Reality Straight Up!

Thoughts & Observations of a Free Range Astrophysicist

Pulsars and Neutrinos

The history that LIGO forgot

Gilding the lily makes everybody look bad. When the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory detected ripples in the fabric of space-time from a pair of merging black holes, it was a technological and scientific accomplishment without peer! But LIGO did not “discover” gravity waves.

This article originally appeared in my Astronomy Magazine column, For Your Consideration.


T wo black holes spiraled together in a cataclysmic event that converted three times the mass of the Sun into pure energy. That energy traveled outward through space as ripples in the very fabric of the universe. More than a billion years later, those gravitational waves swept past Earth and were detected by the most extraordinary measuring device humankind had ever built.

By directly detecting gravitational waves, LIGO has given us a whole new way of observing the universe. That extraordinary technical accomplishment and the discoveries it promises are awe-inspiring. We had been blind, but now we can see!

Binary pulsar

Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor confirmed that the orbit of a binary pulsar was decaying just as predicted by Einstein’s theory of relativity, making them the first to discover direct evidence of gravitational waves. (MPIfR/M. Kramer)

Hulse and Taylor won the 1993 Nobel Prize for discovering gravitational waves.

Of course, astrophysicists had already known that gravitational waves exist for four decades before the LIGO announcement. LIGO scientists recount that history in the opening paragraphs of their own 2016 paper in Physical Review Letters: “The discovery of the binary pulsar system PSR B1913+16 by Hulse and Taylor and subsequent observations of its energy loss by Taylor and Weisberg demonstrated the existence of gravitational waves.”

In 1974, the binary pulsar was the test of Einstein’s theory that everyone had been waiting for. Had the orbit of the binary pulsar not decayed as predicted, the headlines would have read, “Einstein wrong! Gravitational waves don’t exist!” And LIGO would never have been built. Hulse and Taylor were awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work. Isaac Newton famously said, “If I have seen further than others it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” For LIGO, those giants included Hulse, Taylor, and Weisberg.

It takes chutzpah to ignore three Nobel Prizes in the same press conference!

During the gravitational waves press conference, Rainer Weiss, a LIGO co-founder, seemed about to tell that story. He set it up beautifully, talking about the rapid orbital decays of collapsed objects like black holes and neutron stars. The next words out of his mouth should have been “Hulse and Taylor.” Instead it was as if a chapter had been eliminated from a book. In the narrative, suddenly it was 2015 and LIGO was confirming Einstein’s predictions for the first time.

Another surprising omission came later. When Kip Thorne, black hole expert and fellow LIGO co-founder, took his turn at the mic, he enthused, “All of our previous windows through which astronomers have looked are electromagnetic!” In the process he ignored not one but two Nobel Prizes. The 2002 and 2015 prizes both recognized neutrino astronomy, which not only confirmed our fundamental understanding of the workings of stars and core-collapse supernova explosions, but also provided the first hard evidence of a failure of the Standard Model of particle physics — neutrinos were supposed to be massless.

Why would LIGO choose to gild the lily?

Maybe I’m just being a curmudgeon. Events like the LIGO press conference are about sharing the excitement of a moment. Believe me, I get it. I was among those who addressed the American Astronomical Society in January 1994, celebrating the successful repair of the Hubble Space Telescope. Sometimes you have to shout “we’re number one!” and spike the ball in the end zone.

LIGO Facilities

The twin LIGO interferometers, LIGO Handford in Washington state, and LIGO Livingston in Lousiana. (NSF, Caltech, MIT)

Certainly stretching the truth a bit at a press conference is nothing new. A few years after Hubble was repaired I attended a colloquium about some lovely ground-based observations of elliptical galaxies. The speaker closed with a tongue-in-cheek remark. “Just remember, when Hubble discovers this, you saw it here first!” The room roared with laughter!

Then there is realpolitik. Back in the day, then Hubble project scientist Ed Weiler had a favorite saying: “Congress doesn’t read The Astrophysical Journal. Congress reads The New York Times.” He was right.

