For those of you who dont know, in 2002 I did a summer research internship working for California Institute of Technology--Caltech--for a cooperative project between them and MIT. AS I LOVE IRONIES, Im here to celebrate the failure of this project to achieve its initial goal! And someone else achieving it instead! It is called LIGO-Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory. Theyve been looking to directly measure Gravity Waves on Earth. It was the single most expensive grant by the National Science Foundation, and slated get up near HALF A BILLION DOLLARS in expense by 2012. THIS WAS THE WORST JOB OF MY ENTIRE LIFE. At its worst, I trudged around a swamp for 12 hours a day, 6-7 days a week, for 6 weeks. We were told even our little swamps job would have a prestigious publication. And the entire project has yet to detect an astronomical event, or publish any of the objective observations! IRONY! (In Summer 2003, I went to Bucknell University instead. We did low-budget experiments with magnets, wires, chemicals, and electricity. When I came back to JMU to present on it, people were wondering why the heck it mattered compared to their big expensive particle physics research, or major inter-institution materials phsyics research, or whatever. It got published. Then one of older professors there at JMU told me I managed to get a more prestigious publication than more than half of the PhD faculty of my department in the top U.S physics journal, WITHOUT any degree. IRONY!) Who has actually found Gravity Waves? A collection of radio astronomers. From what event? THE BIG BANG! How expensive was this? CHEAP! IRONY!!! There is a better article on this discovery--with a cool multi-biography story along with the findings--that I lost track of, but I hope to find it again and share it here soon.
Posted on: Sun, 30 Mar 2014 10:32:02 +0000
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