LIGO announced they detected gravitational waves: two black holes that spiraled into each other 1.3 billion years ago, warping spacetime itself, and we heard it. A chirp, rising to middle C. Einstein predicted it a century ago and doubted we could ever build something sensitive enough. We built something sensitive enough: an instrument that measures changes 1/10,000th the width of a proton across 4km, while ignoring every truck, earthquake, and thunderstorm on Earth. As a person whose alerting system pages on false positives weekly, the signal processing is the miracle. They ran blind injections for years, fake signals inserted secretly to test whether the team could catch them, which is chaos engineering for physics, and I’m going to steal the practice.
F1 pre-season is about to start too, and Mercedes are prepping their new engine maps. It reminds me of how Lewis Hamilton got his third title last season by optimizing the system around him, carried, for once, by the superior team design. There’s a career lesson in there about operating within a dominant platform. Filing it.
TIL: matched filtering, how LIGO digs a known waveform out of noise. It’s grep for spacetime. Everything is grep if you’re brave enough.