Bittersweet: The End of A Professional Service Term

I have mentioned many times on this blog that I feel that performing service to my profession is just as important as the research and public outreach that I do; in a way, this is a form of professional outreach.

I have had the uncommon honor to serve on the American Physical Society (APS) Council and then, half way into my four-year term, I was elected to serve on their Executive Board.  I have met many new colleagues whom I would have never met otherwise since we don't work in the same field of physics.  Even better, some of them have become friends (good enough friends that I will even discuss my Impostor Syndrome issue with them - I wrote a whole post about this).

As far as contributing to the profession, I have had the opportunity to work extensively on strategic planning for the next decade of the society and represented young physicists' concerns on many issues.  Even more than that, I am now able to better understand the workings of my professional society, understand the concerns of physicists who work in industry, outside of the United States, etc. and learn more about the politics (inside and outside of physics) that make research happen (or not).

My term comes to a close (on both the Council and the Executive Board) at the end of this year and I have just traveled back from my last meetings in Salt Lake City, UT.  I am sad about not getting to meet the new people who will be elected to replace all of us rotating off this year (I do recognize if we never left, there would be no new people!).  A big relief to me is that I won't have to travel so much - if you serve on the Council, that is 2 trips a year and then if you serve on the Executive Board that is an additional 3 trips (or 4 trips next year).  Since I HATE to travel, this will mean more nights in my own bed <contented sigh>.

The view from my hotel room in Salt Lake City.  This is facing Temple Square and the LDS temple is visible between the 2 red-orange buildings.

If you are reading this and are not a physicist (I hope some of you aren't since it is for you that I really write this blog), I hope that I have given you a little peek into the physics community outside of LIGO.  If you are a physicist, I urge you to consider expanding whatever service work you do to the APS, AAPT, OSA, etc.  It can be a lot of work, but I would definitely do it all over again.  Of course, service isn't all work (just mostly):

Wine tasting during the APS Executive Board Retreat, Santa Barbara, CA (Photo: Ken Cole)

Special thanks to Ken Cole for permission to use his picture of me (above).  Ken is the APS Special Assistant to the Executive Officer (and has done a great job a wrangling me these last years) and is also a gifted photographer.  You can view more of his photos here.

2 Questions: "Can there be a gravitational wave detection before Advanced LIGO?" & "What does it mean if gravitational waves aren't detected with aLIGO?"

Sorry for being away from the blog for as long as I have.  What has been keeping me away from you, you say?  Well, I got sick :(  The one thing that I am very susceptible to is sinus infections (ever since I was a kid) and autumn is prime time for me to catch one.  That kept me basically in bed for about 4 days with a few days before and after still feeling miserable but ambulatory.  My waterfall of post-nasal drip has begun to slow down but my coughing is starting to taste funny again.  I'm off to the after-hours clinic tonight to see if I need antibiotics to clear this up.

There was also a meeting at the LIGO Livingston Observatory where I work that brought astronomers and LIGO scientists together to discuss what data of ours they would like to have access to and what is the best way for them to get the data.  This is all in an effort to make the data the the American taxpayer has paid for available to other scientists.  This is an interesting topic because most of us here at LIGO have neuroses about making a detection claim that later turns out to be false.  Because of that, we tend to keep our data close to the vest until we are certain what is in it.  Anyway, I will talk about this more in a later blog post.

Now, back to answering reader questions!  Since I have been away so long I figured I would answer 2:

QUESTION #1

@AstroGuyz asked:

You know the question on every science bloggers' mind is the Big One; "When will LIGO discover gravity waves?"  Are the prospects for gravitational wave detection good before AdLIGO goes online?  Think we'll nab it before the Higgs?

First off, there is very little probability of detecting gravitational waves before Advanced LIGO is ready.  Notice I didn't say it was impossible.  There are 2 situations that could produce a pre-Advanced LIGO detection.

