Lost and Wanted(56)

I could tell that he finally wanted to talk about LIGO. “Do you really have a detection?” I asked.

Neel put one arm on the couch next to me. He was still skinny, his face a little sallow from too many hours in the lab. His features had always been very open and pleasant, handsome even, but he was nothing like as good-looking as Terrence. I’d always thought that the thing that brought Neel and me together was conversation—about our work and everything else. We loved talking, and words in general, more than any of the other physicists we knew.

“September 14, 2015,” Neel said. “Two-fifty a.m., Pacific Standard Time.” He raised his eyebrows theatrically. “Where were you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Asleep, probably.”

“Me, too. And then that morning I was running late, and so I called into the weekly telecon. I’d already looked at the logs and saw that there was a candidate event, lots of speculation—but I mean, we weren’t up and running yet. This was ER8—the last engineering run. The first advanced science run had been postponed a week, because they were still tweaking. So there weren’t supposed to be any blind injections.”

“What’s a blind injection?” I asked.

“Sometimes the technicians insert a false signal in the data stream, to test the way we would respond to an actual detection. September is storm season, lots of microseism that interferes with the machines. It was just a frustrating time to be getting off the ground. Both sites were having trouble locking, and so that’s why we weren’t taking data yet. Blind injections would’ve been an unnecessary distraction, but that’s what everyone assumed it was. The alternative was too exciting to wrap our heads around, at least at first.”

“So you’re sure?”

Neel tapped his left hand on the couch twice. “I get on the call, and I’m still sort of waking up, haven’t had coffee, and I hear Alan talking to Mike—Mike Landry, at Livingston—and he’s like, ‘Mike, can you say that again?’ And Mike says—” Neel lowered his voice. “He says, ‘This was not a blind injection.’?”

    “Wow.”

Neel smiled.

“When are you publishing?”

“Not until February.”

It was hard to know what was more exciting—the fact that Neel’s team had actually detected a gravitational wave, or that they’d achieved the first direct observation of a pair of black holes merging.

“It’s amazing.” I could hear the stiffness in my voice. I imagined Neel could, too, and was enjoying it.

“I thought we would do it,” he said. “Just not so soon.”

“Wait a minute,” Roxy said, catching the end of that. “You’re telling people now?”

“Helen isn’t ‘people.’?”

“Well if you are, I don’t see why I can’t.” Roxy turned to Terrence. “Neel has discovered gravitational waves.”

“Me and a thousand other people,” Neel said, reaching up to shake Terrence’s hand. “We didn’t really meet.”

Terrence introduced himself and congratulated Neel and Roxy on their engagement.

This time Neel didn’t speculate about the nature of marriage, but just nodded seriously. He seemed even more earnest than he might have been, had he been sober. “I don’t know what to say,” he said. “Charlie was extraordinary.”

“Thanks.”

Roxy was the only one who didn’t understand what was going on.

“My wife passed away earlier this year,” Terrence said.

Roxy turned all of her attention on him. I notice that she didn’t react, or say anything right away. In other words, she wasn’t concerned about how her own reaction would appear to others.

“From what?”

Terrence hesitated a moment. “Complications from lupus. Encephalitis.”

“That is terrible,” she said. “You poor thing.”

“It’s been really rough—but we’re managing.”

    “You have children?”

“One—she’s eight.” He seemed much more comfortable accepting Roxy’s condolences than he did Neel’s, either because she was a woman or because she knew how to give sympathy in an inherently professional way. I could imagine that doctors got inured to death, but I could also imagine the opposite—that you would become obsessed, start to think about nothing else.

“What did you discover?” Terrence asked Neel, maybe to change the subject.

“It’s boring,” Neel said.

“It isn’t,” Roxy said. “It’s, like, the one time your work isn’t boring.” It was both skillful and generous, the way she suddenly turned everyone’s attention to Neel, teasing him, and gave Terrence a break. Neel needed only a little encouragement.

“Like I said, there are more than a thousand of us on the team,” he said. “And no one ‘discovered’ anything.”

“We’re talking about gravitational waves,” I told Terrence. “Einstein predicted them. He basically saw that the laws of motion that apply here on Earth—classical Newtonian laws—don’t work on other scales. Not when you’re talking about tiny things, subatomic particles, or giant things like stars and planets. He figured out different rules, especially for gravity, because of the way that large astronomical bodies curve spacetime. Before Einstein, we didn’t know that space and time are one thing, like a fabric. The waves Neel is studying are like ripples in that fabric.”