LIGO

“If you ask in a hundred years from now, will people still build Michelson laser interferometers and do the same thing? Right. I have a hard time believing that's true.”

“Like the ones we detected were at, let's say several hundred million light years, and Alpha Centauri is only four light years, I believe, so it would be stronger by that factor of a hundred million. And, which sounds like a lot, it is a lot, but that means tha…”

“With the current systems, you know, as big as they are, if we put in like our best technical hacks into them that we can imagine, we could maybe get to the place where the universe was about a one fifth or one sixth of its current age. So we could look back so…”

“It has a wavelength of one micron, and so for it some of the things that look black don't work, but if you have a special kind of welder's glass, it really works. Welder's glass is good as, good at absorbing pretty much everything with a longer wavelength than…”

“The mirrors we have are more like They store the energy better, something like. About 10,000 times longer. So if I were to ping one of those would last for, you know, hours. They would just keep ringing and ringing.”

“So the biggest black holes we can't find right now, because This kind of technical noise feedback and the vibrations from the environment are bigger than the fundamental quantum physics limits of measurement.”

“I think in our data there must be, probably we could double the number of signals we have right now if we were to, I mean, that's my guess. It could be much more.”

“Now we've reached the limit of what you can do with linear noise subtraction, and we need some better ideas on how to do the next thing. And the next thing involves nonlinear regression.”

“There's so much laser power that when you, it's weird to think about, but there's so much laser power when we hit the mirror, it moves the mirror. And the mirror, if you, to imagine it, is about this big. And it is 40 kilograms”

“So we take the best laser in the world that we can find, and then we stabilize it and make it about ten million times more stable than what you can buy, and then it's kind of just barely good enough, and we're gonna have to do better if we want to do better.”

“About 10 to the -18 meters, which means one billionth of a, about the size of a atom.”

“We've not seen anything of that size since then, since that first one.”

“It happens to be that the waves that we're detecting and the waves which are easiest to detect are exactly in the human audio band. So the waves that you and I can hear with our ears, that's the whole frequency range for gravitational waves that we can detect.”

“The laser itself is cheaper. You can do, probably you could do the whole thing with a 100,000 dollar laser. That's about the laser cost.”

“If they, I think if they had known how tough it would be, or that it was going to take fifties, five years to have success, probably no one would have started.”