Milestone-Proposal:1972 - Rainer Weiss's Invention of the Gravitational Wave Antenna Used in the Large Interferometric Gravitational Observatory (LIGO)

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Revision as of 20:24, 29 April 2019 by Willie.from.texas (talk | contribs) (Milestone Award Proposal for the Invention of the Gravitational Wave Antenna)


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Docket #:

This Proposal has been approved, and is now a Milestone


To the proposer’s knowledge, is this achievement subject to litigation? No

Is the achievement you are proposing more than 25 years old? Yes

Is the achievement you are proposing within IEEE’s designated fields as defined by IEEE Bylaw I-104.11, namely: Engineering, Computer Sciences and Information Technology, Physical Sciences, Biological and Medical Sciences, Mathematics, Technical Communications, Education, Management, and Law and Policy. Yes

Did the achievement provide a meaningful benefit for humanity? Yes

Was it of at least regional importance? Yes

Has an IEEE Organizational Unit agreed to pay for the milestone plaque(s)? Yes

Has an IEEE Organizational Unit agreed to arrange the dedication ceremony? Yes

Has the IEEE Section in which the milestone is located agreed to take responsibility for the plaque after it is dedicated? Yes

Has the owner of the site agreed to have it designated as an IEEE Milestone? Yes


Year or range of years in which the achievement occurred:

1972

Title of the proposed milestone:

Invention of the Gravitational Wave Antenna Used in the Large Interferometric Gravitational Observatory (LIGO), 1972

Plaque citation summarizing the achievement and its significance:

In 1972 Rainer Weiss proposed a gravitational wave antenna capable of detecting gravitational waves - ripples in spacetime propagating at the speed of light - that were predicted by Albert Einstein in his 1916 Theory of General Relativity. On 14 September 2015, LIGO made a fundamental breakthrough by the first direct detection of gravitational waves produced by the merger of two black holes about 1.3 billion light-years away.

200-250 word abstract describing the significance of the technical achievement being proposed, the person(s) involved, historical context, humanitarian and social impact, as well as any possible controversies the advocate might need to review.


IEEE technical societies and technical councils within whose fields of interest the Milestone proposal resides.


In what IEEE section(s) does it reside?

Region 5 and Region 6

IEEE Organizational Unit(s) which have agreed to sponsor the Milestone:

IEEE Organizational Unit(s) paying for milestone plaque(s):

Unit: Region 5
Senior Officer Name: Director Robert Shapiro

Unit: Region 6
Senior Officer Name: Director Keith Moore

IEEE Organizational Unit(s) arranging the dedication ceremony:

Unit: To be determined
Senior Officer Name: {{{Senior officer name}}}

IEEE section(s) monitoring the plaque(s):

IEEE Section: Baton Rouge Secton
IEEE Section Chair name: Section Chair Don Couvillion

IEEE Section: Richland Section
IEEE Section Chair name: {{{Section chair name}}}

Milestone proposer(s):

Proposer name: Will Robinson
Proposer email: Proposer's email masked to public

Proposer name: Rich Abbott
Proposer email: Proposer's email masked to public

Please note: your email address and contact information will be masked on the website for privacy reasons. Only IEEE History Center Staff will be able to view the email address.

Street address(es) and GPS coordinates in decimal form of the intended milestone plaque site(s):

Site 1: 19100 LIGO Lane, Livingston, LA 70754, GPS Coordinates - +30.56319, -90.77422 Site 2: 127124 N. Rt. 10, Richland, WA 99354, GPS Coordinates: +30.56289, -90.77424

Describe briefly the intended site(s) of the milestone plaque(s). The intended site(s) must have a direct connection with the achievement (e.g. where developed, invented, tested, demonstrated, installed, or operated, etc.). A museum where a device or example of the technology is displayed, or the university where the inventor studied, are not, in themselves, sufficient connection for a milestone plaque.

Please give the address(es) of the plaque site(s) (GPS coordinates if you have them). Also please give the details of the mounting, i.e. on the outside of the building, in the ground floor entrance hall, on a plinth on the grounds, etc. If visitors to the plaque site will need to go through security, or make an appointment, please give the contact information visitors will need. Each site has an operational gravitational wave antenna as first described by Dr. Rainer Weiss in his 1972 paper, and are the locations where the first gravitational waves were detected. Both sites, operated together independently validate detections, and provide the ability to triangulate the approximate location of where the event originated.

Are the original buildings extant?

The buildings at the proposed plaque sites were erected as a part of a laboratory required to support the construction and operation of the gravitational wave antennas. Each of the sites have been designated as Historic Physics Sites by the American Physical Society (APS).

Details of the plaque mounting:

The mounting for the plaques is still to be determined but a permanent immovable mounting is envisioned in relative proximity to other plaques commemorating the site.

How is the site protected/secured, and in what ways is it accessible to the public?

Each observatory maintains visitor control. Each plaque will be mounted outside, and each are accessable for public viewing while on the observatory grounds.

Who is the present owner of the site(s)?

LIGO is a U.S. National Science Foundation funded program. The design and construction of LIGO was conducted by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Construction of the facilities was begun in 1994, and the advanced LIGO installation was completed in 2014. At LIGO Hanford Observatory, the National Science Foundation owns all buildings; the Department of Energy owns the land and allows Caltech and MIT to operate the facility through an MOU and Permit with the NSF. At LIGO Livingston Observatory, the NSF owns all buildings.

What is the historical significance of the work (its technological, scientific, or social importance)? If personal names are included in citation, include justification here. (see section 6 of Milestone Guidelines)

Following the progression of Human knowledge, four fundamental forces of nature have been identified. Early in our recorded history Earth, Wind, Water and Fire were considered by the Greek philosophers as the basis for explaining nature and the complexity of all matter. As our knowledge and scientific method evolved, we eventually identified the gravitational force, as described by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, and the other three forces as quantum fields that are described by the Standard Model of particle physics. The other three forces are the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force and the electromagnetic force. LIGO represents the first time gravitational waves, the force-carrier of gravity as predicted by Einstein over 100 years ago, was directly observed.

