitational Waves Invited Speaker: Virginia Trimble Joe Weber, the last child of eastern European immigrants, had a ham radio license at age 10. He also wired the mess hall of the US Naval Academy for sound, causing the chatter and clashing crockery of his fellow midshipmen to be drowned out by Schubert's Great C Major symphony. He kept a 6 cm radar (not standard equipment on submarine chasers) working before and during the Sicilian landing and ended "his" war in charge of electronic countermeasures for the Navy. Hired as a full professor of electrical engineering and ordered to get a PhD in something, somewhere, by the University of Maryland in 1949, he talked with George Gamow (a story for a different time), but ended up working with Keith Laidler at Catholic University of America on the inversion spectrum of ammonia, building and using a 2-meter traveling wave tube. That, plus a lecture by Karl Herzfeld on the Einstein A and B coefficients, led him to think about inverted populations as amplifiers and spectrometers. His talk at an IEEE conference and the subsequent paper were the first "open source" presentations of what we now call masers and lasers. Then came his interest in General Relativity and the desire to bring this beautiful theory into contact with laboratory science. He started building and then operating bar detectors for gravitational waves in 1965-66, and reporting results from 1968-69. The scientific community first took an enormous interest in his work, then "voted him off the island" starting in about 1973. He continued to operate bar detectors, and later perfect crystal detectors for neutrinos, until his death on 30 September 2000 (Rosh Hashonah that year). The first LIGO event was recorded on his 15th Jarhzeit. We had, by that time, been married for 28.5 years, and it was a joy to watch him pick the right resistor or capacitor out of a box of miscellaneous electronic components. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, January 30, 2017 4:06PM - 4:42PM |
U8.00002: The Path to Gravitational Wave Detection Invited Speaker: Barry Barish Experimental efforts toward gravitational wave detection began with the innovative resonant bar experiments of Joseph Weber in the 1960s. This technique evolved, but was eventually replaced by the potentially more sensitive suspended mass interferometers. Large scale interferometers, GEO, LIGO and Virgo were funded in 1994. The 22 year history since that time will be discussed, tracing the key technical challenges and solutions that have enabled LIGO to reach the incredible sensitivities where gravitational waves from binary black hole mergers have been observed. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, January 30, 2017 4:42PM - 5:18PM |
U8.00003: Enabling the Discovery of Gravitational Radiation Invited Speaker: Richard Isaacson The discovery of gravitational radiation was announced with the publication of the results of a physics experiment involving over a thousand participants. This was preceded by a century of theoretical work, involving a similarly large group of physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists. This huge effort was enabled by a substantial commitment of resources, both public and private, to develop the different strands of this complex research enterprise, and to build a community of scientists to carry it out. In the excitement following the discovery, the role of key enablers of this success has not always been adequately recognized in popular accounts. In this talk, I will try to call attention to a few of the key ingredients that proved crucial to enabling the successful discovery of gravitational waves, and the opening of a new field of science. [Preview Abstract] |
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