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UNLOCKING THE SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE: 

GRAVITATIONAL WAVES 

HEARING 

BEFORE THE

COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND 

TECHNOLOGY 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 

ONE HUNDRED FOURTEENTH CONGRESS 

FIRST SESSION 

February 24, 2016 

Serial No. 114–61 

Printed for the use of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology 

( 

Available via the World Wide Web: http://science.house.gov 
(II) 

COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY 

HON. LAMAR S. SMITH, Texas, Chair 

FRANK D. LUCAS, Oklahoma 

F. JAMES SENSENBRENNER, JR., 

Wisconsin 

DANA ROHRABACHER, California 

RANDY NEUGEBAUER, Texas 

MICHAEL T. MCCAUL, Texas 

MO BROOKS, Alabama 

RANDY HULTGREN, Illinois 

BILL POSEY, Florida 

THOMAS MASSIE, Kentucky 

JIM BRIDENSTINE, Oklahoma 

RANDY K. WEBER, Texas 

BILL JOHNSON, Ohio 

JOHN R. MOOLENAAR, Michigan 

STEPHEN KNIGHT, California 

BRIAN BABIN, Texas 

BRUCE WESTERMAN, Arkansas 

BARBARA COMSTOCK, Virginia 

GARY PALMER, Alabama 

BARRY LOUDERMILK, Georgia 

RALPH LEE ABRAHAM, Louisiana 

DARIN LAHOOD, Illinois 

EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas 

ZOE LOFGREN, California 

DANIEL LIPINSKI, Illinois 

DONNA F. EDWARDS, Maryland 

SUZANNE BONAMICI, Oregon 

ERIC SWALWELL, California 

ALAN GRAYSON, Florida 

AMI BERA, California 

ELIZABETH H. ESTY, Connecticut 

MARC A. VEASEY, Texas 

KATHERINE M. CLARK, Massachusetts 

DONALD S. BEYER, JR., Virginia 

ED PERLMUTTER, Colorado 

PAUL TONKO, New York 

MARK TAKANO, California 

BILL FOSTER, Illinois 
(III) 

C O N T E N T S 

February 24, 2016 

Page 

Witness List ............................................................................................................. 2 

Hearing Charter ...................................................................................................... 3 

Opening Statements 

Statement by Representative Lamar S. Smith, Chairman, Committee on 

Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives ..................... 7 

Written Statement ............................................................................................ 9 

Statement by Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, Ranking Member, Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives .... 11 

Written Statement ............................................................................................ 13 

Statement by Representative Bill Foster, Committee on Science, Space, and 

Technology, U.S. House of Representatives ....................................................... 15 

Written Statement ............................................................................................ 13 

Witnesses: 

Dr. Fleming Crim, Assistant Director, Directorate of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, National Science Foundation 

Oral Statement ................................................................................................. 18 

Written Statement ............................................................................................ 20 

Dr. David Reitze, Executive Director of LIGO, California Institute of Technology 

Oral Statement ................................................................................................. 27 

Written Statement ............................................................................................ 29 

Dr. Gabriela Gonza ́lez, Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Louisiana State 

University 

Oral Statement ................................................................................................. 36 

Written Statement ............................................................................................ 38 

Dr. David Shoemaker, Director, LIGO Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute 

of Technology 

Oral Statement ................................................................................................. 45 

Written Statement ............................................................................................ 48 

Discussion ................................................................................................................. 54 

Appendix I: Answers to Post-Hearing Questions 

Dr. Fleming Crim, Assistant Director, Directorate of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, National Science Foundation ....................................................... 82 

Dr. David Reitze, Executive Director of LIGO, California Institute of Technology .................................................................................................................... 83 

Dr. Gonza ́lez, Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Louisiana State University ......................................................................................................................... 85 

Dr. David Shoemaker, Director, LIGO Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute 

of Technology ........................................................................................................ 87 

(1) 

UNLOCKING THE SECRETS OF THE 

UNIVERSE: 

GRAVITATIONAL WAVES 

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2016 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY, Washington, D.C. 

The Committee met, pursuant to call, at 10:07 a.m., in Room 

2318 of the Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Lamar Smith 

[Chairman of the Committee] presiding. 
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Chairman SMITH. The Committee on Science, Space, and Technology will come to order, 

Without objection, the Chair is authorized to declare recesses of 

the Committee at any time. 

Welcome to today’s hearing titled ‘‘Unlocking the Secrets of the 

Universe: Gravitational Waves.’’ I’ll recognize myself for five minutes for an opening statement and then the Ranking Member. 

Last September, American scientists in Louisiana and Washington State detected a signal from an event so powerful that it 

sent a detectable ripple 1.3 billion light years ago through time and 

space to Earth. Albert Einstein was right: gravitational waves do 

exist. A century ago, Einstein developed his theory of general relativity. He then predicted that intense energy events, like the collision of black holes, could cause such disruption to the universe that 

they would emit waves that distort time and space much like the 

ripples on a pond caused by a thrown rock. 

After decades of effort, scientists have now observed Einstein’s 

theory in practice. They witnessed the effect of two black holes colliding, which released 50 times the energy of all the stars in the 

universe put together that emitted a gravitational wave across the 

universe that was, for the first time, detected on Earth. The discovery was the work of hundreds of scientists, decades of ingenuity 

and innovation, and the commitment of the United States through 

the National Science Foundation. 

Forty years ago, a group of scientists began to design an experimental system to detect gravitational waves on Earth. Then they 

submitted a proposal for funding to the National Science Foundation. In 1990, the National Science Board approved funding for the 

project. Since that time, NSF has supported development of the 

Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO. 

This included construction and upgrades, operations, and research 

awards to scientists who study LIGO data. Today we will learn 

more about the value to America of that investment. We will also 

hear about the monumental success that has resulted from advances in physics, astronomy, engineering, and computer science. 

The NSF’’ support for the LIGO project is a great example of what 

we can achieve when we pursue breakthrough science that is in the 

national interest. 

We have the privilege today of hearing from a panel of witnesses 

who helped make the discovery. They are leaders of the 1,000 scientists and 80 scientific institutions that make up the global LIGO 

Scientific Collaboration. We look forward to hearing more about the 

discovery, what it means for American science and innovation, and 

what new research and applications may be generated by this 

breakthrough. With this discovery, we embark on a new and exciting time for American physics and astronomy, and we move closer 

to a better understanding of the universe. 

This is a quote by Dr. Kip Thorne, a renowned American physicist and one of the founders of LIGO: ‘‘With this discovery, we humans are embarking on a marvelous new quest: the quest to explore the warped side of the universe, objects and phenomena that 

are made from warped space-time. Colliding black holes and gravitational waves are our first beautiful examples.’’ 

Congratulations to the scientists on their great discovery. 
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[The prepared statement of Chairman Smith follows:] 
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Chairman SMITH. That concludes my opening statement, and the 

gentlewoman from Texas, Eddie Bernice Johnson, is recognized for 

hers. 

Ms. JOHNSON. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I’m delighted that you’re having this hearing today. It is gratifying to be 

hearing about a very exciting scientific breakthrough. 

I want to congratulate each of the panelists, and welcome you, 

for your role in anything that you participated when it comes to 

LIGO. Thank you for being here this morning to talk about what 

this achievement means for science, and for our Nation, and about 

the long-term commitment to high-risk, basic research that made 

it all possible. 

The story of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory is a story about the talent, creativity, and perseverance 

of U.S. scientists and engineers. It is a story about the 65-year 

commitment of the National Science Foundation to high-risk, basic 

research. I truly believe that a Nobel Prize will be coming. And it 

is a story about what we stand to lose as a Nation if we fail to 

maintain faith in our scientists, and in the scientific process exemplified by the National Science Foundation that is the envy of nations around the world. 

When LIGO was first proposed by a small group of physicists 

from MIT and Cal Tech, many scientists responded, ‘‘You’re crazy. 

It is not possible to build a gravitational-wave detector.’’ Many of 

the scientists at the National Science Foundation and the National 

Science Board also quietly wondered if it was possible. But the 

project leaders presented a compelling plan, and the Foundation, 

then under the Administration of George H.W. Bush, decided to 

take the gamble. Because that is what the National Science Foundation does. It supports high-risk, but potentially high-reward, 

basic science that nobody else will do. 

Today, we celebrate the scientific and technological achievement 

that LIGO represents. However, the path to this point was not 

smooth. When the National Science Foundation first proposed to 

build LIGO, debates raged in the scientific community and in Congress. Many scientists were concerned about protecting funding for 

competing physics and astronomy projects that were also important. They were also concerned about squeezing resources for research grants. Those concerns were understandable, and eventually 

led to the creation of a separate facilities construction account at 

the Foundation. 

Members of Congress, including Members of this Committee, 

were also skeptical. This was a very expensive project, and some 

scientists doubted that it was technologically feasible. Members 

also wondered, what exactly are gravitational waves and why 

should we care? Throughout these debates and despite the elimination of funding by Congress in the first year that LIGO was proposed and the attempt to do so again in the second year, the National Science Foundation kept faith in the scientists and in its 

own mission. 

Notwithstanding some of the debates we have had here in recent 

weeks, the primary purpose of the National Science Foundation is 

not to strengthen national security, or improve public health, or 

even to grow our economy. To be sure, those are all critically im-
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portant outcomes of National Science Foundation investments in 

basic research across all fields of science and engineering, and 

some NSF-funded research has intended applications even at the 

proposal stage. However, the essential, core purpose of the National Science Foundation is to promote the progress of science, 

whether or not there is a foreseeable or intended application, and 

to train the next generation of U.S. scientists and engineers. And 

it is clear that the Foundation’s bold investments in LIGO, driven 

by that core purpose, have led to a major scientific breakthrough. 

Today’s hearing serves as a reminder not just of how talented 

U.S. scientists and engineers are, but of why we must work hard 

to maintain our status as the best country in the world to do 

science by continuing to fund NSF and encourage high-risk taking. 

This is a lesson that we should apply to the entire agency, and not 

just to certain fields of our choosing. 

Twenty-five years ago, many Members of Congress did not want 

to fund the search for gravitational waves. After all, how was that 

in the national interest? But enough Members did dare to imagine, 

and here we are today. 

Again, I want to thank you and congratulate the witnesses, and 

now I will yield the remainder of my time. 

[The prepared statement of Ms. Johnson follows:] 
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Chairman SMITH. Thank you, Mrs. Johnson. I might point out 

that 25 years ago in 1994, we had a Republican-controlled Congress who took the lead in funding LIGO, and I know it was a bipartisan effort, but it’s nice to see that reach over the span of 25 

years. 

Ms. JOHNSON. Could I yield to Mr. Foster? 

Chairman SMITH. Sure. We will recognize the gentleman from Illinois, Mr. Foster, for one minute. 

Mr. FOSTER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to the 

witnesses for coming here today to talk about this very exciting discovery. As the only Ph.D. scientist in Congress, I’m probably more 

excited about this than most others who’ve come to hear this today. 

A century after Einstein theorized the existence of gravitational 

waves, 50 years after Rai Weiss began thinking of an 

interferometric gravitational-wave detector as part of a class exercise at MIT, 40 years after the spin-down of orbiting neutron stars 

starting giving the first hints that gravitational waves were being 

emitted from astrophysical sources, and 25 years after the National 

Science Foundation began courageous and sustained funding for an 

international collaboration of hundreds of scientists to begin constructing this large and technically risky project, physicists have 

spectacularly confirmed Einstein’s theory. This is a discovery that 

will live on in the science textbooks forever. 

And with this discovery, we have opened a new window onto the 

universe and we have verified that our new telescope is working 

and now the fun begins. 

Thank you, and I yield back. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Foster follows:] 
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Chairman SMITH. Thank you, Mr. Foster. 

I keep telling Dr. Foster that my going off to college thinking I 

was going to be a physics major counts almost as much as his 

Ph.D. but not quite. 

Our first witness today is Dr. Fleming Crim, Assistant Director, 

Directorate of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the National 

Science Foundation. Dr. Crim joined NSF in 2013. Prior to his time 

at NSF, he was the John E. Willard and Hilldale Professor in the 

Department of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, 

where his research group used lasers to understand chemical reaction dynamics that occur in gases and liquids. Dr. Crim has lectured around the world and published more than 150 papers. He 

received his bachelor’s degree from Southwestern University and 

his Ph.D. from Cornell University. 

Our second witness today is Dr. David Reitze, Executive Director 

of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory at the 

California Institute of Technology. Dr. Reitze’s extensive work in 

the area of experimental gravitation-wave detection dates back to 

the mid-1990s. He has authored or co-authored over 250 peer-reviewed publications. Dr. Reitze is currently a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Optical Society, and has served on 

numerous scientific advisory and program committees within the 

physics and optics communities. Dr. Reitze received his Ph.D. in 

physics from the University of Texas at Austin. 