As the most expensive project ever supported by the National Science Foundation, LIGO faces that same reality. Press conferences are important. They are scripted and rehearsed, with PR types directing the show. That’s fine. But when crucial things like the binary pulsar and neutrino astronomy aren’t mentioned, it is usually because someone worried they would “detract from the story.” That’s not OK.

Credibility for dollars is always a bad trade.

Maybe an example best illustrates my concerns. When then presidential candidate Rick Perry ridiculed climate science, he would typically sidestep the science itself and instead attack the credibility of scientists. “There are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects,” he claimed in a speech to New Hampshire voters in 2011.

Those attacks were unfounded, but a lot of people were (and are) predisposed to believe them anyway. Perry was tapping into and reinforcing a common perception that scientists routinely gild the lily in their all-consuming quest for publicity and funding. He marginalized solid and important research by painting scientists as hucksters.

Over the years I’ve heard that sentiment more times than I can count. “Hey Jeff, what’s this new thing? What’s the spin? How much of it is real?” Is the LIGO press conference to blame for that perception? Of course not! But, if only in small ways, LIGO did play that game.

The detection of gravitational waves from merging black holes was a truly profound and triumphant event. A few spoken sentences placing LIGO in its proper historical and scientific context would only have added to the celebration of such an extraordinary accomplishment.

Pulsars and Neutrinos ^ The history that LIGO forgot  © Dr. Jeff Hester
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  • Shaking the hand of someone you disagree with isn’t as much fun as shouting them down, but it is far more effective.


    When you live in small groups on the savanna, as our ancestors did for most of our evolutionary history, it pays to be suspicious of strangers. Other groups were competition. Strangers didn’t drop by for a cup of tea and a friendly chat about our emotional well being. We couldn’t afford to see a stranger as a real person at all.  It was an “us versus them” world. Fear and aggression were the only rational responses. People who did well in that world (AKA our ancestors, the people from whom we get our DNA), knew that the only safe thing was to beat strangers with a club first and ask questions later.

    Fear of “The Other” is hardwired, and talking about it doesn’t help.

    We may not live in small groups on the savanna any more, but our brains don’t know that. For better or worse we are stuck with our evolutionary baggage. Nothing is going to change that. When you encounter someone who your brain perceives as “other”– and by this I mean you personally, dear reader, as well as myself and every other human on the planet — all of that machinery jumps to life in milliseconds. Long before we are consciously aware of anything, our brains are screaming “Danger Will Robinson! Danger!”

    Call this tribalism. Call it racism. Call it in-group/out-group dynamics. Call it identity politics. Call it polarization. Call it whatever you like. It all comes down to the same thing. When we perceive someone as other our reactions are hard wired, preconscious, and impossible to turn off.

    Good intentions don’t matter. Get high and sing Kumbaya all night. Talk about it until the cows come home. Hold workshops. Post platitudes or scream about it on the internet. If you want to judge the effectiveness of those strategies all you have to do is pick up the paper. The louder the mob screams, the more ground they lose. We’ve tried those approaches. They make things worse, not better.

    Quoting Einstein’s famous parable, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

    There is only one solution: Humanize yourself by embracing the humanity of others.

    If you perceive someone as other you will respond to them as a threat. There’s nothing we can do about that. Or is there? Take a step back and the answer is obvious. We can’t change how we react to other, but we can change who we perceive as other.

    There is going on 70 years of really fascinating sociological, psychological, political and even neurological research that all supports the same conclusion: If you know and respect someone, it’s hard not to care about them. Break bread together, laugh together, talk deeply, listen, show respect (even when it’s difficult), build bridges, find common purpose and work arm in arm.

    I could dig into that research, but mercifully for you I won’t. Instead I am going to share an uplifting and illustrative story of what effective anti-racism really looks like.

    How did a Black musician change the hearts of hundreds of Klansmen?

    Daryl Davis is a Black blues and jazz musician with a very strange hobby. He goes to events like KKK rallies not to shout or protest, but to listen, shake hands, talk, and befriend. Literally hundreds of the Klan members who Daryl Davis has become friends with have renounced the Klan. He has a large collection of their robes, including the robe of a man who, when they met, was the Grand Wizard himself.

