I keep pondering how to explain to people why so many of us remain so excited about this LIGO announcement, excited to the point that I was dumbfounded when my barrista this morning made small-talk with me about the basketball game instead of about laser interferometers, and when my non-scientist friends around the world kept posting the same non-LIGO pablum we post on *normal* days (weeks). I guess somewhere, the day Neil Armstrong made one giant leap for mankind, someone m...ust have been saying to his friends, "So, what about that game last night!"
All this talk of Einstein is fine for us nerds, but for the rest of humanity, I think it a pity that there's been so little emphasis on this as a triumph of the human spirit, human ingenuity, and (worldwide) collaboration. "A moonshot" is far from hyperbolic – it might even be understatement. (Kennedy's promise was kept, after all – that happened in a single decade.)
Why can't I stop thinking about this? Not because I'm surprised, or have learned something (much, anyway) truly new. Rather because this is a humbling human achievement, a wonder of the world of at least the scale of the pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the great cathedrals of Europe.
Who would have thought such a device possible, who would have devoted their entire professional lives to making it a reality despite all the skepticism, who would have *funded* a thousand people to do so? Who would have believed that we could so accurately imagine what's out there in the hidden reaches of the universe in the first place – *and* learn how to calculate with such exquisite precision how it would behave, that when we finally glimpsed it, the signal would be immediately recognizable?
A moon shot? The more I think about it, the more I come to feel that if the moon shot was like some great barn-raising, #LIGO was the construction of Hagia Sophia.