The first possibility is a joint run between two or more detectors outside of the United States.  This happened over this past summer when GEO and Virgo were both operational and while we are still looking at this data, we haven't seen anything yet.  Now that Virgo has commenced its upgrade efforts in earnest, there isn't really another chance for a joint run until Advanced LIGO is ready.  (FYI: you can see what gravitational wave detectors are operating right now on the GWIstat page, which is always displayed under my "Interesting Links" to the right.  Note that not all of these are interferometric (laser) detectors.)

The second chance for detection is going to rely on a single detector, mainly GEO, to be operating when a significant astronomical event is observed using other astronomy observations.  For example, if a supernova is detected in the sky at the same time a very strong event is detected in GEO, then chances are that these two events are related and there is a real gravitational wave detection.  That is why GEO is continually running while LIGO and Virgo undergo their upgrades - so that we don't miss something that is basically obvious.

So, unless one of these two situations happens, we will all need to wait for Advanced LIGO to be done.  And I wouldn't expect a detection as soon as we turn it on either...  It will take a while for us to get all of the new equipment "tuned-up" to the point that it is working to the best of its abilities.  Don't quote me on this, but I wouldn't expect anything until 2016-2017.

As far as detecting gravitational waves before the Higgs particle, I can't say but I am thinking about writing a post about what all the excitement over this particle is about in another post!

QUESTION #2

@EclipseMaps asked:

What are consequences for theory of gravity/relativity if null results for gravitational waves after extended observations?

From my last question, I mentioned not to expect a detection of gravitational waves until about 2016-2017.  Even if that time comes and goes, I still wouldn't get too worried.  However, if 2020 or so comes by (remember, this is just my opinion and not that of LIGO) and we firmly see no evidence of a detection, then this does have some implications.

The first thing most people would think is that LIGO has been a failure.  Actually, that is very far from the truth.  I, along with over 800 scientists in the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, have dedicated our careers to this as well as used taxpayer dollars to search for gravitational wave and we haven't done this on a hunch.  The 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for proof that gravitational waves exist by observing their affects on an astronomical system.  We simply want to detect them affecting our own detectors so that we can do astronomy with them.

Not detecting gravitational waves after we have detectors that clearly should be detecting them tells us that there is something we don't understand about general relativity (the theory where gravitational waves originate) or that we don't understand enough about the composition of our universe, namely how many of those things we expect to produce detectable gravitational waves exist.  This would be extraordinarily interesting (although a bit disappointing to me).  So much so, that there would be whole conferences of physicists and astronomers debating the populations of gravitational wave sources to exotic interference such as gravitational waves leaking into separated universes (see my discussion about how gravitons behave in string theory here).

PICTURE FOR THE DAY:

My "Lucky Yen"

This is my "Lucky Yen".  There really isn't anything special about it other than it was given to me by my first physics professor in college, Dr. Plitnik, who gave this to me on my birthday in 1997.  It was just after the Fall semester started.  I know it is kind of dumb, but it meant a lot to me and I have carried it in whatever bag I used through college, grad school and now.  It has even earned its own coin case (which has a higher market value than the coin).

Living LIGO 1 Year Anniversary!

Today is the one year anniversary of the Living LIGO blog!  Thank you to everyone who has ever read my blog and followed me on Twitter.  It has been an exciting year and I hope that the next one is even better for you.

I've learned many things through writing this blog.  The first thing I found was my voice.  Originally, I was targeting this blog to middle and high school teachers and students to give them an insight into the science of LIGO and what it is like to be a scientist.  While I think that this blog has served that role to a point, I also found an audience drawn from a great community of science enthusiasts and I've been able to engage them with all of the things that I love about my job.

By far, it is my readers who have made Living LIGO what it is (and I personally think it is great).  A high point for me came back in March when it was revealed that the "Big Dog" blind injection was not a real gravitational wave.  I wanted to share it on my blog since this was a rare peek into how science is done.  One of my readers shared it on his blog (here) which got the attention of a popular "Cosmic Variance" blog (here) and the story was then picked up by places like Discovery News (here) and various other blogs.  The number of readers went from a few a day to over 1000 on that particular day (and many of those reader have now become regulars).  This is something I never expected when I started writing my blog but it is very exciting for me and I hope that it has at least been interesting for you.

