LIGO (film)

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LIGO
Directed by Les Guthman
Written byLes Guthman
Produced by
Narrated byLes Guthman
CinematographyJohn Armstrong
Edited byLes Guthman
Production
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LIGO is a 2019 American documentary film that tells the inside account of the discovery by the international LIGO Scientific Collaboration of the first observation of gravitational waves in September 2015, [1] a discovery that led two years later to the Nobel Prize in Physics for LIGO physicists Rai Weiss, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish. [2] In December 2019, National Geographic named the LIGO detections at the top of its list of "The 20 Top Scientific Discoveries of the Decade". [3]

Contents

Production

LIGO was written, directed and edited by Les Guthman. [4] It was produced by the Advanced LIGO Documentary Project and XPLR Productions in a collaboration with the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, Caltech and MIT, [5] and financed by a grant from U.S. National Science Foundation and support from MathWorks, Caltech and MIT.

Production on the documentary began in August 2015. Three weeks later, Guthman was on location with his crew at the LIGO Livingston Observatory near Baton Rouge, Louisiana when the historic detection, which was not expected for another year, was made. [6] Production documented LIGO's secret months-long intensive examination of the detection, before it was announced that the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., in February 2016; and production continued, along with script development, through 2016 and 2017.

In August 2017, as the film was about to go into post-production, LIGO made a second major discovery, GW170817, and then in October the Nobel Prize was announced. The script for LIGO was adjusted, requiring additional photography, and its last shoot was with Weiss, Thorne and Barish in Stockholm, along with more than 50 of their colleagues in December 2017.

Synopsis

The film begins as Guthman did, arriving innocently at the LIGO Livingston Observatory in September 2015 and then getting swept up in a compelling scientific experience. The discovery of the first gravitational wave capped a 50-year, $1 billion search for the detection and measurement of microscopic warps in spacetime, predicted by Albert Einstein a century earlier. It was the dramatic and emotional peak in the lives of the 1,000 scientists around the world who had risked their careers on a discovery Einstein himself had thought impossible: detecting the billion-year-old waves—far smaller than the size of an proton—over a length of several thousand kilometers.

The documentary is divided into six chapters which chronicle the phases of the LIGO discoveries:

  1. Warped space –The detection of GW150914
  2. What's out there –The four-month interlude when LIGO kept the discovery secret as they confirmed the detection beyond all doubt and wrestled with its apparent truth
  3. Inventing LIGO –The discovery announcement in February 2016 at an international media event
  4. The universe gets 50 times brighter –A year of emotional letdown and unexpected technical crises at LIGO's two observatories
  5. Hearing the universe –The second, unexpected detection of two colliding neutron stars, GW170817, and its history-making multimessenger results from 70 observatories and space-based cameras around the world [7]
  6. Stockholm –Nobel Prize week in Stockholm

Awards

The film was completed in May 2019 and was the Official Selection of 22 film festivals. [8] It won the Best Documentary award twice, at the 2020 Solaris Film Festival in Vienna, Austria [9] and the 2021 Sigma Xi STEM Film Festival. [10]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LIGO</span> Gravitational wave observatory site

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is a large-scale physics experiment and observatory designed to detect cosmic gravitational waves and to develop gravitational-wave observations as an astronomical tool. Two large observatories were built in the United States with the aim of detecting gravitational waves by laser interferometry. These observatories use mirrors spaced four kilometers apart to measure changes in length—over an effective span of 1120 km—of less than one ten-thousandth the charge diameter of a proton.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kip Thorne</span> American physicist and writer (born 1940)

Kip Stephen Thorne is an American theoretical physicist and writer known for his contributions in gravitational physics and astrophysics. Along with Rainer Weiss and Barry C. Barish, he was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rainer Weiss</span> Nobel Prize-winning American physicist

Rainer "Rai" Weiss is a German-born American physicist, known for his contributions in gravitational physics and astrophysics. He is a professor of physics emeritus at MIT and an adjunct professor at LSU. He is best known for inventing the laser interferometric technique which is the basic operation of LIGO. He was Chair of the COBE Science Working Group.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ronald Drever</span> British physicist (1931–2017)

Ronald William Prest Drever was a Scottish experimental physicist. He was a professor emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, co-founded the LIGO project, and was a co-inventor of the Pound–Drever–Hall technique for laser stabilisation, as well as the Hughes–Drever experiment. This work was instrumental in the first detection of gravitational waves in September 2015.

Les Guthman is an American director, writer, editor and production executive, who has the distinction of both having produced three of the 20 Top Adventure Films of All Time, according to Men's Journal magazine, and having won the National Academy of Sciences' (U.S) nationwide competition to find the best new idea in science television, which led to his film, Three Nights at the Keck, hosted by actor John Lithgow.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gravitational wave</span> Propagating spacetime ripple

Gravitational waves are transient displacements in a gravitational field—generated by the motion or acceleration of gravitating masses—that radiate outward from their source at the speed of light. They were first proposed by Oliver Heaviside in 1893 and then later by Henri Poincaré in 1905 as the gravitational equivalent of electromagnetic waves. In 1916, Albert Einstein demonstrated that gravitational waves result from his general theory of relativity as ripples in spacetime.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gravitational-wave observatory</span> Device used to measure gravitational waves

A gravitational-wave detector is any device designed to measure tiny distortions of spacetime called gravitational waves. Since the 1960s, various kinds of gravitational-wave detectors have been built and constantly improved. The present-day generation of laser interferometers has reached the necessary sensitivity to detect gravitational waves from astronomical sources, thus forming the primary tool of gravitational-wave astronomy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gravitational-wave astronomy</span> Branch of astronomy using gravitational waves

Gravitational-wave astronomy is a subfield of astronomy concerned with the detection and study of gravitational waves emitted by astrophysical sources.

The LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) is a scientific collaboration of international physics institutes and research groups dedicated to the search for gravitational waves.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Barry Barish</span> American physicist

Barry Clark Barish is an American experimental physicist and Nobel Laureate. He is a Linde Professor of Physics, emeritus at California Institute of Technology and a leading expert on gravitational waves.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Neutron star merger</span> Type of stellar collision

A neutron star merger is the stellar collision of neutron stars. When two neutron stars fall into mutual orbit, they gradually spiral inward due to gravitational radiation. When they finally meet, their merger leads to the formation of either a more massive neutron star, or—if the mass of the remnant exceeds the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit—a black hole. The merger can create a magnetic field that is trillions of times stronger than that of Earth in a matter of one or two milliseconds. These events are believed to create short gamma-ray bursts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">First observation of gravitational waves</span> 2015 direct detection of gravitational waves by the LIGO and VIRGO interferometers

The first direct observation of gravitational waves was made on 14 September 2015 and was announced by the LIGO and Virgo collaborations on 11 February 2016. Previously, gravitational waves had been inferred only indirectly, via their effect on the timing of pulsars in binary star systems. The waveform, detected by both LIGO observatories, matched the predictions of general relativity for a gravitational wave emanating from the inward spiral and merger of a pair of black holes of around 36 and 29 solar masses and the subsequent "ringdown" of the single resulting black hole. The signal was named GW150914. It was also the first observation of a binary black hole merger, demonstrating both the existence of binary stellar-mass black hole systems and the fact that such mergers could occur within the current age of the universe.

The Advanced LIGO Documentary Project is a collaboration formed in the summer of 2015 among Caltech, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Director Les Guthman to make the definitive documentary about the Advanced LIGO project's search for, and expected first detection of, gravitational waves; and to record a longitudinal video archive of the project for future researchers and historians. The feature documentary, "LIGO," was released in the spring of 2019. Mr. Guthman also wrote, produced and directed an eight-part video series on YouTube, LIGO: A DISCOVERY THAT SHOOK THE WORLD, which was released over three years, 2017-2020. The video series remains in production with three more episodes covering the LIGO project's third science run 2019-2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GW170817</span> Gravitational-wave signal detected in 2017

GW170817 was a gravitational wave (GW) signal observed by the LIGO and Virgo detectors on 17 August 2017, originating from the shell elliptical galaxy NGC 4993, about 140 million light years away. The signal was produced by the last moments of the inspiral process of a binary pair of neutron stars, ending with their merger. It was the first GW observation to be confirmed by non-gravitational means. Unlike the five previous GW detections—which were of merging black holes and thus not expected to produce a detectable electromagnetic signal—the aftermath of this merger was seen across the electromagnetic spectrum by 70 observatories on 7 continents and in space, marking a significant breakthrough for multi-messenger astronomy. The discovery and subsequent observations of GW170817 were given the Breakthrough of the Year award for 2017 by the journal Science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NGC 4993</span> Galaxy in the constellation of Hydra

NGC 4993 is a lenticular galaxy located about 140 million light-years away in the constellation Hydra. It was discovered on 26 March 1789 by William Herschel and is a member of the NGC 4993 Group.

PyCBC is an open source software package primarily written in the Python programming language which is designed for use in gravitational-wave astronomy and gravitational-wave data analysis. PyCBC contains modules for signal processing, FFT, matched filtering, gravitational waveform generation, among other tasks common in gravitational-wave data analysis.

Samaya Michiko Nissanke is an astrophysicist, associate professor in gravitational wave and multi-messenger astrophysics and the spokesperson for the GRAPPA Centre for Excellence in Gravitation and Astroparticle Physics at the University of Amsterdam. She works on gravitational-wave astrophysics and has played a founding role in the emerging field of multi-messenger astronomy. She played a leading role in the discovery paper of the first binary neutron star merger, GW170817, seen in gravitational waves and electromagnetic radiation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rana X. Adhikari</span> American experimental physicist (born 1974)

Rana X. Adhikari is an American experimental physicist. He is a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and an associate faculty member of the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (ICTS-TIFR).

Jess McIver is an American astronomer. She is an Associate Professor and Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Gravitational Wave Astrophysics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of British Columbia. McIver is a member of LIGO, one of the recipients of the Science 2017 Breakthrough of the Year.

References

  1. ↑ Overbye, Dennis (11 February 2016). "New York Times article Gravitational Waves Detected - Confirming Einstein's Theory". The New York Times.
  2. ↑ "2017 Nobel Prize in Physics announcement".
  3. ↑ "National Geographic's Top 20 Scientific Discoveries of the Decade". National Geographic Society . 5 December 2019. Archived from the original on December 6, 2019.
  4. ↑ "IBDb LIGO". IMDb .
  5. ↑ "Screening of "LIGO" at the Explorers Club, New York City".
  6. ↑ "LIGO Magazine, Issue 8" (PDF). March 2016.
  7. ↑ Overbye, Dennis (16 October 2017). "New York Times article LIGO Detects Fierce Collision of Neutron Stars for the First Time". The New York Times.
  8. ↑ "LIGO (film) Official Website".
  9. ↑ "Solaris Film Festival".
  10. ↑ "2021 Sigma Xi Film Festival Winners".
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