The gravitational force was first described in mathematical terms by Isaac Newton in 1687 by inferring that all matter exerted an attractive force directly related to the mass of individual objects and the square of the distance between them. From 1687 to the early 20th Century, Newton’s model reigned supreme. However, astronomical observations were made that defied explanation using Newton’s laws of motion. These observations were related to objects whose velocities approached that of the speed of light, and to objects subjected to very high gravitational fields. The observations made by astronomers over a period of 200 years involving the precession of the perihelion of Mercury, which did not behave as required by Newton’s gravitational equations, are a famous example.

In 1916, Albert Einstein described gravity as the interaction of space and time in The General Theory of Relativity. General Relativity predicts that a change in a gravitational field will travel through the Universe at the speed of light. These changes in the gravitational field are described as gravitational waves. “In 1918, Einstein, using a weak-field approximation is his very successful geometrical theory of gravity (the general theory of relativity), indicated the form that gravitational waves would take in this theory and demonstrated that systems with time-variant mass quadrupole moments would lose energy by gravitational radiation. It was evident to Einstein that since gravitational radiation is extremely weak, the most likely measurable radiation would come from astronomical sources.” Given the requirements of the measurement, in his paper Dr. Weiss went on to describe a proposed antenna design capable of detecting the gravitational waves predicted by Einstein. In 1979 the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded Caltech and MIT to develop and mature the proposed gravitational wave antenna as described by Dr. Weiss. Following ten years of research and prototype development, Congress approved funding for LIGO in 1991, and construction of the sites began in 1994.

The first gravitational waves were simultaneously detected using the gravitational wave antenna at the two LIGO sites on Sep 14, 2015. The gravitational waves were produced by the merger of two black holes, an event that occurred 1.3 billion years ago. The direct detection of gravitational waves by LIGO resulted in co-founders Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish, and Kip Thorne receiving the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics.

What obstacles (technical, political, geographic) needed to be overcome?

Because gravity is the weakest of the four fundamental forces, gravitational forces are exceedingly small and, before the gravitational wave antennas used on LIGO, were impossible to measure directly. A strong astrophysical gravitational wave, caused by some of the most energetic events in the Universe, will produce a displacement at Earth of order 10-18 meters, which is about 1000 times smaller than the diameter of a proton. Waves of this strength are produced by very massive systems undergoing extremely large accelerations, such as two black holes merging into one at over half the speed of light. This measurement capability has been made possible through the development of state-of-the-art technology in multiple electrical engineering disciplines including photonics, controls, computer systems, software, instrumentation, signal processing, etc. It took over 100 years of advanced multidisciplinary technology development to provide the capability of making sensitivity measurements capable of detecting gravity waves.

What features set this work apart from similar achievements?

There are no other similar achievements. This is a fundamental achievement.

Supporting texts and citations to establish the dates, location, and importance of the achievement: Minimum of five (5), but as many as needed to support the milestone, such as patents, contemporary newspaper articles, journal articles, or chapters in scholarly books. 'Scholarly' is defined as peer-reviewed, with references, and published. You must supply the texts or excerpts themselves, not just the references. At least one of the references must be from a scholarly book or journal article. All supporting materials must be in English, or accompanied by an English translation.

1) Reference for the original paper that described the detector: R. Weiss (1972), “Electromagnetically Coupled Broadband Gravitational Antenna” Quarterly Progress Report No. 105, Research Laboratory of Electronics, MIT, pg. 54 – 76. A PDF of that original paper is available here: https://dcc-lho.ligo.org/public/0038/P720002/001/19720018652.pdf

2) Construction Proposal: R. W. P. Drever, F. J. Raab, K. S. Thorne, R. Vogt, and R. Weiss, Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) Technical Report, 1989, https://dcc.ligo.org/LIGO‑M890001/public/main.

3) Prototype description: D. C. Coyne, 1996, "The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Project" 1996 IEEE Aerospace Applications Conference Proceedings, https://dcc-lho.ligo.org/public/0037/G960051/000/G960051-00.pdf

4) First gravitational wave detection: B. P. Abbott, et al., "Observations of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger" Physical Review Letters, PRL 116, 061102 (2016), https://dcc-lho.ligo.org/public/0122/P150914/014/LIGO-P150914_Detection_of_GW150914.pdf

5) Detection of a binary star merger: B. P. Abbott, et al., "GW170817: Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Neutron Star Inspiral" Physical Review Letters, PRL 119, 161101 (2017), https://dcc-lho.ligo.org/public/0145/P170817/008/LIGO-P170817.pdf

Supporting materials (supported formats: GIF, JPEG, PNG, PDF, DOC): All supporting materials must be in English, or if not in English, accompanied by an English translation. You must supply the texts or excerpts themselves, not just the references. For documents that are copyright-encumbered, or which you do not have rights to post, email the documents themselves to ieee-history@ieee.org. Please see the Milestone Program Guidelines for more information.


Please email a jpeg or PDF a letter in English, or with English translation, from the site owner(s) giving permission to place IEEE milestone plaque on the property, and a letter (or forwarded email) from the appropriate Section Chair supporting the Milestone application to ieee-history@ieee.org with the subject line "Attention: Milestone Administrator." Note that there are multiple texts of the letter depending on whether an IEEE organizational unit other than the section will be paying for the plaque(s).

Please recommend reviewers by emailing their names and email addresses to ieee-history@ieee.org. Please include the docket number and brief title of your proposal in the subject line of all emails.