The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

by Brian Greene

The scientists who designed and built the Laser Interferometer GravitationalWave Observatory (LIGO) (being run jointly by the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and funded by the National Science Foundation) have risen to the challenge. LIGO is impressive and the expected sensitivity is astounding. It consists of two hollow tubes, each four kilometers long and a bit over a meter wide, which are arranged in a giant L. Laser light simultaneously shot down vacuum tunnels inside each tube, and reflected back by highly polished mirrors, is used to measure the relative length of each to fantastic accuracy. The idea is that should a gravitational wave roll by, it will stretch one tube relative to the other, and if the stretching is big enough, scientists will be able to detect it.