Our third witness today is Dr. Gabriela Gonzalez, Professor of 

Physics and Astronomy at Louisiana State University, where her 

research involves the detection of gravitational waves with 

interferomic detectors. Dr. Gonzalez was a founding member of the 

LIGO scientific collaboration and has participated in the commissioning of the LIGO detector at the Livingston Observatory. Dr. 

Gonzalez received her master’s degree from the University of Cordoba in Argentina and her Ph.D. from Syracuse University. 

Our final witness is Dr. David Shoemaker, Director of the LIGO 

Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his 

research focuses on instrumentation to enable the observation of 

gravitational radiation by precision measurement techniques. Dr. 

Shoemaker’s work in the field of gravitational-wave detection 

began in 1980. He spent several years at Max Planck in Garching, 

Germany, and the CNRS in Paris, France, where he helped to develop specific technologies for gravitational-wave detection. Dr. 

Shoemaker has served on numerous scientific advisory and program committees for the NSF, NASA, and for the European Gravitational Wave Observatory. He received his master’s degree in 

physics from MIT and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of 

Paris. 

We welcome you all. We really appreciate your efforts in being 

here. You all are the experts. You led the way in one of the greatest scientific discoveries that we will ever hear about. What really 

caught my attention was the energy release being far beyond the 

energy of all the stars of the universe. That tends to rivet one’s not 

only attention but imagination, so we appreciate you all being here, 

appreciate your expert, and Dr. Crim, we’ll begin with you. 
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TESTIMONY OF DR. FLEMING CRIM, 

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, 

DIRECTORATE OF MATHEMATICAL 

AND PHYSICAL SCIENCES, 

NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION 

Dr. CRIM. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Before I begin my remarks, I would like to show a short video 

clip, just over one minute, on LIGO and its detection of gravitational waves. 

[Video shown] 

Chairman SMITH. Thank you. We won’t count that against your 

five minutes. 

Dr. CRIM. Thank you very much. Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Johnson and members of the Committee, I appreciate your interest in the historic observation of gravitational waves by the Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory. 

My colleagues will describe the exciting science but I will spend 

a few minutes describing the role of the National Science Foundation and the rewards of fundamental research. 

Although Albert Einstein predicted gravitational waves in 1916, 

their direct observation was a daunting, seemingly impossible task. 

Nonetheless, the possibility of opening a new window on the universe was so tantalizing that NSF began funding research on prototype laser interferometers in the 1970s. In the 1980s, the NSF committed almost $300 million to a group 

led by Kip Thorne and Ron Drever of Cal Tech and Rainer Weiss 

of MIT to transform these prototypes into a full-blown gravitational-wave observatory. This effort driven by brilliance, vision, enthusiasm, experimental prowess and deep theoretical insights persuaded the NSF, the National Science Board, and Congress to take 

a risk. 

Even though NSF had never funded anything on such a scale, 

the potential for transformative science was worth it. LIGO was 

the first of our Major Research Equipment projects, now known as 

MREFC projects. It illustrated the importance of distinct funding 

for instruments of this scale and prompted fruitful discussions with 

Congress. NSF embraced a new role in funding large, high-risk, 

high-reward research platforms serving the Nation by betting boldly on the future. 

The National Science Board approved construction of LIGO in 

1990, and following Congressional approval, work began in 1994. 

LIGO started operations in 2002, allowing researchers to gather 

data and develop innovative technologies. 

One of the primary motivators for this arduous research was the 

question of whether it was possible to build an instrument of the 

requisite sensitivity. Indeed, the answer turned out to be yes. Thus, 

in 2008, NSF and Congress understood the compelling case and approved the $200 million of funding for constructing the next generation Advanced LIGO, the instrument that detected a gravitational wave last fall. 

That gravitational wave arose in the collision and merger of two 

black holes approximately 1.3 billion years ago. The wave propagated to the detectors in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, 
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Washington, and produced a chirp that opened a new window on 

the universe. 

This discovery is a beginning, not an end. It marks the birth of 

gravitational-wave astronomy, a new tool for understanding the 

cosmos. 

The really good news is that Advanced LIGO was designed to be 

three times still more sensitive and should begin observations with 

even greater reach this summer. 

The United States has led this international collaboration. However, continued close cooperation with our international partners is 

key to taking the science to the next level. New observational capabilities that our partners in Europe, Japan and India are either 

building or planning promise an exciting future. 

LIGO is a national and international collaboration in which cooperation drives the science and leverages precious resources. The 

LIGO scientific collaboration is a group of more than 1,000 scientists at universities around the United States and in 16 countries. I’m pleased to add, Mr. Chairman and Ranking Member 

Johnson, that 30 members of that collaboration come from Texas. 

Mr. Chairman, this historic measurement illustrates the importance of NSF and exemplifies its role in advancing discovery. The 

majesty of exploring our universe motivates this ambitious experiment, but as with all fundamental science, LIGO offers other important benefits. The science will advance education, inspiring students in developing the workforce our society requires. It has and 

will continue to spawn collaborations in engineering, computer 

science, and other fields to make the Nation more competitive. The 

fruits of NSF-sponsored research drive our economy, enhance our 

security, and ensure our global leadership. 

Basic research is uncertain and risky but it is also revolutionary. 

LIGO is a striking example but not the only one. Fundamental 

science has transformed our world and will continue to change it 

in ways we have not yet imagined. All the contributors to LIGO— 

scientists, the National Science Foundation, the National Science 

Board, and Members of Congress—deserve to take enormous prid 

in our collective accomplishments. 

These comments conclude my testimony. I’ll be pleased to answer 

questions. 

[The prepared statement of Dr. Crim follows:] 
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Chairman SMITH. Thank you, Dr. Crim. 

And Dr. Reitze. 

TESTIMONY OF DR. DAVID REITZE, 

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF LIGO, 

CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY 

Dr. REITZE. Chairman Smith, Ranking Member Johnson, Members of the Committee, thank you for holding this very important 

hearing. I’m delighted and honored to be testifying before you 

today. My name is Dr. David Reitze. I’m the Executive Director of 

LIGO. I’m based at the California Institute of Technology. 

On February 11th, my colleagues and I announced to the world 

the first detection of gravitational waves from two colliding black 

holes. This is truly a stunning discovery. It comes 100 years after 

Einstein first published his general theory which predicted gravitational waves, and it was made possible only after a 40-year dedicated effort of experiment and theory funded by the National 

Science Foundation with your support, with Congressional support. 

This discovery is in and of itself an incredible scientific and engineering feet and it proves that Einstein was right once again. However, the detection is really much, much more than that. Up until 

this point, humanity had never observed two colliding black holes 

merging to form one. This is a stunning discovery. It’s what my colleague Kip Thorne calls ‘‘a storm in space-time.’’ For the first time, 

we’re probing the universe in a completely new way. Indeed, before 

this discovery, we hadn’t even known that black holes existed in 

pairs. 

LIGO is a new kind of astronomical receiver similar to a radio 

telescope and can directly hear vibrations in space-time. The gravitational window opened by LIGO dramatically differs from all other 

windows. LIGO should be able to detect things that no other type 

of astronomical telescope will detect. 

Einstein tells us that space-time is warped, that gravity is geometric, and that black holes exist. It also predicts the existence of 

gravitational wave. As you pointed out, Chairman Smith, they are 

ripples in the fabric of space-time. 

The effect of gravitational waves is mind-bogglingly tiny so it 

takes massive objects, 30 stellar-mass black holes colliding with 

each to produce detectable waves, and the changes that we measure to detect them are one one-billionth of one one-billionth of a 

meter, incredibly tiny. That’s a tiny fraction of a proton’s diameter. 

First slide, please, Jose. 

[Slide] 

To detect gravitational waves, LIGO uses two interferometers. 

You see the one from Livingston, Louisiana, here, each having 4- 

kilometer arms, and the signal that we record is actually in the 

audio band. In other words, we can hear the signal when we play 

it through a speaker, and Jose, could you play the first? That is the 

sound of two black holes colliding. Play the next slide, please. 

[Slide] 

This makes it a little bit easier to hear. We just frequency-shifted 

it. Thank you. 

Like many scientific discoveries, LIGO had very humble beginnings. Experiments were carried out in the 1960s and 1970s by 
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Rainer Weiss of MIT and groups at the University of Glasgow in 

Scotland and by Ron Drever in the Max Planck Institute in Germany along with theoretical efforts in gravitational-wave physics 

by Kip Thorne of Cal Tech as well as others. 

When LIGO was first proposed as a large-scale project in the 

mid-1980s, some deemed the project too risky and too expensive. 

NSF, however, recognized both the huge scientific potential and the 

cutting-edge technology that could result from designing and building LIGO. 

I believe this discovery is truly a scientific triumph but I want 

to set aside that for a moment and focus on some broader impacts. 

LIGO in the United States leads the world in this new form of 

astronomy. Large-scale interferometers are currently under construction in Italy and Japan, and India just last week announced 

that it will partner with the LIGO Laboratory to construct a third 

identical LIGO interferometer in India. The world is following the 

United States into this new scientific frontier. 

In addition, to make LIGO work, we had to develop the world’s 

most stable lasers, the world’s best mirrors and optics, some of the 

world’s largest vacuum systems as well as push the frontiers of 

quantum-measurement science and high-performance computing. 

We use a lot of technology, and all the technology we use, we advance. 

In addition, LIGO is a big data generator. We produce almost 

one petabyte—that’s one million gigabytes—of data per year. LIGO 

scientists develop and employ sophisticated computer algorithms to 

sift through the data searching for these gravitational waves, and 

we use numerical modeling to model the signals that we expect to 

see, and that requires high-performance computers, supercomputers, supplied by NSF XSEDE and Blue Waters program. 

All of this said, I believe that the largest impact from LIGO in 

the past and in the future will continue to be the scientific workforce, the education of scientists and engineers that we’ve done 

over the past 40 years and that we’ll do going forward. Many scientists when they come to LIGO, they fall in love with it and they 

choose to stay. However, others go on to distinguished careers in 

both high-tech industry and international laboratories. And in addition, LIGO invites about 20,000 students every year to come and 

visit our observatory education and outreach program. 

I’ll close with the following statement. LIGO is a testament to 

the vision and tenacity of scientists like Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne, 

Ron Drever, and others who began these research programs, but 

it’s also a testament to the National Science Foundation, whose 

bold vision and steadfast support and stewardship enabled this discovery. It’s with great appreciation that I also thank the U.S. Congress for recognizing the importance of this research and supporting it. 

Thank you. 

[The prepared statement of Dr. Reitze follows:] 
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Chairman SMITH. Thank you, Dr. Reitze. 

And Dr. Gonza ́lez. 

TESTIMONY OF DR. GABRIELA GONZA ́ LEZ, 

PROFESSOR OF PHYSICS AND ASTRONOMY, 

LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY 

Dr. GONZA ́LEZ. Chairman Smith, Mr. Beyer and Members of this 

Committee—— 

Chairman SMITH. Is your mic totally on, or close enough? There 

we go. Thank you. 

Dr. GONZA ́LEZ. It is an honor to testify here on behalf of my collaborators. We thank you for your interest and support of gravitational-wave science. 

I’m Dr. Gabriela Gonzalez, a Professor of Physics and Astronomy 

at Louisiana State University and the current elected Spokesperson of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, or LSC. 

Ours is an international collaboration that succeeded recently in 

detecting gravitational waves from black holes and will keep opening a new window to the universe. Can I have the first slide, 

please? 

[Slide] 

As shown in the slide, the LSC, which includes the LIGO Laboratory, has more than a thousand members in 15 countries with more 

than half of those in the United States. The collaboration was 

formed almost 20 years ago and is the entity that carries out the 

LIGO scientific research program. The LIGO Laboratory and the 

U.S. scientists have played a key, very important role in the LSC 

scientific and leadership activities. Also, LIGO has fostered the 

very effective relationship with other collaborations with the European Virgo Collaboration and with the Japanese KAGRA collaboration. The LIGO India project just approved by the Indian government is part of the LSC effort. We really lead the world. 

[Slide] 

As shown in the next slide—can I have the next slide, please— 

the LSC has a great diversity of colleges and universities in 22 different U.S. states. They are top-tiered private universities, large 

state universities, undergraduate and liberal art colleges, as well 

as institutions with many underrepresented groups in science. The 

collaboration effort is very broad, includes research in many different areas, and this investigation, all these activities, are geographically very distributed but the benefits of our research like 

the recent detection are common to all. That is one of the strengths 

of collaborative work. 

We do not receive funding as a collaboration. Each LSC group 

seeks funding from agencies for their research based on their own 

individual merits. In the United States, the NSF funds the LIGO 

Laboratory with cooperative agreement but also funds the basic research in the many other U.S. groups through the very competitive 

research award system, and that guarantees the quality of the 

funded activities. Can I have the next slide, please? 

