E-Book Content
GRAVITY’S KISS GRAVITY’S KISS THE DETECTION OF GRAVITATIONAL WAVES HARRY COLLINS The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in Adobe Garamond and Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk by The MIT Press. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Collins, H. M. (Harry M.), 1943Title: Gravity’s kiss : the detection of gravitational waves / Harry Collins. Other titles: Detection of gravitational waves Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016035193 | ISBN 9780262036184 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH : Gravitational waves--Research. | General relativity (Physics) Classification: LCC QC179 .C647 2017 | DDC 539.7/54 --dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016035193 10 9 8 7 6 For Osh and Elsa 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS 1 The First Week: We Have Coherence 1 2 Reservations and Complications: Malicious Injections? 17 3 Half a Century of Gravitational Wave Detection 49 4 Weeks 2 and 3: The Freeze, Rumors 57 5 Week 4: The Box Is Opened 75 6 Week 5 to the End of October: Directness, Black Holes 87 7 November: Ripples, Belief, and Second Monday 113 8 November: Writing the Discovery Paper 131 9 December, Weeks 12–16: The Proof Regress, Relentless Professionalism, and the Third Event 173 10 January and February: The LVC-Wide Meetings and the Submission 195 11 The Last Ripples: From the Press Conferences to the American Physical Society and the Rest of the World 225 12 Changing Order: The Long Aha! 255 13 On the Nature of Science 289 14 The Book, the Author, the Community, and Expertise 313 Postscript: The Beginning of Gravitational Wave Astronomy 325 How the Book Was Written and Those Who Helped 343 Sociological and Philosophical Notes 349 Appendix 1: Procedure for Making a First Discovery 377 Appendix 2: First Draft of the Discovery Paper without Author List or Bibliography 383 Appendix 3: Rules for Author Lists 395 References 397 Index 403 vi Contents 1 THE FIRST WEEK We Have Coherence It is September 14, 2015, and I am in my study sitting on the sofa with my laptop on my knees—the way I spend most of my waking life these days, as I prefer to work from home. It’s evening and I am idly reading the subject lines of the dozens of emails that come in every day. The largest number come from the gravitational wave community, and I usually delete them without reading. I’ve been working with this community for over four decades now, longer than all the active gravitational wave scientists except one. Once every six months or so I might save a short string of these emails in a folder, in case they turn out later to be of interest. I study how science is actually done in real time. One email catches my eye. The subject line is “Very interesting event on ER 8.” It had come in around noon, British Summer Time. The email says that the interesting event has been seen by the cWB analysis “pipeline.” The abbreviation “cWB ” stands for “coherent wave burst” and the “Burst Group,” which developed the pipeline and is tasked with finding bursts of gravitational waves without basing the search on preconceived waveforms. The cWB pipeline, then, has just detected something that looks like an interesting burst of waves. A pipeline is a mathematical/statistical procedure that is applied to the torrent of data that pours out of the interferometric det