LIGO_casebook

LIGO COURTROOM DRAMA: Trial Part 10
TRIAL PART 10
ON THE WITNESS STAND: Professor Karsten Danzmann (for the Defendants)
VINO MOSCATO (Attorney for the Defendants): Greetings, Professor Danzmann. You are the
Director of the Max-Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, and a major player in LIGO.
One of the scientific areas you are concerned with is calibration of the LIGO instrument. My
first question to you is this: Is the LIGO instrument calibrated?
KARSTEN DANZMANN: It is.
MOSCATO: And has this calibration been documented?
DANZMANN: It has been extensively documented. It involves painstaking research involving
controlled moving of the LIGO mirrors, and noting the LIGO instrument readout
corresponding to this mirror movement. This is followed by extensive scientific and technical
analysis.
MOSCATO: Is this the kind of technical complexity you were referring to when you told one
Wolfgang Engelhardt that LIGO calibration is too complicated to understand?
DANZMANN: Yes. He expected simple or simplistic answers, but they are not often available
at the cutting edge of scientific instrumentation.
MOSCATO: Very fine! So you did not intend any slight to Engelhardt?
DANZMANN: Of course not.
MOSCATO: Is the LIGO calibration science Engelhardt wanted to know about all recorded in
the public domain? I mean, nothing he would need to understand the calibration procedure
has been classified or kept from the public?
DANZMANN: Everything necessary to understand LIGO calibration is in the public domain.
Someone capable of understanding this will see that LIGO is a properly calibrated instrument.
MOSCATO: Indeed! It is quite obvious that the Nobel Prize deliberation committee has
understood and accepted as valid the calibration. And that is the final imprimatur on the
calibration procedure – a kind of certificate of operability. Wouldn’t you say?
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