[Slide] 

In this chart, and in these pictures, you can see that more half 

the LSC members are graduate students, postdoctoral scholars or 

undergraduate students. These are young, busy and happy inves-
37 

tigators in training in a very interdisciplinary and international 

scientific environment. Undergraduates contribute to the LSC research program not only in the LSC groups but also in research experience for undergraduate programs in the United States funded 

by the National Science Foundation. 

The training in LIGO of all these young scientists is done at the 

forefront of science and technology. It’s multidisciplinary. It involves precision measurement technology, Big Data analysis, a constant need for diagnosis and problem-solving, as well as basic physics and astrophysics. 

There are many career options available to LSC trainees in academia, national laboratories, and high school science education as 

well as cutting-edge industry. 

We compiled an incomplete list of companies employing LSC 

graduates and they are now working in the human genomics industry, the U.S. healthcare industry, biomedical information, oil industry, Microsoft, Google, Boeing, SpaceX, Northrop Grumman, 

Synaptics, Celestron, Luminit, Cytec Engineered Materials, GE 

Global Research, Geneva Trading, Seagate. We are training the 

workforce in the United States. 

Many members of the collaboration dedicate a significant fraction 

of their time to K–12 education and outreach. The public’s curiosity 

about our discovery has been intense. Only last Saturday, almost 

1,300 people, some driving for hours to get there, visited the LIGO 

Science Education Center at the LIGO Livingston Observatory in 

Louisiana. The Science Education Center is also funded by NSF. 

And they went there to see where the science is done and meet 

some of the scientists who do it. The national as well as the local 

coverage of our detection showed the broad spectrum of scientists 

working on this field everywhere. There are many local heroes to 

celebrate. 

In conclusion, the LSC will continue working hard on its mission 

to understand the universe better through the newly opened gravitational-wave window. We are very proud about the result of our 

work not just being amazing astrophysical results but also pushing 

the technology and contributing to the progress of society. 

We thank NSF and the U.S. Congress for the support of our activities. 

[The prepared statement of Dr. Gonza ́lez follows:] 
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45 

Chairman SMITH. Thank you, Dr. Gonzalez. 

Dr. Shoemaker. 

TESTIMONY OF DR. DAVID SHOEMAKER, 

DIRECTOR, LIGO LABORATORY, 

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY 

Dr. SHOEMAKER. Chairman Smith, Ranking Member Johnson, 

and Members of the Committee, thank you for holding this hearing 

and inviting me to participate today. I too would like to thank the 

Committee for its interest in gravitational waves and LIGO, and I 

hope our testimony helps the Committee in its work. 

I’m Dr. David Shoemaker. I’m with MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My role was to have the pleasure and honor to lead the 

Advanced LIGO Project. Let’s take a look at the first slide, please. 

[Slide] 

This was a major project, MREFC, and it came in on time and 

on budget. Could we look at the next slide, please? 

[Slide] 

To round out our testimony, I want to paint a broad picture of 

our field and its future. Let’s look at the next slide, please. 

[Slide] 

What you see here are various images of people at work in the 

process of putting Advanced LIGO together. 

So our first goal is accomplished, as you heard. We made a detection, a remarkable thing, but it’s just the start of the new astronomy. 

There are more kinds of sources that LIGO can expect to see. 

Let’s look at the next slide. That’s great. Thank you. 

[Slide] 

One of the ones that I want to talk about are neutron stars. 

These are stars which have collapsed from their original size, not 

all the way back down to a black hole but to material so dense that 

a single teaspoon would weigh 10 million tons, if you imagine such 

a thing. They tend to be magnetized and spinning, and they’ve got 

some strange things going on in their interior that we don’t understand. They also can form binaries like the black holes that we 

saw, and if we can observe them both with our gravitational-wave 

detector as well as with satellites in space that NASA puts up to 

look at X-rays and regular telescopes on the ground that the NSF 

supplies for our observatory, we can put together all this information into a complete package and know more than we could have 

ever known without gravitational waves or without this combination, this synergy of information. So it’s a wonderful new way to 

reuse tools that have been used for astronomy in the past and also 

to learn new things about space and nature that we couldn’t have 

learned otherwise. 

We have other ideas of things we’ll see. Supernovas are rare but 

they will be wonderful to see. The modelers still don’t know how 

to make them explode, and we might be able to answer that question. There are collapsing stars. There are cosmic stringers. There 

are defects in space-time. There will certainly be surprises. There 

are a lot of things. Every time we open up a new window to the 

universe, we see new things and we’re surprised every time. I 

think this is going to be another one of those surprises. 
46 

Just as we need radio telescopes and optical instruments in the 

electromagnetic spectrum to see the full range of possibilities, we’ll 

also want different kinds of gravitational-wave detectors in the future. Already underway is using isolated neutron stars, these 

funny, magnetized, spinning stars, looking at their radio signals 

from neutron stars throughout the universe, bringing them back 

down to the Earth and forming a complete picture of what we see 

and resolving that there’re ripples in space-time between the Earth 

and these neutron stars that may soon yield the result that gives 

us our first ideas of what it’s like for universe galaxies to be spiraling together. But really, the ultimate way of doing that kind of 

thing sometime in the future would be to have a space-based antenna. Instead of having two-and-a-half-mile-long arms, in space 

you could make two-and-a-half-million-mile-long arms. Our sensitivity grows with the length of those arms. You could do phenomenal science that way, and at some point that will be something I think the scientific community will feel we must do. 

Coming back to Earth, let me say a little bit about LIGO. Next 

slide, please. 

[Slide] 

The first events were only seen with one-third of the full sensitivity that we believe this instrument currently can do. Right now, 

we’re tuning it. We’re increasing its sensitivity, and we think that 

we’ll be able to run again sometime in the fall, making more observations. We’re hoping that when we next run we’ll be running with 

the French-Italian detector, Virgo, which will be coming on just 

about that time, and with three detectors, you can do a great deal 

more science. You can see where the source is in the sky and you 

can get an idea of what the polarization nature is. It will really add 

to what we can learn, and it leverages our investigation to have, 

as people were saying, these other projects that are coming along 

behind us but will add to, supplement the science we can do and 

complement the science we get from our own detectors. 

We are the leaders, but with these other observatories, we will 

have a worldwide global cooperation that will bring us all forward 

in science. Once tuned, Advanced LIGO can go even further with 

modest technology changes. We’re learning how to squeeze light, 

how to get more uncertainty out of our measurement and improve 

our resolution by using squeeze states of light. We also are looking 

into making better optics, in particular, ones that have new and 

better coatings on them that can reduce noise in certain areas. And 

it could be at some point in the future if this field comes alive the 

way we think it will, that we’ll need a new observatory. It’s not 

there yet, but that’ll happen. 

So the window to this new world of gravitational waves has just 

been cracked open. As we open it wider, more people look out on 

the landscape, we’ll be rewarded with discoveries that will time 

and time again give us all, scientists, students, leaders and 

laypersons, a thrill of understanding things much better than ourselves. 

Thank you for your time. Thank you for your interest in our 

science and your continuing support for the spectrum of innovations in science and technology that we see in the United States. 
47 

We hope this glimpse of our field has allowed you to share in the 

sense of accomplishment you have enabled. 

[The prepared statement of Dr. Shoemaker follows:] 
48 
49 
50 
51 
52 
53 
54 

Chairman SMITH. Thank you, Dr. Shoemaker. Thank you all. 

Let me recognize myself for questions, and I’d like to ask quick 

questions and ask you all to give brief responses if you could just 

to get though all these kinds of comments. 

But first of all, what are the practical application of gravitational 

waves? Dr. Crim, any thoughts on that? 

Dr. CRIM. Detecting gravitational waves is this fundamentally inspiring scientific problem, and the point that Dave was just making 

about a new window on the universe, instead of just looking in the 

electromagnetic region or just looking at parts from space, we can 

now look in a completely different way and see new things, but the 

practical consequences of doing this are really what Gabby was 

talking about. They have to do with workforce and they have to do 

with technology. There are miracles of vibration isolation, and none 

of us really believe they’re miracles but they are remarkable efforts 

at vibration isolation, laser stabilization. All of those are spinning 

forward into technologies that are extremely important to the county. 

In addition, the students—and I was very impressed with your 

list, Gabby—the students that come out of this are finding—are not 

just doing gravitational-wave physics, they are going on and transforming the semiconductor industry in SpaceX and many, many 

others. 

Chairman SMITH. Thank you, Doctor. You gave several examples. 

Any other examples that anyone wants to mention? Dr. Reitze? 

Dr. REITZE. So I’ll follow up a little bit. I actually believe what 

Dr. Crim said, that fundamentally, LIGO is about opening a new 

window on the universe. Just to give you an example, after we announced our discovery, the amount of reaction to it worldwide was 

awe-inspiring. I learned yesterday that—I’m not a social-media person but younger people are. There was 70 million tweets about this 

discovery which is, to me, mind-boggling. 

I can focus a little bit on the technology to focus on some of the 

vibration isolation system. We can’t talk about it, but we’ve been 

approached by companies that manufacture, you know, computer 

chips that do lithography, and the vibration isolation that we do, 

all right, because we have such good low-frequency vibration isolation, we keep things still for a long time. That’s actually something 

that could be very, very beneficial for companies that make semiconductor chips. There are other examples too that I could talk 

about but maybe—— 

Chairman SMITH. Okay. Dr. Gonzalez, anything to add? 

Dr. Shoemaker then? 

Dr. SHOEMAKER. I have one thing I can add to that. Timekeeping 

is really important for a broad range of activities. I think GPS is 

one of the things that we most frequently use now and take for 

granted. It requires general relatively to work but it also requires 

very precise timekeeping, and some of the innovations that we’ve 

made both in laser stabilization as well as these mirror coatings 

that are low loss and low noise, they help us do a better job of 

timekeeping, and that really makes a lot of the economy turn, 

being able to get things to a place in time. 

Chairman SMITH. Dr. Reitze, let me follow up real quickly, and 

it is this: What can we learn from the LIGO detector—you men-
55 

tioned this briefly in your opening statement. What can we learn 

from the LIGO detector that we can’t learn from traditional telescopes? 

Dr. REITZE. Well, gravitational waves are dark. They’re invisible 

to the electromagnetic spectrum. So everything we know about the 

universe comes from X-rays or gamma rays or light or an infrared 

radiation. This is a completely new sector, so in some sense it’s the 

complete complement of astronomy, and the event we saw, black 

holes,we believe that you can’t see them using conventional astronomy, so that’s one example. As David mentioned, cosmic strings. 

There are a whole host of things that you cannot learn from any 

other type of astronomy that you can only learn from gravitational 

waves. 

Chairman SMITH. I probably only have time for one more question, and let me address it to Dr. Shoemaker, Dr. Gonzalez, and Dr. 

Crim as well, and that is, for instance, Dr. Shoemaker, you mentioned coming surprises. Dr. Gonzalez and Dr. Crim both mentioned the future. So my two-word question is, what’s next? 

Dr. SHOEMAKER. I’ll make a guess, and it’s a bit of a hope as 

well, that it will be a pair of neutron stars spiraling into each 

other, which we may actually see also with our ground instruments. That would be very exciting. 

Chairman SMITH. Great. Thank you. 

Dr. Gonzalez? 

Dr. GONZA ́LEZ. Let me mention that this discovery of black holes 

was a surprise. We didn’t know that these objects were in abundance, and we will now know a lot more about those. So this was 

the first surprise. We expect other surprises. 

Chairman SMITH. You might discover something you’re not even 

expecting. 

Dr. GONZA ́LEZ. That’s right. 

Chairman SMITH. Dr. Crim? 

Dr. CRIM. Your last comment is exactly the point. At the budget 

presentation, the Director of the National Science Foundation, Dr. 

Cordova, said she wanted to tell us what the next discovery was 

but she didn’t know because we had to discover it, and I think that 

is a very important point. Now we have a completely new way to 

look. I mean, to get out of the electromagnetic spectrum and have 

the complement of gravitational-wave astronomy is remarkable. 

Chairman SMITH. Great. Thank you all for your responses. The 

NSF is well represented here today so I’m glad for them to hear 

your comments as well. 

I’ll now recognize the gentleman from Virginia, Mr. Beyer, for his 

comments. 

Mr. BEYER. Thank you, Mr. Chair. 

I’d like to begin by thanking the Chairman and the Ranking 

Member for having this hearing. This is great fun. I love this job 

just for what we get to learn, and I’d like to welcome the students 

from Oakton High School from northern Virginia. Welcome. It’s 

great to have you guys here. 

I feel like I’m in Bern, Switzerland, in 1905 or the United States 

in July 1969. This is just so exciting. And I have some—-forgive 

me—nerd questions for you guys, and I’m not quite sure who to 

send them to. 
56 

So we have the strong nuclear force with the glue on and you 

have electromagnetic force with the photon and the gravitation 

force is supposed to have the graviton, gravitational waves and 

graviton wave particle, so tell us about the graviton. 