I usually like to post a picture with every post, but I didn't have anything particularly relevant to this so I decided to give you a peek into where I create my blog post and most of my other brilliant research - my office.  It's small but it's all mine!  I even have a window (which is great since fluorescent lights give me migraines) and a door:

If you look closely, you can see some of my collection of stuffed vampire/creepy things.

*Thank you again to every reader out there.*  As always, please let me know what kinds of things you would like to know about.  I'll answer almost anything - from science questions to how to become a physicist or whatever!  Ask in the comment section of any blog post or contact me on Twitter as @livingligo.

Night Life at the LIGO-Virgo Collaboration Meeting

I've talked before in this blog about what it is like being at various scientific conferences including the LIGO-Virgo Collaboration (LVC) Meetings.  At the March LVC Meeting, I was able to share the exciting news about the "Big Dog" blind injection (my blog about it | official LIGO release) and discuss the value of blind tests in science.  Last week I was at the September LVC Meeting in Gainesville, FL and, while there was much to talk about, nothing was truly exciting except to those of us in the business.  So, I decided that I would share with you what the night life is like at a meeting like this.

On the evening of Tuesday September 27th, A good friend of mine called me to ask if I had any plans.  Since I didn't I asked what she had in mind and she told me that she and a bunch of other LIGO people were going out to a trivia night.  I had to think about this for a minute since I am very much a homebody and was looking forward to finishing the book I was reading, but then I realized that I tend to have no life at all and should go out.  So, off I went!

We ended up going to The Laboratory which is a science themed pub/cafe.  Below is a picture of me standing in front of The Laboratory:

Me in front of The Laboratory

When I got inside, I saw that the place was definitely "no frills" and a little divey but the atmosphere was still fun and settled in for an evening of showing off my vast intellectual prowess (read: know a few of the answers and hope my other team mates know more than I do).  I grabbed one of the few menus and took pictures for your enjoyment:

Front of menu (FYI: the URL listed on this menu does not work)

Back of menu

All of the food has a science themed title.  I chose the Dr. Hawking chicken sandwich (the item on the left bottom corner on the back of the menu pictured above).  How could I possibly order any other sandwich since I specialize in relativity?  I was so hungry when it arrived that I dove right in and forgot to take a picture for you.  So, here what it looked like when I woke from my hunger craze and took a picture:

What was left of my Dr. Hawking when I remembered to take a picture

As I was eating, more and more people started showing up for the trivia event.  And the place ended up being nearly overrun by all of the usuals and the mass amounts of LIGO people who showed up as well (I didn't actually count, but there wer about 20 of us).  The lights went off, the black lights came on and the trivia started, hosted by none other than Doc (get it?).  We settled into teams of about 6 people and played the night away.  There were 20 questions.  After each question the DJ played a song and that song usually had some kind of hint to it.  Once the song was over, the team had to turn in the answer on a slip of paper and you got a seconds chance (for reduced points) if it was wrong.  I'm not sure exactly where our team finished (not first and not last) but we had a great time.  Below is a picture of the row of us LIGO people who invaded (and we stick together).  And this isn't even everyone since some stragglers ended up sitting at their own table to the right of the picture:

Just some of the LIGO people who showed up for trivia (yes, all the way to the back of the picture)

And what would a science themed cafe be without lab coats?  Here is one of us brilliant specimens modeling one (with a nice glow from the black lights):

A real scientist in a real lab coat at The Laboratory

After trivia fun was over, a few of my friends and I headed back to the hotel since there was another day of the meeting the next day, but I also had to pack since I left the meeting after lunch to head home (which was an adventure in itself since my plane from Atlanta to Baton Rouge was diverted to Jackson, MS just before we started our decent due to a really horrible storm.  As you can tell, after hours of sitting in a closed airport I did indeed make it home.  And I was glad for it since I was away on travel to Long Island, NY for an APS Executive Board Meeting just before this trip.  Remember how I said I was a homebody?  This body was very glad to be home!

Q: How Does Einstein@Home Search for Gravitational Waves?

@umbonfo asked the following question:

What about the Citizen Science project Einstein@Home? I'm running it but I don't know which GW data it's analyzing.

