
Gravity Waves and Neutrinos: The Later Work of Joseph Weber - dnetesn
http://mitp.nautil.us/article/162/gravity-waves-and-neutrinos
======
yodon
As someone who was peripherally involved in this field I'm very glad this
history of science was recorded and hope the author repeats the analysis for
the context around the Ligo project.

When I was in grad school getting my PhD in Physics, I was interested in doing
gravity wave searches for high frequency gravity waves using arrays of small,
inexpensive, cryogenically cooled Weber bars. This was at the time when Ligo
was being built to search for much lower frequency waves at much higher costs.

I found the sociology around both the Weber and Ligo work fascinating then and
in hindsight, and I personally ascribe the complex sociology to the incredible
difficulty of these incredibly sensitive experiments. Detecting gravity waves
is one of the hardest experiments an experimental physicist can attempt
(numbers like 10^-23 and 10^-51 are not uncommon to encounter in your
sensitivity calculations, for example, and it doesn't really matter what units
you're talking about if you're trying to measure something with 10^-51 in it,
it's going to be incredibly difficult). My read was and is that the physics
community understands the risks these researchers are taking to their careers
by engaging in experiments of this incredible difficulty and cuts them slack
or gives them an underlying cushion of respect for what they are doing because
everyone knows they are probably going to fail and it is ultimately likely to
be a fall on your sword effort for the benefit of trying to advance a very
difficult aspect of our knowledge.

I can attest to the author's observations of the complexity of the continued
respect for Weber even in the context of complete and universal disregard for
his experimental results. He wasn't viewed as a crank or a laughing stock,
even though everyone knew the story of finding a spurious signal in data that
he'd failed to correct for differences in time zones between detectors. It was
much closer to someone you respect very much who one day hooked his laptop up
to the projector in the board room, opened it, and accidentally projected
weird disturbing porn on the screen by mistake. He screwed up, everyone knew
that, but he was still respected for all the other work he had done and no one
took any joy or mirth in his screwup, nor did they really want to talk about
it or bring it up (I suspect I spent more time poking around the historical
periphery of Weber bars than most anyone other than the author of this paper,
because I was seriously considering treading into this field and placing
myself at risk of doing a very very hard experiment, with the added factor
that I was proposing to go after high frequency gravity waves of a sort no one
in the physics community had a source type in mind for, so it would have been
doubly risky, a hard experiment looking for a signal that probably wasn't
there but that I felt should still be looked for, if only to place a limit on
the magnitude of the background).

I mentioned hoping the author writes a similar paper on Ligo. Ligo was a huge
success, as everyone expected. Rai Weiss[0] was (is) a brilliant experimental
physicist (and a very kind and helpful mentor to me when I was an
undergraduate starting to think about alternative ways to detect gravity
waves, he graciously gave me many hours of his time to bounce around crazy
ideas and help with difficult calculations).

Back to the sociology, as much as I and everyone else respected Rai, I didn't
go work on Ligo because it looked clear to me there were two answers Ligo
could get: It could detect gravity waves at about the level everyone expected
colliding black holes to produce (in which case everyone would say "It was an
incredibly difficult experiment but they pulled it off" and a Nobel Prize
would likely get awarded) or they could fail to see them/see way to many of
them (in which case the community would say "Rai's a really smart guy but it
was just a very hard experiment to do"). I simply didn't see any way that the
community would actually increase it's actual Shannon information level about
gravity waves significantly in response to Ligo, because the community had
such a big Baysean probability factor folded in to its planned assessment of
whatever the eventual outcome would be.

Fortunately, Rai (and others) were really smart, and really good
experimentalists, and they did get "the right answer" having taken a great
risk in doing so, and they are rightly respected for it, in somewhat the same
way that Joe Weber was still respected in the community when I was thinking
about these things back in the late 80's and early 90's (it's possible things
have changed as the people who knew Weber personally have retired and/or
passed away and his memory has been replaced by that of the actually,
genuinely successful Ligo, I've been out of the field for too long to have
current info there).

Anyway, thanks to @dnetesn for posting this and bringing good memories to mind
for me.

[0][https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainer_Weiss](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainer_Weiss)

~~~
eveningcoffee
Incredible story! Thank you for posting it.

