To Catch a Black Hole From the Bottom of the Pond

On January, 2016, Dave Reitze the Director of the Laser Interferometric Gravity Wave Observatory (LIGO) called Michael Smith at home...did he want to be included as a co-author on the historic scientific paper that was about to be announced and published in Physical Review Letters; GW151226: "Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger?" OH, MY GOD WE DID IT The gravity wave signals were detected on September 14, 2015 at 09:50:45 UTC-first at Livingston, LA, and 7 milliseconds later at Hanford, WA, within the speed of light travel time between the two sites. The LIGO detectors heard the last one-half second of a primordial song, 1.2 billion years ago This remarkable event provided the first direct proof of Einstein's theory of general relativity, and his prediction of gravity waves emitted from the merger of two black holes, each one approximately 30 times more massive than our own sun. This memoir is about a seventeen-year odyssey that began in 1996, when Michael Smith joined the Laser Interferometer Gravity Wave Observatory (LIGO) design team at Caltech. This book will take you through the inner workings of a complex scientific development project funded by the National Science Foundation-seen through his struggles, tribulations, and joys as he prevailed in the emotional and technical challenges of creating something never undertaken before. He was one of those thousand little turtles at the bottom of the pond who designed and built the LIGO detectors at the two sites-Livingston, LA, and Hanford, WA, and who held up the three luminaries-Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Barry Barish-on their backs atop the LIGO pyramid, rising higher than the sun and basking in the glory of their Nobel Prize 2017 in Physics...and unlike the Dr. Seuss story, "Yertle the Turtle," he didn't burp This is also the story of an ongoing love affair with Frances Mayes' Tuscany, Brunello di Montalcino wine, and the lovely Rainbow Face who would finally marry Michael.