Dr. GONZA ́LEZ. The graviton is actually the particle nature of 

gravity. What we detect with our detectors is the wave nature of 

gravity. Those are the gravitational waves. So it’s a classical 

version. Each of these gravitational waves we detected and the 

ones that—— 

Mr. BEYER. Will you be able to find something like the photoelectric effect with the gravitons? 

Dr. GONZA ́LEZ. Probably not with LIGO detectors, no. 

Mr. BEYER. Okay. 

Dr. GONZA ́LEZ. We do not do quantum gravity. That is actually 

a very hot area of research but we do classical relatively, which is 

interesting enough. 

Mr. BEYER. Okay. 

Dr. REITZE. To follow up on that, so we actually calculated how 

many gravitons we saw or how many gravitons were released in 

this experiment or in this black-hole collision, numbers 10 with 80 

zeros after it, so there’s a huge number of gravitons here. We may 

discover something. I might—we may discover something interesting about quantum gravity that we didn’t know before. That’s 

one of the excitements of this business. 

Mr. BEYER. Does the gravitational waves go at the speed of light? 

Dr. REITZE. Yes. That’s what we’ve learned in this experiment, 

that we’ve put a limit on it, that it can only—it can’t go slower 

than .992 or 993, the speed of light. We believe it goes at the speed 

of light. 

Mr. BEYER. So we didn’t know that these black holes existed or 

were about to collide until we saw the gravitational waves from 

then, and imputed that backwards? 

Dr. GONZA ́LEZ. Yes. 

Mr. BEYER. Very cool. So Einstein spent most of his life hating 

quantum mechanics and trying to reconcile quantum mechanics 

with general relativity, reconciling gravitation force with the electromagnetic and the strong force. Does this help? 

Dr. REITZE. Actually it’s interesting. Einstein, first of all, he 

goofed when he calculated the first gravitational-wave phenomenon. He actually got the term of the radiation wrong. He corrected that and fixed it, but later he actually believed that the— 

first of all, the effect was so tiny that it would never be discovered, 

so he never worried about it, and then later he actually believed 

that it didn’t really exist and he had to be convinced by one of his 

postdoctoral associates that it exists. So Einstein himself doubted 

his own discovery. 

Mr. BEYER. But will—Dr. Crim, will the reconciliation between 

quantum mechanics and general relativity come about? 

Dr. CRIM. Well, we’re certainly funding researchers who are 

working hard on pushing the theory and pushing that understanding. That’s a great, outstanding question in physics and in 

science today. But it’s interesting to think, if we think about—you 

mentioned the photoelectric effect. The things that gave us hints 

about quantum phenomena were people looking for often electro-
57 

magnetic radiation to behave classically. So as we now have the 

ability to look at gravitational radiation, just as my colleague said, 

there may be a surprise lurking in there as we go and with this 

tool start to poke on that behavior. 

Mr. BEYER. The cosmologists try to look as far in time in possible 

and, you know, we have that initial thousandths or millionths of 

a second that we can’t see. Does gravitational waves help us to get 

back to there? 

Dr. SHOEMAKER. We can say that it’s unlikely that LIGO with a 

ground-based observatory will have a chance to see the primordial 

gravitational-wave background. At least our predictions right now 

insofar as we understand it would put them at a level which is too 

low to be seen, but it could be that either a space-based antenna 

could be seen—could see these sorts of effects or these groundbased antennas, which have been looking from Antarctica to try 

and understand the polarization of the Big Bang background, I 

think those experiments will also give a positive result shortly. I 

hope they will. That will be a very exciting result. 

Dr. GONZA ́LEZ. And let me say that one of the questions that people are drawing—one of the conclusions they’re drawing from our 

observation is how early or how late the black holes formed. That 

is not well known at this point, and our observations are the ones 

giving clues about the origin of the small black holes. 

Mr. BEYER. Dr. Reitze, one last question. String theory, yes or 

no? 

Dr. REITZE. Maybe. 

Chairman SMITH. Thank you, Mr. Beyer. 

The gentleman from California, Mr. Rohrabacher, is recognized 

for his questions. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I’ve 

got a wild question at the end to ask you, but in the meantime, let 

me do some business here. 

We started off this program with a $300 million grant in 1980. 

Is that correct? Okay. 

Dr. CRIM. Ninety-four was actually when that was made. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Okay. So—okay. I thought that you said it was 1980. In 1994, was the first major expenditure of $300 million? 

Dr. CRIM. That was when we went to the phase of actually constructing LIGO but these earlier dates where we’re talking about 

funding research starting in 1979 had to do with a lot of demonstrations of both technology and science. For example, people 

built tabletop laser interferometers to start to show that they could 

reach the kinds of sensitivities—there was a chance to get there. 

My colleagues here can tell that story in some detail but this is a 

pattern that we often follow. We start out funding folks who lay 

the groundwork and then the community gets together, again as 

my colleagues said, and makes a compelling argument based on 

that early theory and experiment. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Okay. So from those early experiments until 

now, how much are we talking about that’s been spent on the 

project? 

Dr. CRIM. We have spent a total of over a billion dollars, $1.1 bil- lion. About $450 million of that went into actually constructing initial Advanced LIGO. The rest has supported operations and main-
58 

tenance of the observatories as well as individual investigators that 

were doing that early kind of work and the laboratory work I’m 

talking about. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. We talked about everybody’s working together and many different countries have contributed. How much 

have they contributed to this effort? 

Dr. CRIM. David, why don’t you comment? 

Dr. REITZE. So Japan got started with a detector in the 1990s, 

and they’re building a big one. I think their number, don’t quote 

me on this, but I think it’s on the order of 250 million, but they’re 

well behind us. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. The Japanese, you say? 

Dr. REITZE. That’s the Japanese detector. The Italian Virgo detector, I think they’re in—the way they do their accounting is a little bit different because they don’t cost their people in it so it’s not 

really an apples-to-apples comparison but probably they have spent 

about $200 million not including the people that they’ve put into 

it. 

Dr. CRIM. It’s foreign countries—— 

Dr. REITZE. Oh, I’m sorry. Maybe I misunderstood the question. 

Foreign contributions to Advanced LIGO—David Shoemaker might 

be able to answer that question. 

Dr. SHOEMAKER. Let me speak to that. NSF did fund us for a program to build Advanced LIGO detectors at $205 million, but 

then of their own free will, the German Max Planck Society, the 

STFC in the U.K., and also ARC in Australia all made contributions with a total value of some $17 million just because they wanted to be part of the experiment. They would’ve had access to the 

data. They would have enjoyed the profits of it. They wanted to be 

part of this activity. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. So would it be fair to say we’ve spent about 

half the money that was necessary for the project to be successful 

as you are today, and the rest of the world spent half of that, 

and—— 

Dr. SHOEMAKER. No, our fractional contribution is much larger 

than that, but as far as getting to the point of this observation, it 

is sort of 20 million versus 450 million of construction costs but Dr. 

Reitze was making an important point. Other nations are mounting 

large gravitational-way detection elements and we are working in 

concert with those. So if you wanted to add up all of that, the 

money going into KAGRA, the money that’s going into Virgo, that 

becomes a much bigger number, but as far as the U.S. investment 

in these instruments, it’s about what I said. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. I’ve always supported basically research 

when we’re looking out because I’ve been told that if we’re looking 

out into outer space that we actually can determine what’s going 

on in the molecular structures that can have impact, major impacts 

here, and sometimes it’s easier to see it out there than it is to see 

it through your little microscopes. Telescopes and microscopes are 

very related from when I was first educated when I first came here, 

so I’ve tried to be supportive of both efforts. 

Now let me ask a little—I know this—Mr. Chairman, just one— 

first of all, we’re talking about waves, and I’m a surfer, of course, 

and I want to find out about riding waves, but will this discovery 
59 

that you are talking about today make time travel any more—I 

mean, this is one thing I’ve been hearing about. Will it make it any 

more likely? 

Mr. LOUDERMILK. Beam him up, Scotty. 

Dr. GONZA ́LEZ. We wish. This actually does show distortions of 

space-time so we measure it as distortions of distance but it is distortion of time. We can see time traveling faster and slower but it 

cannot make us travel in time. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Well, thank you very much. 

Chairman SMITH. Thank you, Mr. Rohrabacher. 

The gentlewoman from Connecticut, Ms. Esty, is recognized. 

Ms. ESTY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and to the Ranking Member, and most of all, thank you to the four of you and these huge, 

exciting team of international researchers. So there are two topics 

I wanted to quickly touch on. First was the importance—and you’ve 

all mentioned it a little bit but the importance of robust, long-term 

funding for basic research. You know, if we’re going to break those 

boundaries, reach beyond what we know, it does take that kind of 

serious long-term committed investment, even in the face of if not 

failure, not the sort of data you would have wanted. So a couple 

of you can comment on that because we’re under constant budget 

strains, and it’s really easy for people to say, you know, I have 

bridges and roads and schools in my district that need fixing but 

I also believe that we will be better not just as a country but as 

a species if we continue the sort of cutting-edge research. So that’s 

one topic. 

And the other was to talk a little bit—and Dr. Gonzalez, you particularly touched on this—about the diverse STEM workforce and 

the need to inspire a new generation, the collaboration that comes 

up, and what efforts are being taken in this project to make sure 

we’re seeing diversity because I know, you know, a suburban white 

boy may be thinking about using those STEM skills differently 

than a woman of color in the inner city, so hoping that we’re really 

making an effort as part of this collaborative endeavor. Thank you 

very much. 

Dr. SHOEMAKER. Let me say one or two things about discussion 

of the sustained support for the research. I’m a professional scientist, I’m not a faculty member, and it’s been really invaluable for 

me and for other colleagues in the LIGO Laboratory supported by 

the National Science Foundation to be able to turn our careers to 

this and choose to, without striving every 6 months to look for another funding source, to be able to make plans, to be able to make 

small-scale experiments that take years to give results, to work 

with industries in a cooperative way through the manufacturing 

cycle. It’s that kind of continuity and intellectual input that allows 

something of this nature to take place. So that’s been a very, very 

important thing to us. Clearly, also, when students come to us and 

say they want to do a project with us, and we can tell them you’re 

going to be able to start and finish on this topic. It’s something that 

really gets people engaged, keeps their mind on the science and 

away from what’s happening next, so it’s been very valuable to us. 

Thank you. 

Dr. GONZA ́LEZ. I have to say that it’s not only us as members of 

this collaboration that are inspired to work on this because of black 
60 

holes and gravity and Einstein, we inspire people too, and we have 

made a very big effort, we have a big effort in outreach and diversity. We actually try very hard in the United States to increase diversity, not just of our collaboration but of the scientific workforce 

in general. We work with the National Hispanic Society of Physics, 

with National Black Society of Physics. We have fellowships that 

we work out with them. So we do have a very diverse effort. 

But it’s been rewarding with this discovery, especially to receive 

questions and visits, visits from schoolchildren, from parents wanting their children to learn about the science. We receive emails all 

the—all day from many schoolchildren asking about gravity and 

Einstein and how do you do this and where is this done and how 

can I visit. It’s inspiration that we provide that I think it is—it’s 

going to help the diversity of our workforce. 

Ms. ESTY. And to that point, if you have not already, I would 

hope that you are developing materials, links to websites that you 

can disseminate us to, we can to our districts and to our colleagues 

to allow that citizen exploration and inspiration because we find 

obviously the ability to use the internet really does bring this 

home, and I can tell you we had the astronauts here in a live link 

in this room, and I was able to have a live link with an astronaut 

from my district, and the inspiration for 3,000 school students who 

could watch a graduate from their high school speaking to them 

while he’s spinning upside down was extraordinary, and I would 

hope—this has really captured the Nation’s imagination so I urge 

you to develop good materials of a variety of ages and then we’d 

love to—I know I would, and I know all of us would love to be able 

to make that available to the students and—— 

Dr. GONZA ́LEZ. We are working very hard on that. We already 

have a K–12 material about this discovery, and we also have translations on our website and our papers in different languages including Spanish. 

Ms. ESTY. Terrific. Thank you very much. I really appreciate 

your hard work, and another 40 years for this project. Thank you. 

Dr. CRIM. If I could—— 

Ms. ESTY. Dr. Crim, yes. 

Dr. CRIM. —briefly comment to two of your points. Our Directorate for Education and Human Resources has been collaborating 

with us and generating the kinds of materials that you’re talking 

about. We began thinking about that prior to the announcement 

and conversations with the leader of that directorate, Joan FerriniMundy. 

Your comment about long-term sustained funding and what 

David had to say about it is really important. We see ourselves trying to find ways to support these long-term risky bets to really get 

out on the edge and do something transformative, and I think we 

all recognize the challenges that—with the budgets the way they 

are but we see that as a constrained, a boundary condition within 

which we work, and we try what we can to accomplish what David 

was talking about to let these projects have the stability. It’s not 

easy. It’s a constant dynamic tension. 

