Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony by Marcia Bartusiak

Author:Marcia Bartusiak
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300223392
Publisher: Yale University Press

Richard Isaacson, the NSF’s former program director of gravitational physics, in 1995. Photograph by Tatiana Divens, courtesy AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives, Divens Collection.

With this decision, gravity-wave astronomy moved toward the big leagues. Weiss, Drever, and Thorne were in charge of overseeing the new collaboration. Given Thorne’s Russian connection, the three came to be known as the “troika.” The troika’s first order of business was to assemble a detailed construction plan for two full-scale interferometers, which had been reduced to having four-kilometer (two-and-a-half-mile) arms owing to budget and engineering considerations. (The available sites, for one, were limited in size.) The NSF’s response to their initial ideas, though, was decidedly cool. Their suggested schemes were judged not good enough to be viable, especially in an era when federal budget woes were putting the brakes on other big science projects. “Caltech and MIT were simply not ready. Their plans were premature,” said Isaacson, who rose to become NSF’s program director of gravitational physics and is now retired.

As a result, the troika went back to the drawing board to rework their plans. “Each step forward in the scientific community or the governmental funding process required the interruption of exciting progress in laboratory research or conceptual insights,” recalled Isaacson. “Endless dog-and-pony shows, each demanded another week of preparation.” During this period of turmoil, Isaacson and Weiss would occasionally meet, walking around Walden Pond outside Boston to deliberate uninterrupted. In the end, the troika continued to get lukewarm critiques. Normally, that would have been the death knell for a proposed science endeavor, but Isaacson and Marcel Bardon, then director of NSF’s division of physics, had faith in the idea and pulled every string to keep the project alive. They made sure that money was provided to continue research and development on the proposal. “Bardon in particular recognized the technological promise,” recalled Isaacson. “The intellectual excitement was overwhelming. But what we had to do was reduce the risks. We wanted to nurture the dream until Caltech and MIT were up to the job of managing such a project.”

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