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

Synopsis

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. The documentary is divided into six chapters, WARPED SPACE, WHAT'S OUT THERE, INVENTING LIGO, THE UNIVERSE GETS 50 TIMES BRIGHTER, HEARING THE UNIVERSE and STOCKHOLM. It begins as Guthman did, arriving innocently at the LIGO Livingston Observatory in September 2015 and then almost immediately being swept up in a great human experience, scientific or otherwise. The discovery of the first gravitational wave capped a 50-year, $1 billion search for these elusive messengers from warped space, predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago. 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 a billion-year-old wave of warped space the size of one atom in the distance between the Earth and the Sun. The film chapters chronicle the six phases of the LIGO discoveries: 1) The detection of GW150914; 2) 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) the discovery announcement in February 2016 at an international media event; 4) followed by a year of emotional letdown and unexpected technical crises at LIGO's two observatories; 5) then their second unexpected and dramatic history-making detection of two colliding neutron stars and its spectacular light show seen by over 70 observatories and space-based cameras around the world; [6] 6) and finally, Nobel Prize week in Stockholm.

Production

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. [7] 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. And then, in August 2017, as the film was about to go into post-production, LIGO made the second major discovery, GW170817, followed by the Nobel Prize announcement in October. LIGO resumed production, the script was rewritten, and its last shoot was with Weiss, Thorne and Barish in Stockholm, along with more than 50 of their colleagues in December 2017.

Release

The film was completed in May 2019. To date it has been the Official Selection of 22 film festivals. [8] It has 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] (Sigma Xi is the Scientific Research Honor Society, STEM is the acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) A complete list of the festivals, along with the documentary's nine other awards. may be found on the LIGO (Film) official website. [11]

Related Research Articles

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

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 which are capable of detecting a change of less than one ten-thousandth the charge diameter of a proton.

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

Kip Stephen Thorne is an American theoretical physicist known for his contributions in gravitational physics and astrophysics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rainer Weiss</span> 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">Einstein@Home</span> BOINC volunteer computing project that analyzes data from LIGO to detect gravitational waves

Einstein@Home is a volunteer computing project that searches for signals from spinning neutron stars in data from gravitational-wave detectors, from large radio telescopes, and from a gamma-ray telescope. Neutron stars are detected by their pulsed radio and gamma-ray emission as radio and/or gamma-ray pulsars. They also might be observable as continuous gravitational wave sources if they are rapidly spinning and non-axisymmetrically deformed. The project was officially launched on 19 February 2005 as part of the American Physical Society's contribution to the World Year of Physics 2005 event.

<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 waves of the intensity of gravity that are generated by the accelerated masses of binary stars and other motions of gravitating masses, and propagate as waves 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.

<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 an emerging field of science, concerning the observations of gravitational waves to collect relatively unique data and make inferences about objects such as neutron stars and black holes, events such as supernovae, and processes including those of the early universe shortly after the Big Bang.

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 a type of stellar collision.

<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.

Maura McLaughlin is currently an astrophysics professor at West Virginia University in Morgantown, West Virginia. She holds a Bachelor's of Science degree from Pennsylvania State University and a Ph.D. from Cornell University. She is known for her work on furthering the research on gravitational waves and for her dedication to the Pulsar Search Collaboratory. She was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2021.

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

GW 170817 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. The signal was produced by the last minutes of a binary pair of neutron stars' inspiral process, ending with a merger. It is the first GW observation that has been confirmed by non-gravitational means. Unlike the five previous GW detections, which were of merging black holes not expected to produce a detectable electromagnetic signal, the aftermath of this merger was also seen by 70 observatories on 7 continents and in space, across the electromagnetic spectrum, marking a significant breakthrough for multi-messenger astronomy. The discovery and subsequent observations of GW 170817 were given the Breakthrough of the Year award for 2017 by the journal Science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GW170814</span>

GW170814 was a gravitational wave signal from two merging black holes, detected by the LIGO and Virgo observatories on 14 August 2017. On 27 September 2017, the LIGO and Virgo collaborations announced the observation of the signal, the fourth confirmed event after GW150914, GW151226 and GW170104. It was the first binary black hole merger detected by LIGO and Virgo together.

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.

Stanley Ernest Whitcomb is an American physicist and was the chief scientist at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) project when the first direct detection of gravitational waves was made in September 2015.

<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).

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.
  4. ↑ "IBDb LIGO". IMDb .
  5. ↑ "Screening of "LIGO" at the Explorers Club, New York City".
  6. ↑ Overbye, Dennis (16 October 2017). "New York Times article LIGO Detects Fierce Collision of Neutron Stars for the First Time". The New York Times.
  7. ↑ "LIGO Magazine, Issue 8" (PDF). March 2016.
  8. ↑ "LIGO (film) Official Website".
  9. ↑ "Solaris Film Festival".
  10. ↑ "2021 Sigma Xi Film Festival Winners".
  11. ↑ "LIGO (film) Official Website".
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