Ms. ESTY. Thank you all very much. 

Chairman SMITH. Thank you, Ms. Esty. 
61 

The gentleman from Florida, Mr. Posey, is recognized for his 

questions. 

Mr. POSEY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for holding 

this hearing, and I want to thank all the witnesses for their participation on this exciting subject. 

For Dr. Reitze and Dr. Shoemaker, because the expansion of the 

universe is accelerating, I’m told that the science theorized a mysterious dark force is pulling us apart and that only five percent of 

the universe is visible to us. They say dark matter is 27 percent 

and dark energy is 68 percent of the universe. That’s just what I 

read. Can the gravitational waves help us understand the missing 

dark matter and the dark energy better? 

Dr. REITZE. So let me start, and David can comment. It may be 

possible—first of all, gravitational waves themselves exist. They’re 

ubiquitous just like dark energy and dark matter but they’re a 

very, very tiny fraction. I mean, you can sort of add up how much 

energy density is in from gravitational waves and it turns out to 

be very tiny. But it may be that gravitational waves interact with 

dark matter in a way that we haven’t theorized yet or calculated 

so it may very well be that somebody will come up with an idea 

to use LIGO or maybe LISA, the space-based detector, to detect 

them. So it is—you know, it’s one of those things where now that 

we’ve detected gravitational waves, people are going to start thinking about how can we use to understand other more fundamental 

things. 

Dark energy is trickier. I once heard somebody say that dark energy overstates our knowledge of this phenomenon by two words: 

dark and energy. We really don’t even know what—it’s getting— 

there’s getting better understanding of it but it’s still—you can 

measure it but to understand it is kind of hard. 

Dr. SHOEMAKER. Let me add that we’re already one step along 

the way by having seen just how well our discovery, our first discovery, matches general relativity. It is astonishing how well Einstein’s theory from 1916 matches what we saw, and that already 

excludes some possibilities for some things going haywire in our 

understanding of the universe. So that’s already a set of constraints, and we think as we see each new source, we’ll probably 

reach new limits. Maybe we’ll discover something which is different 

than we expect, and that would really be a key, or maybe we’ll find 

that our theories are better and better confirmed, but either way, 

this new window on the universe gives us a possibility to close 

some opportunities that would otherwise not be there to zero in on 

what the real answer is. 

Mr. POSEY. You know, if it took 100 years to go from Einstein’s 

equations to discovering they’re actually correct, just wildly thinking, what do you foresee in the next 100 years? And all of you just 

comment on that if you don’t mind. 

Dr. REITZE. So my favorite philosopher is a gentleman named 

Yogi Berra, and he said predictions are difficult, especially about 

the future. You know, you can look back 100 years ago when general relativity was first postulated, when quantum mechanics were 

first postulated, and it was—at least it would have been impossible 

for me to project forward where we might be. That’s the thing 

about science that’s so great, that you never know where your big 
62 

breakthrough is going to come from. So for example, you know, everybody probably or some people have been through MRI, you 

know, getting diagnostic imaging from MRI. That comes from an 

obscure phenomena that was investigated in the 1940s and 1950s 

by nuclear physicists and condensed-matter scientists so I wish I 

could answer. If I could, I would probably make a lot of money in 

the stock market but I just don’t know. 

Mr. POSEY. We love wild speculation in this Committee, and 

that’s just what Einstein was 100 years ago actually. 

Dr. GONZA ́LEZ. Let me say that I also don’t have an imagination 

big enough to think what will happen in 50, 100 years from now, 

but I think there are surprises that are a lot closer. We are looking 

at the dark side of the universe. You talk about dark matter, dark 

energy. We are looking at the dark side, black holes of which we 

know very, very little. These surprises are just around the corner. 

That’s what I imagine the best side of this story is. 

Dr. CRIM. I want to emphasize how well chosen your time scale 

is in that it can take 20, 50 or 100 years for these discoveries to 

come out of ideas that start to emerge now and the consequences 

can play out over those time scales. 

Dr. SHOEMAKER. I don’t have too much to add. I’m an instrument 

builder. I love the technologies. I know we’ll be doing wonderful 

things with the technologies that we’re developing 5 or ten years 

from now. What will happen 100 years from now, I have absolutely 

no idea, but it will be neat. 

Mr. POSEY. And finally, Dr. Crim, I was wondering as the field 

of gravitational-wave astronomy moves forward, how are the NSF 

and NASA corroborating on supporting the field? 

Dr. CRIM. We have a very effective and close collaboration with 

NASA. The simple way to describe it is, we do ground-based astronomy; they do space-based astronomy. But that means that oftentimes experiments we fund are very complementary to ones 

they fund. For example, we have a collaboration on their exoplanet 

program making ground-based radial velocity measurements to understand the mass of planets around other stars. So we have joint 

committees where we talk constantly, and the physics and astronomy that unites this effort is common to us both, and we’re in really good contact. 

Mr. POSEY. Thank you. 

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Chairman SMITH. Thank you, Mr. Posey. 

The gentleman from Illinois, Mr. Foster, is recognized. 

Mr. FOSTER. Thank you all again. 

And just in terms of technology, I bet you have some fun facts 

about your mirror specifications and how that compares to the sort 

of mirror that you look at every day in the bathroom. 

Dr. SHOEMAKER. Well, I’ve actually never done any metrology on 

my bathroom mirror and so I can’t quote you the specifications for 

it. The optics which are hanging freely in space to respond to the 

passing gravitational waves are right circular cylinders. They’re 

chunks of beautiful, clear fused silica, or glass. They’re about 100 

pounds each. They’re about—they’re 34 centimeters, about a third 

of a meter, about a foot and a half in diameter. Their surfaces are 

polished to the radius of curvature that matches our two-and-a- 
63 

half-mile-long arms so they’re actually a very, very shallow curve 

and figured to within a ten to the minus 9 of a meter across or ten 

to the minus 10 of a meter across the full surface. This is work 

done by Zygo et al and they developed these techniques I think for 

some satellites that are looking down on us at the very moment. 

But they were able to figure these mirrors to an absolutely superb 

precision and then on that we put down layer after layer of alternating indices of refraction to get mirrors which reflect the light 

back extremely effectively with very little absorption but then also 

a curious additional requirement that the mechanical losses in the 

coating be low. This is part of the thermal noise. It’s like the 

Brownian motion. Everything is jiggling around because it’s at 

room temperature. Our coatings are the things that jiggle the most 

in our entire interferometer, and it’s there where we have to put 

the most work in the near future in making our technology advances, and those are tough ones to do. 

Dr. REITZE. And let me just follow up on that. This is where 

LIGO is so cool in so many ways for me. This is—the problem that 

David just alluded to is a material-science problem. You know, we 

have to solve fundamental material-science problems to be able to 

discover black holes so there’s just a natural connection across lots 

of different disciplines. 

Mr. FOSTER. Thank you. So cooling the mirror is not going to get 

around the coating problem? 

Dr. SHOEMAKER. It would work. In fact, the Japanese detector, 

KAGRA, which is in the process of now going together, uses this 

technique of cooling mirrors. The noise goes down as the square 

root of the temperature and so it’s a pretty hard row to hoe. You 

have to bring down the temperature of a lot of big equipment in 

the presence of a very intense laser beam, so it’s a big challenge. 

It’s going to be somewhere in our future but I think we can do a 

lot on the Earth with the LIGO infrastructure without getting into 

cooling, and I hope we can hold off on the cooling until we really 

know that it’s the best path to take. It’s complicated. 

Dr. GONZA ́LEZ. But let me say that like Dave said, this will take 

fundamental research in coating technology that it’s not in hand 

yet. Advancing our detectors, improving—we can improve the detectors. We have technology already to improve the detectors a bit 

but to improve them ten times better, we have to make them 10 

times longer or get technology for these coatings 10 times better. 

Mr. FOSTER. And what do you think are the ultimate capabilities 

of ground-based versus space-based and what are the sort of 

sources that you can hope to see with each? And in particular, 

what would it take to get to the sensitivity where you could have 

seen SN1987A, the supernova that was detected in my—the detector built for my Ph.D. thesis? 

Dr. SHOEMAKER. Let me say a little bit about the technical limits 

on the ground. What we’ll probably find ourselves limited by is the 

lowest frequency we can observe which also corresponds to the biggest system of masses that we can measure, and it’s finally the fact 

that the Earth is not just moving but also compressing and getting 

less dense as seismic waves pass that causes our mirrors to move 

because the amount of Newtonian attraction of the mirror is changing as a function of time, and that’s a wall that’s about one hertz 
64 

and that will limit us to, I don’t know, something like a thousand 

solar masses as the biggest objects that we can really measure on 

the Earth, and at that point it will really be the time to go into 

space and see what’s going on there. The others, if you want to respond to the other questions? 

Dr. REITZE. Yes. If the supernova 1987A went off today and 

LIGO was on line, we’d have a good chance of actually seeing it. 

We would have actually seen it. Or if we didn’t see it, it would’ve 

said something about the dynamics of the core collapse in that 

supernova process. So there’s a star Beetlejuice that’s a red giant 

and it’s probably going to explode sometime in the next 10,000 

years. We’re hoping it explodes in the next—we’re hoping it’s already exploded and the signal’s on its way—— 

Mr. FOSTER. Do you have any graduate students where that’s 

going to be their Ph.D. thesis? 

Dr. REITZE. They’re lining up in 2028. 

Dr. GONZA ́LEZ. But let me say that the sensitivity to supernova 

is on the high-frequency end as opposed to the low-frequency end, 

and the coolest technologies that we will be applying is quantum 

manipulation of the light that will improve our sensitivity to 

supernova. 

Mr. FOSTER. And so do you have an easy way to explain to this 

Committee what squeezed light is? 

Dr. REITZE. Sure. So—I’m sorry. These are questions we love, 

okay, and shut me up if I’m getting—I’ll be quick. 

So electromagnetic waves are not very precisely defined. They 

have uncertainties in amplitude and in phase, all right, and that 

comes from the natural quantum nature of light, and the way that 

you distribute those uncertainties, somebody named Heisenberg 

told us that there was sort of a little fuzz ball. You can think about 

an electromagnetic wave as a vector with a fuzz ball at the end. 

You can actually squeeze the amplitude at the expense of phase or 

vice versa. So this is something that’s existed since the 1980s and 

it’s actually a technology that hasn’t found much of an application 

until LIGO, and now we’re using it, so—— 

Mr. FOSTER. Thank you. I yield back. 

Chairman SMITH. Thank you, Mr. Foster. 

The gentleman from Kentucky, Mr. Massie, is recognized. 

Mr. MASSIE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

My first question is, how frequently do these observable events 

happen? You know, like when we talk about storms and floods, 50- 

year storm or a 50-year flood, 100-year-flood, this event that you 

observed from probability, how soon can we expect to see one of 

that magnitude or larger again? 

Dr. GONZA ́LEZ. Very soon. We—— 

Mr. MASSIE. Like five minutes or five decades or—— 

Dr. GONZA ́LEZ. Well, let me tell you, the analysis that we presented was the analysis of one month of data taken with the two 

detectors that only had 16 days of effective time when the two detectors were working together and we need the two detectors to 

confirm the signal, and we saw one event in one month. Of course, 

you could say you can—— 

Mr. MASSIE. Well, that either means you got really lucky or your 

instruments aren’t working, or it could mean a lot of things so—— 
65 

Dr. GONZA ́LEZ. That’s right. That’s right. So we can only predict 

from that one month of data. We can only say we saw one event 

in one month. But we have taken three months more of data that 

we are still analyzing, and everything we see is consistent with 

what we saw there, and we are going to take more data in the future, and from the theories that we derive even from this just one 

observation, we have a predicated rate that will mean at least a 

few a year. 

Mr. MASSIE. Dr. Shoemaker, you’re from the university I graduated from so—— 

Dr. SHOEMAKER. Oh. 

Mr. MASSIE. —go ahead. 

Dr. SHOEMAKER. So one other thing to point out, though, I mentioned that we’re at one-third of the sensitivity we believe our instruments can achieve with just doing tuning. A really neat thing 

about gravitational waves, it’s an amplitude phenomenon. It falls 

off as one over R and not over one over R squared, the distance 

from the source to us. If we can increase our sensitivity by a factor 

of two, the number of sources within reach goes up as two cubed. 

Mr. MASSIE. So I was going to ask you about that. You said it’s 

going to increase by a factor—or it’s going to increase by three. Did 

you mention 3X or three orders of magnitude? 

Dr. SHOEMAKER. I mean 3X. 

Mr. MASSIE. Okay. 

Dr. SHOEMAKER. That’s to say we’ll reach—— 

Mr. MASIE. Darn. 