This is a great question and there is so much I want to tell you all about that I am going to break this down into smaller questions:

What is Einstein@Home?

If you aren't familiar with Einstein@Home (read more, sign up), it is a screensaver that looks for gravitational waves in data collected by LIGO and other detectors like it.  Basically, users allow Einstein@Home to become part of a large supercomputer seeking gravitational waves but ONLY when the users are not using their computers.  How many times have you gone to bed at night and left your computer on?  If it doesn't have anything to do, it just sits there.  Einstein@Home gives it something productive to do that comes at no additional cost to the user.  Below is a screenshot of Einstein@Home as it is running on my computer.  It shows you where the two LIGO detectors are (the green and blue 'L' on the starsphere), where the GEO detector in Germany is (the red 'L') and where on the sky this program is looking for gravitaional waves right now (the orange cross-hairs).  To learn more about what you see on the screensaver, click here.

This is a screen shot of the Einstein@Home screensaver from my laptop just moments ago.

How does Einstein@Home get data?

Once you install the Einstein@Home screensaver, the central data servers (at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee) send a small portion of data to your computer for it to analyze.  Once your computer is done looking at that data, it sends a message back to the central computers telling them if there was a candidate gravitational wave in it.  Regardless of the result, 1 to 2 other computers also process the same data to make sure that they all get the same results (and we are sure that there isn't someone out tampering with the software to report false results).  If the same results are found and there is a candidate gravitational wave in the data, then it is looked at more closely by physicists who specialize in data analysis (like me - although I look for different kinds of gravitational waves than Einstein@Home looks for).


What kind of gravitational waves does Einstein@Home look for?

Einstein@Home looks for a very specific kind of gravitational wave call a continuous gravitational wave.  The are expected to be emitted by rapidly spinning, dense objects like neutron stars.  If there is even a small imperfection in the spherical shape of these stars, they will be constantly emitting a gravitational wave (if you were to put the signal of the gravitational wave through speakers, it would sound like a single tone).  We look for this kind of gravitational wave by breaking down the data collected from the detector into its different wave components.  Think of the data as the sum of a collection of many different waves each with a constant frequency.  We can then take a chunk of data and break it up into its component waves.  (This is called a Fourier transform.)  Since we know what a continuous wave should look like, Einstein@Home then inspects each of the component waves to see if it could be a gravitational wave.

Does Einstein@Home do anything else?

Why, that's insightful of you to ask!  :)  Einstein@Home also processes data from the Arecibo radio telescope looking for pulsars - a special kind of neutron star that emits radio waves from their magnetic poles.  Every time that the star spins its jet of radio waves across the Earth, radio telescopes can detect it.  The data analysis in not quite the same as when Einstein@Home looks for gravitational waves, but the basic process of breaking down the data into its component waves is the same.

Why is Enstein@Home interested in discovering pulsars?

Knowing more about where pulsars are in our universe lets us know better where to look for them in our gravitational wave data (notice that the screensaver has crosshairs that show you specifically were Einstein@Home is looking for gravitational waves) and, since pulsars are a special kind of neutron star, we can get a better sense of how many of them are out there in the Universe which give us more accurate measures of how often we should expect to detect gravitational waves from them.

What has Einstein@Home found?

Well, since there has been no direct detection of gravitational waves yet, it is obvious that Einstein@Home has not produced a real gravitational wave yet.  However, it has found over 10 previously unknown pulsars including the fastest known spinning pulsar!

All of this would not be possible without users like you!  When all of the computing power of Einstein@Home is combined, it is within the top 20 or so supercomputers in the world!   


I hope I answered at least most of your questions about Einstein@Home.  As always, feel free to ask me questions by leaving a comment on this blog or tweet me @livingligo.

About Time...

I know that I haven't been posting as much as I usually do (I like to post once a week) but life gets in my way.  For example, I had a tooth break that needed fixed and both my husband and I have come down with the cold that has been making its way around the observatory.  Basically, between life and getting work done, I haven't had a lot of time.