    Read that last sentence again. Then if you honestly care about fighting racism you owe it to yourself to invest 18 minutes and listen to Daryl Davis’s story in his own words.

    This is not your Woke friend’s Anti-Racism.

    It feels good to gang up and shout at people. The difference between the shouters and the shoutees makes it really easy to tell who is “us” and who is “them.” Our brains love that. The dopamine flows like a river.

    But that is not what Daryl Davis did. There was no shouting about racism. Terms like “White privilege” and “White fragility” were never used. Daryl Davis never complained about microaggressions or political correctness. DEI workshops were not part of the program. Mr. Davis did not wear his feelings on his sleeve. Quite the contrary, Daryl Davis listened even to open hatred and tried to understand where it was coming from. There was no talk of victims and oppressors. There were no social media attacks or calls for deplatforming. There was no virtue signaling about Wokeness.

    Instead, Daryl Davis treated those who were predisposed to hate him with dignity and respect. He listened. He questioned. He befriended. He humanized himself by seeing and acknowledging the humanity of others, including those with whom he deeply disagreed. In the process he did what few have ever accomplished. Daryl Davis changed the hearts of hundreds of the most committed racists in the nation.

    This is what real, effective anti-racism looks like. And as Davis mentions at the end of his talk, if he can do it, so can we.

  • What do record fire seasons in the West, record hurricane seasons in the Atlantic, record winter storms in the South and the hottest years in history have to do with each other? Everything.

    This article originally appeared in the December 2019 issue of my Astronomy Magazine column, For Your Consideration.

  • You don’t tug on Superman’s cape. You don’t spit into the wind. Yes, schools are desperately important to kids. No, COVID-19 doesn’t care, and COVID is making the rules right now. Attempts to open schools this fall will fail of their own accord. The relevant question is how to meet the needs of children, families and the community in the face of that reality.

  • Currently new cases of COVID-19 in Arizona are doubling every 7 days. ICU beds in the state are already full. The rest of the country isn’t that far behind us. You do the math.

  • Now is not the time for scientists to be circumspect and silent. We are on the short end of a battle over whether truth even matters. If scientists do not stand up for what is real, who will?

  • The morning cyclist in my neighborhood may not be standing in the Michigan Statehouse carrying a gun and demanding her right to spread contagion far and wide, but she may as well be.

  • You know those nice charts and graphs that make it look like we are over the hump of COVID-19 and that things are about to get better? Those predictions are dead wrong, with an unfortunate emphasis on “dead.”

  • Imagine three gregarious scientists, each with the gift of the gab, all coping with stay-at-home orders. Of course we started a livestream/podcast talk show! What else would we do? Welcome to the kickoff episode of Scientists Stuck Inside.

  • Even after COVID-19 kills hundreds of thousands in the U.S. over the coming weeks, we will still be almost as vulnerable to the pandemic as we are today. We’d all love to “get back to normal” after that, but the price could be a second wave, worse than the first. Some see us facing either economic Depression or allowing vast numbers of preventable deaths, but that is a fool’s choice. There are better options if we have the will to find them.

  • There is a lot of information about COVID-19 out there, much of it misleading. When looking at the future, start with what the science really says.

  • If someone can’t tell you how they would know that they are wrong, they don’t have a clue whether they are right.

    This article originally appeared in my Astronomy Magazine column, For Your Consideration.

  • Once seemingly incomprehensible, the origin of life no longer seems such a mystery. Most of what once appeared as roadblocks are turning out to be superhighways.

    This article originally appeared in my Astronomy Magazine column, For Your Consideration.

Over his 30 year career as an internationally known astrophysicist, Dr. Jeff Hester was a key member of the team that repaired the Hubble Space Telescope. With one foot always on the frontiers of knowledge, he has been mentor, coach, team leader, award-winning teacher, administrator and speaker, to name a few of the hats he has worn. His Hubble image, the Pillars of Creation, was chosen by Time Magazine as among the 100 most influential photographs in history.
©Dr. Jeff Hester LLC, 5301 S. Superstition Mountain Dr., Suite 104 #171, Gold Canyon, AZ 85118