Dr. SHOEMAKER. —three times further out, but that means that 

the effective—sorry. That means the effective rate will go up by 27 

if you cube three, and if we saw one event in 30 days of observing, 

that says we might get to the point where we’re seeing an event 

every day if this one event we saw is representative of the rate. So 

I think we can see that there’s a lot of progress in the future—— 

Mr. MASSIE. Right. 

Dr. SHOEMAKER. —that can go to increasing the rate. 

Dr. REITZE. And that’s just for binary black holes. We still 

haven’t seen neutron stars, and we expect to see quite a few of 

them per year when we’re at design sensitivity. 

We talked about supernovas before. They are the ones that are 

going to be hard to see. We’re going to have to get really lucky to 

see a supernova because they’re just not that strong of an emitter. 

Mr. MASSIE. One of the questions I did want to ask, and Dr. Gonzalez, you touched on it. Did you remember to leave it on when you 

came to the hearing? Like what is the duty cycle? How frequently 

is this collecting data, and maybe we’ve already observed things we 

don’t even know yet and people just need to sort through that data. 

Maybe we’ve already observed simultaneously something that we 

saw in the electromagnetic spectrum but we just don’t know it yet. 

Is this thing turned on now? 

Dr. GONZA ́LEZ. It is intermittently, but for diagnostic purposes, 

we have not taken data in coincidence but we have plans to take 

more, what we call engineering runs, opportunistic engineering 

runs. We have another run with the two LIGO detectors starting 

in this late summer, early fall, perhaps July, and that’s how we 
66 

will know what the rate of these binary black holes and perhaps 

other events will be. 

But let me say, you asked me if I remembered to leave it on. It’s 

not me, and that’s the strength of having a thousand people working on these. We have 200 people in the LIGO Laboratory and they 

are the ones who not only keep the detectors on but they improve 

them every day. 

Mr. MASSIE. I have a question I want to make sure I get to ask. 

What are the sources of noise that you have to contend with? You 

know, like I imagine our sun is doing something. There may be nuclear tests where on Earth that are causing seismic. Maybe talk 

radio is interfering. It’s a big source of noise. But what are some 

of the noises you’d have to filter out? 

Dr. SHOEMAKER. Let me say what the basic noise sources are. 

One of them has to do with the sort of quantum effects that Dave 

Reitze was talking about. We use lasers, and the lasers emit photons in a statistical way so there’s a fluctuation of the number of 

photons so there’s a fluctuation in what we use as our measure of 

where the masses are. 

Mr. MASSIE. Can you get smaller photons? 

Dr. SHOEMAKER. The thing to do is get more photons, turn up the 

laser power. The next thing to do is address these questions of 

thermal noise that I mentioned earlier on, that everything is jiggling around due to Brownian motion, and the way we address that 

is to choose materials that have very, very low internal losses and 

squeeze all of that jiggling into a very narrow frequency band. 

Lastly, you were talking about seismic motion. We built—and 

that’s one of the really big improvements of Advanced LIGO over 

Initial LIGO, a system of seismic isolation which makes it so that 

we’re effectively independent of the environment around us during 

normal weather conditions. We still can get knocked out of lock 

when there’s a lot of wind. There was a tornado down in Louisiana 

just yesterday. So there’s—— 

Mr. MASSIE. One last quick question before I yield back. When 

you get this third detector, does that just improve the reliability of 

your data or does having a third point on Earth give you an ability 

to triangulate? Dr. Crim, you were shaking your head. Maybe you 

could—— 

Dr. GONZA ́LEZ. All of the above. 

Dr. CRIM. All of us are shaking our head yes. That’s—— 

Dr. GONZA ́LEZ. To both. 

Mr. MASSIE. But will it give you a bigger picture of what’s going 

on? Can it do that? 

Dr. GONZA ́LEZ. It gives you better localization so you will better 

pinpoint what the source comes from, but also if you have three detectors, you need two to see a signal. If you have three, you can 

have one on and the other two and then you will still see the signal. With only two LIGO detectors, if one is down, we are in the 

dark. 

Mr. MASSIE. Thank you, and I yield back. I could ask a hundred 

more questions. This is very fascinating. Thank you. 

Chairman SMITH. Thank you, Mr. Massie. 

The gentleman from New York, Mr. Tonko, is recognized. 
67 

Mr. TONKO. Thank you, Mr. Chair, and welcome to our panel. 

What a fascinating panel. Let me congratulate you and all the people and institutions who have inspired this tremendous moment. 

It’s truly a phenomenal success, and certainly I’m grateful to the 

people who had the vision and pursued based upon the seed that 

they planted to be determined to come to the success that we’ve 

met. So I anxiously look forward to what else is out there, and you 

know, and can’t wait to see what is yet to come. And if this doesn’t 

serve, if this doesn’t illustrate the value added of high-risk, highreward basic research, I don’t know what does. So hopefully we get 

the message, we invest deeply and soundly in research and move 

forward. 

My question would be to all of you, any of you, what role did 

partners in industry play in the design and development of the— 

of this new technology? Certainly you’ve got infrastructure that 

we’ve seen in your slide presentations. There was a lot of talent 

you had to draw upon, so can you describe that, please? 

Dr. REITZE. Just a couple of examples. I’ll start actually with the 

first LIGO, Initial LIGO, which was built in the late 1990s and 

2000s. We partnered closely with a firm called Chicago Bridge and 

Iron Works that developed our vacuum system, and this was a— 

this vacuum system at the time was the world’s, I think, largest 

although maybe that’s not true from a defense standpoint, highest 

vacuum system, and some of the work that they did for us went 

on to later inform what they did for the National Ignition Facility. 

We worked closely with a company in Silicon Valley that developed layers, Light Wave Electronics. They developed the first laser 

for Initial LIGO that was actually used in some other applications 

such as newspaper printing. 

As David mentioned, we worked closely with industry for developing optics and coatings so that’s both in the United States and 

in with international partners. We worked a lot with companies in 

Colorado, in Boulder, Colorado, to develop some of the first LIGO 

mirrors and some of the first coatings, a company called Research 

Electro-optics, also advanced in films. We work a lot with companies like Invidia, all right, because we use graphic—we use GPUs 

in some of our analyses. We’re actually not using them right now 

but we will be using them so we’ll working closely with them. So 

there’re a number of touch points where we’ve actually worked— 

partnered closely with industry, and that’s just a partial list. 

Mr. TONKO. Right. Anyone else that—— 

Dr. SHOEMAKER. That covers a broad spectrum of the things that 

we used. 

Mr. TONKO. Was there anything unique in the collaborations that 

you developed as a LIGO industry? Was there anything in particular that was a different approach? 

Dr. REITZE. We developed—actually, this is one of the things that 

I worked on. We had to develop some novel electro-optic technologies for—it’s sort of a technical thing about how we lock—how 

we keep our interferometer in an operational point. We had to develop something called electro-optic modulator that was actually 

new and it’s patented. It hasn’t been licensed—it hasn’t been licensed yet. But there are things like that. Some of the work that 
68 

we did with the silica fibers, I think, with the Glasgow group has 

been spun off to some other applications. 

Dr. SHOEMAKER. Then coming back to the mirrors once again, we 

knew what we needed for mirrors and so we found the very few 

bidders, one in Australia and one in France, by the way, who could 

deal with our basic requirements but they couldn’t actually even 

measure what needed to be measured, and so we gave them instruction on how to proceed. We worked with them in a collaborative way to develop the technologies that were necessary and 

then we brought the optics back to Cal Tech where the very finest 

metrology in the world could be done and give them feedback about 

what they need—you know, what kinds of changes they needed to 

make in their technology. So in that way we were able to trade 

things back and forth between the academic side and the commercial sector and work in a collaborative way to get something to 

push the state-of-the-art forward. 

Dr. GONZA ́LEZ. I should mention also that information technology 

has been used. Many of the algorithms or some of the algorithms 

that we developed to search for gravitational waves in the data 

have been—have found applications in the genomics industry and 

in some other Big Data analysis, and that’s why some of our graduates actually are sought by these industries. 

Dr. SHOEMAKER. In particular, the kinds of challenges that we 

have of looking for small, intermittent signals against a complicated noise background are things that the defense industry 

finds interesting, so a number of people have gone off into that sector and discovered the skills that they developed with us were very 

useful. We don’t hear much back from them, though. 

Mr. TONKO. Well, it just shows the emphasis that we have on 

science and engineering, scientists and engineers to make it all 

happen. 

And just quickly, Dr. Reitze, you made mention of the commitment of NSF to fund the development of LIGO as a scientific moon 

shot. Can you elaborate upon that? 

Dr. REITZE. Yeah. Look, I think Chairman Smith said it, or somebody said it quite well, that the first time people, rational scientists 

hear about LIGO, they think it’s crazy because they think how do 

you possibly make a device that can measure to the billionth of, 

one- one-billionth of a diameter of a proton, and you scratch your 

head, and then you start thinking about it and you realize that yes, 

it is possible. So in some sense, this was even bigger than the moon 

shot in the sense that I think most physicists—and it ran into resistance early on. Most physicists didn’t believe it could be done. 

So I think it was due to a few key people including some key NSF 

Directors early on, Rich Isaacson and Marcel Berdon, that recognized that yeah, you could do this. It was just amazing. 

Dr. CRIM. Just to briefly follow up on that, this is not a discontinuous process as people scratch their heads, they do calculations, 

they do experiments, and you persuade people. It’s a very critical 

community competing for precious resources, and people have to 

make their case forcefully, persuasively, and part of what we try 

to do at NSF is to balance off all of those really good ideas, and 

it’s a marketplace where people have to really meet a very high 
69 

standard, and this wasn’t some longshot, it was a series of considered bets, and they were risky but it’s paid off beautifully. 

Mr. TONKO. Well, thank you, and again, congratulations, and 

with that, Mr. Chair, I yield back. 

Chairman SMITH. Thank you, Mr. Tonko. 

The gentleman from Georgia, Mr. Loudermilk, is recognized. 

Mr. LOUDERMILK. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman, and this is 

very exciting. It’s a very exciting discovery, and I’m very proud that 

we discovered this here in America. This is the type of thing that 

we have been known for in the past, and I think it’s large in part 

not just to investment but to the freedom that we have to investigate and explore. 

And again, I see it much like the Apollo program that some of 

the spinoff technologies that we’re going to have not just from the 

discovery itself but the tools and the technology that goes into the 

discovery I think is going to benefit future generations. 

I’ve also been impressed with the large audience we’ve had here 

today, Mr. Chairman. I think this may be one of the largest audiences that we’ve had, and I really appreciate those students being 

here. This is the type of thing that I think we’re setting the 

groundwork for future generations. 

In Georgia we’ve had a little bit of a challenge of inspiring our 

young people to get into science and technology career fields. We 

have some of the world-class research institutes right there in Atlanta. We’re leading the Nation in health IT and a lot of innovations and discoveries but yet our biggest challenge has been filling 

those jobs with innovators just seemed to be a lack of inspiration. 

But I’m becoming more encouraged by what I see here and something I did yesterday. On my way to the airport, I had the opportunity to stop by one of our high schools and notify two students, 

both high school sophomores, that they had won the app challenge 

that Congress had put on. Ryan Cabelli of Kennesaw Mountain 

High School and Alvin Potter of Wheeler High School took technology—they didn’t develop the technology, the coding language, 

but they saw a need with other students and they took the technology someone else had discovered and they put it into a practical 

application called Grade Spar. As they informed me that GPA is 

everything to these students and one of the challenges students 

have is predicting what their GPA is going to be based off of their 

previous grades. So they have actually developed an app for your 

phone that students can put their grades in and they can estimate 

where their GPA is going to be and what they need to do, and so 

it’s taking the research others have done and put it to a practical 

application, which I think this next generation will be able to do 

that same thing. 

A couple of questions, though. I’m very interested in the technology you’re using. I spent 30 years in the IT sector—but the technology that you use to actually do these discoveries. But first of all, 

from previous questions, I was very intrigued about what you’ve 

discovered about gravity, that from what I understand, it sounds 

like there’s a lot of properties of gravity that’s very similar to light, 

the speed, that there is actual waves, and particles. Are we seeing 

more and more relationship between the two the more you discover? 
70 

Dr. GONZA ́LEZ. Well, yes, of course. There is a very strong relationship between the sky, what we learn about the sky from the 

electromagnetic and the gravitational spectrum. I think one of the 

biggest—I wouldn’t say surprise because we are expecting it—one 

of the biggest events that we expect in the future is seeing a bright 

source both in the electromagnetic and the gravitational spectrum 

so that we can learn from the matter and the photons in there. 

That will be amazing. And it will happen. It will happen soon 

enough. 

Dr. SHOEMAKER. But then on the more fundamental question of 

the similarity of the two different effects, it’s true that in both 

cases it’s information that travels at the speed of light or the speed 

of gravity as you prefer. In both cases, the effect is perpendicular 

to the direction of propagation of the effect. In both cases, as you 

make antennas longer under the conditions of long wave lengths of 

information, you get bigger and bigger signals. 