But today is an important day since we will reach GPS time 1,000,000,000.  This time is measured in seconds from Sunday January 6, 1980 at midnight UTC (this is the official time of the planet measured at the Prime Meridian passing through Greenwich, England) without any leap second corrections to match the rotation of the Earth (astronomers use a similar time keeping method called Julian Date which is the number of days since January 1, 4713 BC without any corrections for outright changes to the calendar [like to the Gregorian calendar - which is the calendar we use today]).  Here at LIGO, this is important to us since this is how we measure the official time for everything and this time needs to be very accurate since we will never believe a potential gravitational wave detection unless it is measured at different observatories within the time it would take a it to travel between the sites - for the two LIGO observatories, the maximum time is 10 milliseconds.

Other than it being cool to watch the time roll over to one billion (like watching your car odometer roll over to 100,000 miles) this event can cause issues with the data analysis programs that we write to search for gravitational waves.  For example, I wrote a software package while I was in grad school that we still use to produce simulations to test the efficiency of data analysis software.  My baby is called GravEn (for GRAVitational-wave ENgine) and uses the GPS time to determine where the simulations will be added to the real data (this data with fake signals is never saved together so that we don't trick ourselves into thinking we saw something real).  GravEn has specifications in its programing to return the time of the simulation in whole GPS seconds in one column of the log file and the nanoseconds after that time in another column.  I have made it so that the whole-second time is returned with 9 digits and this is now an issue since the time will be 10 digits.  It is easy enough to fix, but it must be fixed!

This new 1,000,000,000 time is not going to be of any serious concern like people feared the Y2K bug to be.  Instead, all of us code monkeys (as computer programers are lovingly referred to) need to go back and make sure that we allow enough (10) digits in the parts of our programs that use GPS time.

So, GPS 1,000,000,000 will happen today (September 14) at 1:46:25 UTC (or September 13 at 9:46:25 PM in Eastern Daylight Time).



***

My next blog post will be on Thursday and will answer the reader question on exactly what kind of gravitational waves Einstein@home seeks and how it looks for them.

Free Books by Einstein on Kindle and a Request by "The Big Bang Theory"

I will get back to answering reader questions with my next post, but I wanted to mention some other things...

Free Books by Einstein on Kindle

I love to read (preferably books with vampires or other creatures that go bump in the night) and my Kindle has become something I am rarely far away from.  I am also frugal so I like to browse pages that list free or reduced cost ebooks (my favorite is eReaderIQ).  Today, I noticed that there are a number of books by Einstein that are free (if you don't have a Kindle, you can still download these books and read them on the Kindle app for your computer/smart phone):

• The Theory of Relativity: and Other Essays
• Essays in Science
• The World As I See It
• Out of My Later Years: The Scientist, Philosopher, and Man Portrayed Through His Own Words
• Sidelights on Relativity
• Essays in Humanism
• Letters on Wave Mechanics: Correspondence with H. A. Lorentz, Max Planck, and Erwin Schrodinger
• Letters to Solovine: 1906-1955 

I've only read all of "Out of My Later Years" but I have also read bits and pieces of most of the other titles.  I've always been impressed by Einstein's thoughts on a wide range of topics like religion and politics, even when I didn't agree with him.  I hope that you check these out to get a unique view of who Einstein was.

A Request by "The Big Bang Theory"

I recently received an email letting me know that the producers of "The Big Bang Theory" requested permission to use the "Gravitational Waves" poster I worked on with the APS.  The request went to the APS (as the publisher), they granted it, and forwarded the legal paperwork through channels to me.  By and large, the release is what you would expect but regarding how, when, and where the producers can use the poster it states:

"in any and all media whether now known or hereafter devised, in perpetuity, throughout the universe by Producer or its assignee."

"... Throughout the universe ..."  I suppose it makes sense to cover all your bases these days.  Evolving technology has made the wording of copyright notices ever more complicated and this kind of generalization seems to take care of that.  That's great, but I am not sure that the Earth laws this release is tailored to will hold up in Martian court :)

So, take a close look at the backgrounds on this season's "Big Bang Theory" and look for the "Gravitational Waves" poster.  It will be quite a thrill to see something that I worked on glimpsed on television and my favorite show to boot!