How did a "singular hero" help create a new field in physics: NPR

Imagine spending 40 years and over a billion dollars for a bet.

That's what a US government science agency did. This is now paying a lot, with new discoveries on black holes and exotic neutron stars coming up almost every week.

And while three physicists shared the Nobel Prize for the work that made this possible, one of them claims that the real hero is a former National Science Foundation staff member, Rich Isaacson, who had the opportunity to do great research and grab them.

"What Rich Isaacson did was such a miracle," says Rainer Weiss, a physicist at MIT and one of the 2017 Nobel Laureates. "I think he's the hero." A singular hero We simply do not have a good way of recognizing such people Rich was in a peculiar place in the midst of a peculiar war that no one else could have led. "

Without him, Weiss said: "We would have been killed dead on virtually every subject". He and his fellow award winner, Kip Thorne, have recently donated money to create a brand new award from the American Physical Society in the honor of Isaacson.

This unlikely story begins in the 1960s, while Isaacson was a PhD student and was interested in one of Albert Einstein's predictions.

In 1916, Einstein hypothesized that whenever two large objects stick together, shockwaves must traverse the very structure of the universe. These gravitational waves through space and time are like the ripples you see in the water when you throw a pebble.

"For my thesis, I showed how gravitational waves behave like other types of waves, like light and radar, X-rays," says Isaacson.

His calculations showed that these waves were not just a mathematical darkness, but something that could possibly be measured. "It showed exactly how Einstein's theory worked in detail to create gravitational waves," says Weiss. "And this has been done in such a way that it is mathematically correct and no one can dispute it anymore."

Einstein, who had discussed the issue of gravitational waves a great deal, thought that they would probably never have been detected – the distortions they create in space are simply too small.

Isaacson was more optimistic. "I imagined that one day of my career, we would see him," he says.

He just did not realize that trying to see him would to become his career.

In the early 1970s, Isaacson held a position with the newly established National Science Foundation to review funding proposals. And Weiss wanted money for a crazy idea that he was pursuing: trying to detect gravitational waves with the help of lasers.

Lasers could, in theory, be used to measure very very small distortions in space, such as changes of one-thousandth of the width of an atomic nucleus. "Most people have said:" Saint Mackerel! It must be crazy. You can not do that, "Weiss remembers.

The technology was too hard. Moreover, no one even knew what in the universe could emit gravitational waves powerful enough to be measured in this way.

Normally, says Weiss, "with these two things … this proposal would have died on arrival, but it was not so with Rich."

Isaacson having studied gravitational waves, he saw the potential. He has personally led this research for nearly three decades.

It has become the largest project ever funded by the National Science Foundation.

"He sat on the NSF and by himself – I mean alone – convinced everyone in the NSF that it was the right thing to support for the NSF and that science would be spectacular if it had to succeed, "says Weiss. "And he built the argument."

It is held up to years of prototype testing and expert panels, feasibility studies and management nightmares. Of course, many people have worked on this project, but Weiss said that "Rich's elegance lay in the fact that he knew how the system worked and that he knew the science".

"He was a defender, like a messiah, of the whole idea of ​​detecting gravitational waves, and then he became a strategist," says Weiss. "Now imagine the NSF Program Manager becoming the main advocate for this program, as well as the one who developed most of the strategies to put it in place, which was a miracle for me. is what made it survive. "

After all, many people thought that it was foolish to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to build giant detectors that could never detect anything – especially astronomers, who feared that money would be diverted sums such as the construction of new telescopes.

"There is always a danger that the project will be stopped," said Isaacson. "And like all big science projects, it's a roller coaster ride."

Officially, Isaacson has never worked more than half that time. In reality, it took everything. The long days of work have had adverse consequences. At one point, her blood pressure skyrocketed and her doctor became alarmed.

Isaacson says that he feels lucky to have been able to try to change the story. "But history demands that you pay the price of this privilege, in terms of stress, agony, lifestyle and family events," he said. "If you're willing to pay the price, OK, you're lucky and you can go and maybe it'll work, maybe it's not right."

In 2002, Isaacson retired. It is also the year that the NSF began to explore the sky with its brand new Laser Gravitational Interferometer Observatory (LIGO): two massive detectors, one in the world. Washington state and the other in Louisiana. Everyone has lasers that go down the pipes 2 1/2 miles long.

For years, these detectors have searched for gravitational waves … and found nothing.

The scientists persevered. They improved the instruments of the detectors. And in 2015, Isaacson went to Maine for a getaway with Weiss and another colleague, who opened a laptop to reveal the steps taken a few days ago.

It was the first detection of gravitational waves from two black holes colliding more than a billion light years away. "It was absolutely clear that this fantastic thing had just happened," recalls Isaacson.

The realization produced "a little warm glow," he says. "I guess now that I'm in a few years, I'm starting to feel it more."

When asked about the chances that a government-funded science project like this could happen today, he replied, "Zero".

"We live in a very different era," says Isaacson. "I do not think anyone can undertake such large-scale, high-risk, long-term research."

The science of gravitational waves has given astronomers an unprecedented ability to see some of the most powerful and exotic events in the universe. In 2017, for example, the LIGO detectors recorded a collision between two neutron stars. The telescopes were then able to find the cosmic fireworks and watch it in real time.

Last month, researchers launched massive detectors after another major hardware upgrade. They have already detected at least five other gravitational wave events.

Isaacson keeps an eye on science, but in retirement, he is finally free to pursue fully another love: the ancient textiles of Central Asia. He even wrote a book about decorated strips that wrap around nomadic tents.

He likes carpets and weaves with geometric patterns. "Since modern physics is very geometric, it's not that different," Isaacson says. "Except that physicists usually work between four or ten dimensions, so for a retired career, working in two dimensions is a child's game."

He unrolls a red carpet made by an Uzbek tribe in the mid-nineteenth century and says that the forgotten craftsmen who did this job, usually women, were a hundred years ahead of the celebrities of modern art.

"They were anonymous," says Isaacson, "and they were completely ignored, but they were doing beautiful things."