A basic difference, though, is that a photon is a particle that 

travels in space time. And we looked at space time itself as it 

warped, and so it’s a slightly different thing in that sense there. 

Mr. LOUDERMILK. So as we get to the longer tubes, if I may ask— 

I know I’m running out of time—are you already seeing the—anticipate even at 4 kilometers you’re seeing the gravitational pull on 

your lasers—a slight, somewhat bend of—— 

Dr. REITZE. Yes, we see actually—so we design our instruments 

so that the light itself—4 kilometers is not a lot of distance—— 

Mr. LOUDERMILK. Right. 

Dr. REITZE. —distance for light, and we have to design our instruments so that we take into account the curvature of the 

Earth—— 

Mr. LOUDERMILK. Right. 

Dr. REITZE. —so that we can go flat. But what we do see in our 

instruments are the tidal effect from, you know, the moon goes 

around the Earth, the Earth, you know—— 

Mr. LOUDERMILK. Right. 

Dr. REITZE. —the Earth sort of breathes because of the tidal effects, and that actually shows up on our detectors. It changes the 

length of our detectors by about 100 microns a day. And we actually have to—— 

Mr. LOUDERMILK. Okay. 

Dr. REITZE. We predict it. We can correct for it and we feed it 

back so that we don’t have to—— 

Mr. LOUDERMILK. Well, that was kind of my other question as far 

as the calibration factor from seismic activity and having the 

thought about the effect of the gravitational pull on the moon. So 

there is a lot of technology, as you alluded to, just to go into the 

research itself, and I applaud you on these great discoveries. Thank 

you. 

Chairman SMITH. Thank you, Mr. Loudermilk. 

The gentleman from Colorado, Mr. Perlmutter, is recognized. 

Mr. PERLMUTTER. Thanks, Mr. Chair. Just a couple questions. I 

find this so fascinating and so over my pay grade I don’t know 

what to tell you. And you four really are inspiring to me. You 

talked about being inspiration to your students. You’re inspiring to 

all of us. And thank you for your patience and, you know, looking 
71 

at this and talking about the space time continuum and warp 

speed and worm holes and I don’t know what else. But just sort 

of just the basic human question for me is like can you describe the 

first few hours after the detection? Who found out about it? How 

quickly did, you know, word travel? Was it as fast as the speed of 

light? Is that how fast the sound was? And just generally how did 

the scientific community individually and as a whole feel about this 

discovery? And then I am just opening up and you can go one at 

a time. 

Dr. GONZA ́LEZ. Yes, let me tell the story. Actually, it’s a very long 

story. We had been preparing for discovering gravitational waves 

for a long time, so we have computer programs that produce alerts, 

and we—and those alerts are alerts in the control rooms, but we 

didn’t have those alerts quite ready yet when these came. So they 

were producing Web pages where codes—which had very smart 

codes produced by very smart people were producing Web pages. 

And because this event happened in the middle of the night in the 

United States, these Web pages were first seen by our collaborators 

in Europe because it was daytime for them. But that’s again, the 

strength of having a distributed collaboration. So there was an 

email flurry saying what is this? Who is injecting this now? So it 

took us a while to find out that the detectors were all in fine state, 

this was not a test, this was not a dream, it was a real event. 

But then we had a very hard work to vet the signal, to convince 

ourselves that this was a signal. And that took months to vet the 

signal to make sure that everything was okay, that all our hundreds of monitoring systems did not produce any earthquake, any 

lightening, anything strange that could have caused this, and then 

to also analyze this event to get all the physics and astrophysics 

out of it, that took months of work by many hundreds of people. 

Dr. REITZE. Yes. We in California are usually the last to know 

about anything because we’re on the farthest time zone. So I got 

to work—I took my daughter to school and I got to work at 7:30 

this morning and I read my emails first. That’s my routine. And 

I saw a number of emails saying you need to look at this. This is 

serious. And the more I looked at it, the more I went wow. This 

is actually unbelievable. 

And this thing that Gabby pointed out about injections, one of 

the things that we do to test ourselves is we inject signals. We can 

actually wiggle the mirrors to produce the kind of signals that I 

showed you. And we do it sometimes secretly. So there was—after 

people saw this signal, they said to themselves, oh, this must be 

a blind injection. And there were only four people in the collaboration and I was one of them that knew that this was not a blind 

injection. So I got a lot of emails saying Dave, can you confirm 

whether this is an injection or not? And I would send back, no, this 

is not an injection. And at that point, interest ramped up very dramatically. By the end of that day, I think a number of—you know, 

probably the entire collaboration knew we had something really 

hot. 

Dr. SHOEMAKER. I’d just add a little bit more. I talked a little bit 

about this dream of multi-messenger astronomy where you could 

see simultaneously on the ground with radio telescopes or the 

FERMI satellite and gravitational waves coming in all at once. An 
72 

important necessity for that to work is that we be able to identify 

the signal as soon as possible after it is detected. It was 3 minutes 

after the waves cross the Earth that we had a signal that was unambiguous and clear that said something has happened here that 

requires attention. 

For me, it was, again, when I first woke up 3 hours before Dave 

did, I’d been actually working with a close European colleague in 

Germany on just this question of whether or not we could perform 

injections. And we’ve been pulling our hair out because we knew 

technically we had a problem that we needed to solve before we 

could properly do the injections. So he thought only four people 

knew, but I knew also. It couldn’t be an injection. We didn’t know 

how to do them at that moment. 

It took only minutes to realize that something had changed, but 

it’s taken months for me really to integrate it into my vision of 

things. You work on something for 40 years dreaming about the 

day when the detection will come. It takes months for it to finally 

sink in. 

Dr. CRIM. So very quickly, first of all, this gave me an opportunity to walk into the Director’s office and say I have good news 

for once. But I want to say something about the collaboration because, you know, we’ve watched as this information propagated 

through and our program officers learned about it and all. The way 

the collaboration handled this is a model of how you do modern big 

events in science. The rumors were circulating but they vetted the 

signal, they wrote the paper, they had it reviewed. They had it 

published in a premier journal before—they had reviewed in a premier journal before they had the press conference announcing the 

result. That’s the classy way to do science. 

Mr. PERLMUTTER. Well, thank you. And I yield back. 

Chairman SMITH. Thank you, Mr. Perlmutter. 

The gentleman from Alabama, Mr. Palmer, is recognized. 

Mr. PALMER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Dr. Reitze, in 2014 BICEP2 experiment team announced that 

they had found evidence of gravitational waves, but the observations were later shown to be the result of galactic dust and were 

discredited. How confident are you that this or some other type of 

error is not responsible for the detection of gravitational waves in 

this case? 

Dr. REITZE. Yes, that’s actually an excellent question and one 

that we worried very much about ourselves. I think the way—first 

of all, the thing you can say about it is that we actually had two 

different detectors. We had the one in Louisiana and the one in 

Hanford. They’re independent. They’re operated totally independently. They’re uncorrelated. They both saw the same signal. It had 

the same characteristic in signal. 

The data that we analyzed from that actually showed that the 

signal was completely consistent. It was found by many different 

methods. There were a lot of other checks that were done because, 

as was mentioned before, there are other things, noises that can 

creep in, so we looked at our detectors and convinced ourselves that 

there was nothing that was perturbing our detectors. 

We also did a statistical analysis. Without going into much detail, we calculate what’s the probability that this could actually be 
73 

false, and how many—if you had to run for how many years, would 

you see an event that looked real, was false? We couldn’t actually 

put a bound on that number. It’s more than 1 in 200,000 years. 

That said, we also looked at other things. Could somebody have 

done an injection? We talked about injections. Could somebody 

have, you know, secretly hacked into our computers and done this? 

We checked every path that we could think of and even some that 

we couldn’t think of after we thought about it a little bit more and 

convinced ourselves that, no, that was not possible either. 

The answer to your question is I think we’re very confident. I 

would say this, too. You know, we expect to see more of these signals, so we hope that in the next—you know, the data that we still 

have sitting—you know, we’re analyzing right now that we’ll see 

more of them. And having more of them gives you confidence. 

Mr. PALMER. I want to give you somewhat of a follow-up on that, 

and any of you can answer this, and that’s the practical application 

of this because, as my colleague Mr. Massie from Kentucky and I 

were discussing, GPS doesn’t work without relativity. Do you see 

any practical application of this? And I’m not implying that this is 

not viable for the sake of science and science—what would any of 

you see as a practical application? 

Dr. REITZE. Of—— 

Mr. PALMER. That doesn’t mean my time’s up. 

Dr. REITZE. Yes. Of detecting gravitational waves? It’s hard to 

see anything in the short-term. Some people, for example, thought 

about you might be able to use them for communication because 

they go through everything. I mean, your bodies are being—my 

body is being bathed by gravitational waves right now. But it turns 

out that to generate them you need big huge black holes, so it’s 

hard to see that. 

I think in the short term—and, you know, I feel more confident 

talking about the short term—the things that we’ll see that will 

come out of this research are the technology, you know, transfers 

that come from the work that we do to build these detectors in 

computing and optics and lasers, servo controls, vacuum systems, 

things like that. 

Fundamentally, it’s hard to see. But again, you know, for me this 

is inspiration because it allows us to see the universe in a way 

we’ve never seen before. And for all of us, that’s why we got into 

science. That’s why we like to do it. 

Dr. CRIM. I really love the GPS mention that you make because 

it’s certainly the case that when Einstein did general relativity, he 

had no idea it was going to help me find a Starbucks. And there 

are remarkable things like that in the future. But as I said before, 

I wish I could tell you which one, I think we all do, but they’re out 

there. 

Mr. PALMER. I have to credit Mr. Massie with that question. It 

helps to sit by a physicist from MIT. 

Mr. MASSIE. Engineer. 

Mr. PALMER. Engineer, okay. Dr. Shoemaker, not long after the 

announcement on February 11, the Indian Cabinet granted approval for LIGO–India Project. Can you give us an idea of the impact of additional observatories coming online? 
74 

Dr. SHOEMAKER. Yes. The really wonderful thing about the India 

opportunity is that it’s far to the south of all of the other existing 

detectors. We have the Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana, detectors. There’s the Virgo detector from Italy, which is in 

Pisa. There’s KAGRA, which is a Japanese detector. But if you look 

from a big distance from the Earth, they’re all pretty much in a 

line. And the wonderful thing about the India site is that it’s to the 

south of that. And that gives us a bigger tripod that we can use 

to look in the sky and try to localize the source of a gravitational 

wave, and it will have a remarkable and unique effect on our ability to pinpoint in the sky. 

Mr. PALMER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My time is expired. 

Chairman SMITH. Thank you, Mr. Palmer. 

And the gentlewoman from Massachusetts, Ms. Clark, is recognized. 

Ms. CLARK. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Ranking Member 

Beyer. This is truly just a great hearing and we are so excited 

about the results. And as you said, Doctor, it just really—this is inspirational science and sort of fulfills our cravings as human beings 

for exploration. But what I find really impressive is that—and this 

has been touched on by some of my colleagues—it’s really a decade—decades of partnership and significant funding, I think 1.1 

billion total over many, many years going from basic research to 

building LIGO. 

And what I want to know because I feel this is such a success 

story for us to tell about what it means when you can talk to your 

students and say you can begin, you can end, and you can remain 

on this project, what that means. How do you put together a 

project of this size? How do you keep benchmarks with it? How do 

you manage something that goes on for many different people over 

such a long period of time and end with the success that you’ve 

had? And I certainly appreciate the classy rollout. But I think that, 

you know, I’m very interested in how you do that because I think 

some of the technology that you ended up using you couldn’t foresee in the beginning, so if you could just speak to that. 

Dr. REITZE. Let me try and start, and I know David Shoemaker 

will also have some, I think, good answers or good comments about 

that. 

First of all, when you get the project—I mean the idea of 

interferometry, you know, goes back to actually the ’70s, Rai Weiss 

and even some guys in Russia thought about it. And so the question is what you then have to do to make this work. And so you 

write down a list of things that you need to study and investigate. 

You start investigating them using, you know, money from the National Science Foundation, what I would call individual investigator grants, and then you get to a point where you realize that 

that it could work and that there’s lots of work to be done but it’s 

more of an engineering. You know, you take the ideas that you’ve 

tested—you’ve studied and you have to engineer them. And then 

you get into the project phase. 

And I think one of the things that LIGO—well, first of all, LIGO 

got started—I think it was the first big major project that NSF had 

done, and it had a rocky start to it because, well, you know, it was 

so big. It was a factor of 100 bigger than anything else had ever 
75 

done. We’d done prototypes 40 meter that you—we didn’t think of 

everything. And so there was some management changes that had 

to take place, but eventually, we got an organizational—a robust 

organizational structure in place that understands project management, the fact that you have budgets, accounts, and things like 

that. You have to track them. You have to make sure—you’re given 

a finite amount of money. You have to make sure that you build 

everything you need to build with that finite amount of money. You 

have to understand how everything fits together, system engineering. 

