Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS April Meeting 2024
Wednesday–Saturday, April 3–6, 2024; Sacramento & Virtual
Session M10: Isaacson Award Session
1:30 PM–3:18 PM,
Friday, April 5, 2024
SAFE Credit Union Convention Center
Room: Ballroom B1, Floor 2
Sponsoring
Unit:
DGRAV
Chair: Michael Landry, Caltech
Abstract: M10.00003 : What We Can Learn from History As We Plan the Coming 3G Detectors*
2:42 PM–3:18 PM
Presenter:
Bernard F Schutz
(Cardiff Univ of Wales)
Author:
Bernard F Schutz
(Cardiff Univ of Wales)
The Isaacson Award rightfully celebrates the key role that Rich Isaacson played in getting LIGO built. While the scientists of LIGO were successfully addressing the technological challenges, Rich was masterfully dealing with equally trying organizational and funding challenges. During the same period, Europeans were facing similar issues but in an international context, which shaped their challenges in a different way. While in Europe two full-scale detectors were proposed but only one was funded, in the US Rich was able to keep LIGO's two-detector proposal intact and get it funded. In this talk I will reflect on these times, in which scientists who were used to working on laboratory-scale physics and technology had to learn how to engineer some of the biggest and most expensive measuring instruments ever constructed -- in one huge leap. We are now planning an equally ambitious leap to 3G detectors in the next decade, but fortunately we are starting from a position where we collectively have much more experience with the engineering and with the cutting-edge technologies that we will need. However, I think we can still learn from this history much about the organizational challenges we will inevitably face. We should be aiming to build a 3G detector network whose sensitivity is limited by the properties of materials and the cleverness of our inventiveness, and not by organizational problems that we were unable to master.
*I am grateful to the Max Planck Society for enabling me to attend this meeting.
Follow Us |
Engage
Become an APS Member |
My APS
Renew Membership |
Information for |
About APSThe American Physical Society (APS) is a non-profit membership organization working to advance the knowledge of physics. |
© 2024 American Physical Society
| All rights reserved | Terms of Use
| Contact Us
Headquarters
1 Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20740-3844
(301) 209-3200
Editorial Office
100 Motor Pkwy, Suite 110, Hauppauge, NY 11788
(631) 591-4000
Office of Public Affairs
529 14th St NW, Suite 1050, Washington, D.C. 20045-2001
(202) 662-8700