Move to the back of the bus Einstein, now a coon "computer operator" was "working" when LIGO made gravitational waves discovery

[Apeology]

William Parker was nearly seven hours into a routine shift in
the Livingston control room when he thought he saw a flash on a
screen.

Parker, a 41-year-old Southern University graduate with a
bachelor’s degree in mathematics and master’s in physics, was
hired in 2014 as an operator with the Laser Interferometer
Gravitational-wave Observatory.

Parker’s job is to monitor LIGO’s highly sensitive instruments
for any changes that might indicate a distortion in the laser
beams running down two perpendicular, 2.5-mile tubes.

That distortion, if there was one, might be one of the ripples
in space-time that Albert Einstein predicted in 1916 and that
LIGO scientists had been seeking for decades. It might be the
world’s first detection of gravitational waves.

Or maybe he just blinked too fast, Parker recalled thinking.

Maybe light from the ceiling or somewhere else in the control
room had simply bounced off the monitor screen.

“We see certain anomalies in the monitors anyway, so I didn’t
think much of it,” Parker said, noting that a variety of things
from ocean tides to interstate traffic can vibrate the equipment
that it’s his job to keep still, or quiet. “I checked all the
monitors, and everything was as it should be. Then I got the
alarm.”

LIGO has a network of scientists at other observatories and
elsewhere who might see an anomaly in the data while LIGO
operators are looking for it, Parker said.

“When they see something, they contact us to make sure we’re
locked and listening,” Parker said. “So when I get the alarm,
I’m like, ‘Hmmmm.’ You know, it was just one of those moments.
Maybe I did see something. Maybe I didn’t. I didn’t want to
react.”

Five minutes later, Parker received a call from another site
asking if he had received an alarm. Yes. Was the detector’s
equipment locked into place to continue recording data? Yes.

“At that point it seemed like everyone had seen the anomaly,” he
said. “The next step was just to collect as much data around the
event as possible and wait. It could be something. I was just so
nervous, thinking, ‘What did we get? What did we get?’”

What they recorded, at 4:51 a.m. on Sept. 14, 2015, was
gravitational waves produced in the final quarter-second of a
billion-year-old binary black hole merger. What LIGO scientists
eventually presented to the public about their findings are
illustrated visually as wiggles on a graph, but can also be
heard as an audible noise that some are calling a “chirp.”

The team spent weeks analyzing the data to ensure the equipment
had been operating properly and that no one had touched
anything, even remotely, Parker said. They also had to be
certain it was not a blind injection, a process where a select
group of LIGO officials are authorized to insert a signal that
mimics gravitational waves in order to test the team’s response.

Parker said everyone was excited, “giddy” even, when the
detection was confirmed.

“To some, it may not seem like anything, but to us, it was
huge,” Parker said. “It was what we had all been waiting for.”

Parker said he never dreamed that he would be among the team of
scientists who first recorded gravitational waves. The New
Orleans native had always been interested in science, but
struggled academically when he first attempted to get a higher
education at Delgado Community College.

“I wasn’t quite prepared for the next level at that point, and I
didn’t fare too well,” Parker said. “But as I matured, I tried
again and started at Southern University in New Orleans under
the direction of Dr. Joe Omojola. He gave me a second chance to
get in school.”

That second chance came through the Louis Stokes Louisiana
Alliance for Minority Participation, a statewide program funded
through the National Science Foundation and designed to increase
minority studies in science, technology, engineering and
mathematics programs at both the undergraduate and graduate
levels.

Parker participated in the program at SUNO and, after Hurricane
Katrina, at Southern University in Baton Rouge.

Southern has been an active member in LIGO in the area of
optical materials since 1999, according to a news release
following last week’s announcement of the gravitational waves
detection. The university’s work focuses on minimizing noise in
LIGO test mass mirrors in order to help maximize the sensitivity
of the LIGO interferometers, the instruments that detect the
waves.

Southern’s work with LIGO, and in particular its participation
in the LIGO Science Education Center, first connected Parker to
the LIGO project. He served as a docent, or guide, at the center
for several years beginning in 2007.

“I was already interested in science, ever since I was a kid,”
Parker said, noting that Neil deGrasse Tyson had been a favorite
of his because of the way the astrophysicist made scientific
study easy to understand. “Becoming a docent gave me an interest
in education too.”

Parker said he continued working as a LIGO docent even after
graduating because he enjoyed it so much.

“I liked working with the staff at the SEC and stuck with it,”
Parker said. “They joked about how I always came back, I was
always around, because I spent so much time there.”

As Parker was completing his master’s degree in late 2014, he
heard about the operator position in Livingston. It was an
opportunity he could not pass up.

“When I got the email about the opening, I was like, ‘Duh! Of
course I want this,’” he recalled. “I guess you could say that’s
when I went from watching SciFi to doing SciFi.”

Follow Heidi R. Kinchen on Twitter, @HeidiRKinchen, and call her
at (225) 336-6981.

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in-wee-hours-of-the-morning-when-ligo-made-gravitational-waves-
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