So there are a lot of things that we learned and then borrowed 

to make LIGO work. And I think both initial LIGO and in particular advanced LIGO was quite successful because we take these 

things that we learn from project management and we apply them, 

too. So it’s actually a testament to not only the scientists but a lot 

of businesspeople. We had a lot of accountants and things like that 

working on doing this. So there’s lots to be proud of here. 

Ms. CLARK. And was that a different model, sort of having lots 

of accountants, or was that just continuation of work you’d done before—— 

Dr. REITZE. Well, no, no, no. It was—— 

Ms. CLARK. —being on a different scale? 

Dr. REITZE. —a complete—to do big science, you need to have an 

infrastructure that not only includes the scientists and the engineers and the students—we had a lot of students involved—but you 

need to have, you know, people that know how to track projects. 

You need to have people that know how to, you know, track budgets and things like that. So that was something that we figured out 

once we had to go into the big science model of it, and we put together a structure that ended up being successful. 

Ms. CLARK. Yes. 

Dr. GONZA ́LEZ. Let me say that the project model has been very 

successful in this case due to the very good management it had, but 

the human side of this is that, like you were saying, there are 

graduate students whose career in this is in research. It’s 4 or five 

years, not 20. 

Ms. CLARK. Right. 

Dr. GONZA ́LEZ. But they are still interested. They were then. I 

was one of those graduate students in the beginning that I knew 

I wasn’t going to be discovering gravitational waves in my Ph.D. 

thesis. I did a thesis on something that was going to help the construction of these projects, the sensitivity of this detector, and that 

was exciting enough. It’s inspiring people to be part of something 

bigger, and that is what inspires our undergraduate and graduate 

students to work for a few years even though some of them have 

been part of the detection now. But many are proud of having been 

part of this in the past, and we are attracting many more. 

Ms. CLARK. Wonderful. 

Dr. CRIM. May I briefly—— 

Chairman SMITH. Yes. 

Dr. CRIM. —comment? 

Chairman SMITH. We are—we do have a time factor involved 

here—— 

Dr. CRIM. Okay. 
76 

Chairman SMITH. —but please go on and—— 

Dr. CRIM. I—— 

Chairman SMITH. —respond. 

Dr. CRIM. Let me just very briefly go from the inspiration to 

some of the practicalities of doing this. At the Foundation we have 

these remarkable program officers. The collaboration that we build 

is through what’s called a cooperative agreement, and the—one of 

the striking things I’ve learned that I’ve been at the—been at the 

foundation is how complicated project management is. And the program officers, working with the people and the project, it’s really 

a hand-in-glove relationship. And there’s an enormous structure if 

you’re going to spend $400 million of the taxpayers’ money. And 

we’re careful about it, and it involves these close collaborations. 

Chairman SMITH. Thank you, Ms. Clark. 

Ms. CLARK. Thank you. 

Chairman SMITH. The gentlewoman from Virginia, Mrs. Comstock. 

Mrs. COMSTOCK. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I’d like to thank 

our witnesses so much. It’s so exciting to see your enthusiasm. And 

I’m thrilled that we had one of our local high schools here. I think 

we still have some of the students here from Oakton High School 

in Fairfax, and we appreciate them being here. And I wanted to 

ask you, even though we don’t have that time travel thing that we 

could do, if for each of you if you could go back to being in high 

school and you were looking at this field and you were looking at 

how someone might get engaged and involved in this exciting opportunity and career that you all have had an opportunity to do, 

what would you tell them to do today and going forward in their 

educational experiences, their volunteer experiences, you know, 

where they can get internship opportunities and any Web sites or 

other resources that you might provide for the Committee that we 

could share with them or that you might direct them to here today 

if you could speak to that. 

Dr. SHOEMAKER. Let me just start by saying briefly, this field 

didn’t exist when I was in high school, but I think what I found 

was really crucial was to find something I was passionate about 

and just throw myself into it. That was really the key for me in 

being able to focus enough on a topic—you know, I was a young 

and wild one at one point, and it took finding something and also 

finding someone. It wasn’t actually when I was in high school but 

when I was in the university that I found Rai Weiss, who has remained my mentor for the—all of my career, someone who was inspiring to me, somebody who was a role model, who looked to me 

like they understood what was important in what we were trying 

to do and could—was also good with a soldering iron. And I think 

those kinds of things, you find somebody that really turns you on. 

It gives you the focus to actually follow through with things that 

look really tough when you start out. Thank you. 

Dr. GONZA ́LEZ. Let me say that when I was a high school student 

I began liking science and physics because I liked asking questions. 

So that’s what you need to do the most, ask questions. Don’t shy 

away from questions. There are no dumb questions. 

About material, we do have in our Web site in LIGO.org a lot of 

material, and we also have people, emails of people who you can 
77 

contact to ask any questions, and we are receiving lots and lots of 

questions and we answer them all. And we also have some material 

for teachers to use in their science classes. There are also programs 

organized by the American Physical Society for high school like 

Adopt-a-Physicist so you can ask teachers to contact LIGO people, 

collaboration people to act as a consultant and answer questions. 

Mrs. COMSTOCK. So is there like a package we can give to our 

high schools that you—— 

Dr. GONZA ́LEZ. There’s a K–12—— 

Mrs. COMSTOCK. —all have? 

Dr. GONZA ́LEZ. —packet—— 

Mrs. COMSTOCK. Great. 

Dr. GONZA ́LEZ. —for students that we have developed, yes. And 

there are a lot more material—— 

Mrs. COMSTOCK. Great. 

Dr. GONZA ́LEZ. —for teachers and students. 

Mrs. COMSTOCK. Right. Thank you. 

Dr. REITZE. Just to follow up a little bit, one of the things that 

I think is very important more when you get to the college level 

but it can happen at a high school level is to go up to a professor, 

all right, and ask them is there interesting research that you’re 

doing that I can get involved with? So all of us got started actually 

doing research as college students. You know, we hadn’t even decided what we wanted to do yet. And even in high school—so at 

Cal Tech, for example, we have in the—just in LIGO alone we take 

in three or four high school students every year, all right, and we 

give them, you know, a pretty well-defined project, and, you know, 

we mentor them to make sure that they get through it. They get 

exposed to, you know, seminars and things like that. 

And I suspect that a lot of universities especially in the Washington, DC. area there are a huge number of universities. I would 

imagine that those kinds of things exist here, too. If they don’t, 

they’re not that hard to set up so—— 

Dr. CRIM. I want to associate myself with the comment about 

passion. I think being passionate about science is something that’s 

driven us all. 

As far as this research comment is an important comment, and 

the Foundation supports research experiences for undergraduates 

to just provide that kind of an opportunity. There are programs 

that reach down into the K–12. 

I want to make one brief comment, though, about how your question relates to how we function as a nation. I am a child of Sputnik. 

That event and the focus on science directed many, many people 

for more than a generation into science. And the Nation made a 

huge commitment to our being the global leader in science. Those 

kind of moments are the things that will invite these folks to come 

in. 

Mrs. COMSTOCK. Thank you. I appreciate that passion and for 

the students, these are your role models that you are looking for 

in the science field. If they look and sound like this, grab them. 

Thanks. 

Chairman SMITH. Thank you, Mrs. Comstock. 

The gentlewoman from Oregon, Ms. Bonamici, is recognized. 

Ms. BONAMICI. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. 
78 

What an exciting topic and thank you so much for holding this 

hearing today so we can learn more about this very exciting research. And I wanted to align myself with the comments of Mr. 

Tonko and others about the value of taking risks and the value of 

this sort of persistence and perseverance over the years and sometimes decades. 

I want to take just a moment to acknowledge my alma mater, 

the University of Oregon, for their efforts in this discovery. The 

university was one of the founding groups of the LIGO scientific 

collaboration. And I know that the university scientist Dr. Robert 

Scofield participated in testing the detectors at the site in Livingston, Louisiana, on the day that the gravitational wave was recorded. 

And almost simultaneously, the LIGO’s partner site in Hanford, 

Washington, where University of Oregon graduate students were 

stationed, registered the wave. University of Oregon is responsible 

in part for the environmental monitoring and really investigating 

that the wave was in fact a gravitational wave. When anything 

happens in the Northwest, we think it’s an earthquake, right, so 

they in fact confirmed that this was a gravitational wave. 

And I know Professor Frey as well, Raymond Frey, who leads the 

university’s physics department and their team on the LIGO 

project—that includes five Ph.D. students, a post-doc, and three 

faculty members. So I’m proud of the University of Oregon. I know 

that their report really helped the scientists with their confirmation. 

One of the problems with being one of the last Members to ask 

a question is that a lot of the topics have already been touched on. 

I was actually in an Education hearing with the acting Education 

Secretary, so I wanted to ask to—if you could follow up a little bit. 

I know the question was asked about how we could get materials 

to teachers in classrooms, but I also was wondering if a researcher 

who’s unaffiliated with the LIGO collaboration has access to the 

data. 

Dr. GONZA ́LEZ. Yes. We have—we—in LIGO.org you can find the 

actual data, one hour of data before and after the detection. And 

people have already downloaded and—— 

Ms. BONAMICI. Terrific. 

Dr. GONZA ́LEZ. —are analyzing it. We are going to—we have 

made the data from initial LIGO runs. They are also available and 

people have been looking at that. And we will make the formats 

of data that we have taken available to the public in the future. 

So we are very committed to open access and the public access to 

the data. 

Ms. BONAMICI. Terrific. And I really appreciate all the comments 

that I’ve heard all of you make about the importance of engaging 

especially students and the internship opportunities and how do we 

help students follow their passion? I know Mr. Loudermilk was 

talking about the App Challenge. My office did that as well. I had 

Adam Barton from Sunset High School win the App Challenge. He 

also happens to be a very talented pianist, which is confirming my 

theory that integrating the arts into STEM results in more creative, innovative people. 
79 

Do any of you have any sort of new approaches to bringing, you 

know, first generation students, for example, and students from 

underrepresented groups into the STEM fields? 

Dr. GONZA ́LEZ. Yes. We are very committed to increasing the diversity not just in our collaboration but in general in the scientific 

community. We have been working very closely with the National 

Society of Hispanic Physicists and Black Physicists for including— 

for affiliating students and teachers from colleges with large underrepresented—— 

Ms. BONAMICI. Excellent—— 

Dr. GONZA ́LEZ. —minorities. We work with several of those universities like Southern University, University of Texas, Rio Grande 

Valley. Thank you for that work. It’s important to get them interested and also to retain them by having positions and having good 

working environments. 

And then finally, I know it’s been touched on this morning, but 

could you expand a little bit on the importance of international collaboration? I know that there was a lot going into this, but we also 

talk about this when we talk about, you know, space research. You 

know, we have jurisdiction over NASA, for example. Can you talk 

about the importance of the international collaboration with LIGO 

and this discovery? 

Dr. GONZA ́LEZ. Yes. We are very proud of having had very international effort on this. It’s been led by the United States. The 

United States has been a leader in this effort both within the scientific—the LIGO scientific collaboration, which is an international 

collaboration. We have been living this in the United States but 

also living—uniting all the other collaborations, getting agreements 

with all the other collaborations so that we don’t compete with each 

other but we collaborate for better science. We collaborate in forming a network. 

And that has been very important and very efficient, too, because 

we have recruited many students and scientists from other countries to help us here in the United States, for example. 

Ms. BONAMICI. That’s a great model for collaboration. And I see 

my time is expired. I yield back. Thank you again, Mr. Chairman. 

Chairman SMITH. Thank you, Ms. Bonamici. 

That was very deftly done to include the University of Oregon to 

the extent that you did. 

Ms. BONAMICI. It is my alma mater. 

Chairman SMITH. Totally understandable. 

Thank you all for being here today. This was really a special and 

even unusual hearing just because there was so much to learn and 

so much excitement about a new discovery. It’s also nice, I think, 

from our point of view just to see how much mutual support there 

is among you all, how much collaboration, even camaraderie perhaps. So I appreciate that. We had a full house when we began 

today. They’ve trickled out over time, but it was nice to start off 

with every seat in the room occupied and a tribute to what you all 

have done. So thank you all very much. 

Dr. GONZA ́LEZ. Thank you all for holding this hearing. 

Dr. CRIM. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

[Whereupon, at 12:05 p.m., the Committee was adjourned.] 

(81) 

Appendix I 

ANSWERS TO POST-HEARING QUESTIONS
82 

ANSWERS TO POST-HEARING QUESTIONS

Responses by Dr. Fleming Crim 
83 

Responses by Dr. David Reitze 
84 
85 

Responses by Dr. Gabriela Gonza ́lez 
86 
87 

Responses by Dr. David Shoemaker 
88 
89 

Æ