of mine of faith and how that was linked
with my work as a young physicist the
year was 1992 I was having a wonderful
conversation in front of our student
center coffee house and donut shop at
MIT and I was discussing with another
scientist our research work which
included energy the beginnings of the
universe the Big Bang it was a great
conversation until I mentioned in that
conversation my belief in God that was a
conversation stopper literally the
scientists did not know what to say he
was so taken back that he found another
scientist who actually was doing
fundamental work on the creation and
believed in God it didn’t make sense to
him so he just stared at me and said you
must be a mutant well I kind of laughed
a little bit and I think he felt he
stepped over the line just a bit so he
reached out to console me but God he was
eating a jelly doughnut and started
wiping jelly all over my coat
I’ve been called extraterrestrial
extraterrestrial and a few other names
but I realized that in the scientific
community it is difficult to talk about
God and science in the same sentence
it’s sometimes considered a oxymoron
thinking gets very blurry very quickly
in these conversations it reminds me of
a famous letter written to a young
church in Italy and I heavily paraphrase
here but it says that what can be known
about God is already obvious to us but
because of the things that we allow into
our lives and the amount of noise we
bring into our minds it makes it
difficult if not impossible to think
clearly about the topic that letters
really about clear thinking and for me
it’s more than that it’s also about
reducing noise of course all of us want
to be clear thinkers don’t we so this is
where it kind of began a few years
before that in 1984
here I was with a bit more hair tweaking
nobs in my very first major physics
experiment my mentor was this very
interesting gentleman his quest was to
build an apparatus that would be so
sensitive that it could detect the minut
vibration setup by colliding black holes
literally millions of light years away
now you’ve probably heard of black holes
at the time these are still considered
hypothetical objects well a few years
before this another handsome gentleman
with even more hair of course albert
einstein formulated as general theory of
relativity out of that theory came some
of the most bizarre things including
black holes so when a star approaches
the end of its life and is burned most
of its hydrogen and lighter elements
through nuclear fusion there’s no longer
the thermal pressure available to keep
that star from collapsing through
gravitational force it collapses down to
a single point a singularity well you a
picture of what one of these looks like
an artist version of this black holes
singularities are so powerful nothing
can escape them not even light you can
even see the curvature of space being so
distorted by these things in the center
of our galaxy stellar populations are so
so so numerous that it’s quite probable
that two of these things can actually
come together orbit in a disintegrating
orbit and actually collide it’s a little
bit imagine taking a large rock and
throwing it into a smooth pond circular
ways would emanate from the splash point
black holes are orbiting and colliding
black holes unlike water waves created
these are actually rare fractions and
contractions of space and time
themselves these things are generated an
enormous energy wave and they leave the
center of galaxies or other galaxies and
they travel when they reach to the earth
they’re so weak that it takes an
incredibly colorful and sensitive
detector to find these things but that
was my assignment and I set out to do
that
now I sat next to my mentor I remember
his simple desk with his pipe at his
hand and he instructed me what I needed
to do I needed to develop and build an
apparatus that would reduce the noise on
our prototype gravity antenna it was
built in a an old building that was
poorly insulated from outside noise near
noisy and busy Technology Square in
Cambridge Massachusetts trucks would
drive by and shake the ground all that
shaking and vibration had to be
minimized to an absolute nearly zero if
we had even a chance of detecting
gravity waves that was my assignment
well while I was trying to figure out
how to reduce noise in the laboratory I
was also trying to figure out God and
that was a big test to take on because
in the mid 1980s there was a culture war
brewing in the United States one between
the communities of the academics and
religion that culture war really didn’t
exist before and it has been growing
ever since to create really a gaping
chasm between the two communities today
there was a lot of noise that áfourá
Clee speaking generated by that that war
on the religious side i remember the
great public debate of prayer in the in
the public school that created a lot of
noise and where you landed on that
debate could create a lot of friction
actually there was a lot of noise across
our TV screens and the media we saw
scandals and vices of the religious
leaders constantly draped across their
TV screens there was a mockery of God
that created a lot of noise and of
course in the published media I remember
visiting different bookstores on campus
in around town it seemed like religion
or God was getting more and interested
in prosperity and blessings for profit
you could have a great wonderful life
accumulate wealth and and do all these
great things of course as long as you
supported this or that ministry or this
or that minister more particularly and
there was a lot of noise out there and I
think if you didn’t have the wherewithal
you would get lost in all this we’re
start with
politics and religion was another thing
that created a lot of noise and I don’t
think this started in the 1980s but it’s
where I remember it for the first time
we seem to laud and judge our our
leaders not so much for how they
conducted their lives with more on how
they held up the Bible and waved it
around it was difficult to get through
that noise and if it was noisy in the
religious community
it was ear deafening in the scientific
community scientists would very
frequently voice their anti-god opinions
in our lecture halls
I remember one famous scientist you
might have heard of him Stefan Hawkins
he came to our lecture hall in the
mid-1980s his view on all this is the
philosophy of naturalism that is
everything it ultimately be a tribute to
pure random chance even though I believe
it takes a lot of faith to believe the
astronomically small probabilities for
random chance to work and for us to be
here and ironically he’s kind of viewed
as I did my gag too so that’s that’s
something to think about you know there
wore scientist who sincerely did believe
in God but they never voiced their
thoughts unless I prompted them for a
dialogue which I did occasionally
because I was interested in figuring
things out and I was never convinced by
arguments on either side religious or
scientific and how and why we got here
they’re rather shortcut arguments or
condescending views and it just didn’t
make it for me
I simply wasn’t interested so what I did
is I went around and visited different
churches and not knowing kind of where
to go
I just went to different ones there’s a
lot of choices that to choose from of
denominations white black brown churches
it was confusing because each church
seemed to say that they were carriers of
the truth even though they they differ
greatly and there are fundamental
doctrines all of which came from the
same place that didn’t make a lot of
sense to me and when I talked to people
it was also confusing because I asked I
remember asking an interviewing people
why they actually went and there was
never really a good answer apart from my
family always went my grandparents my
parents I always when I better always go
dot dot dot
was not convinced the best conversation
I had was with another fellow physics
student he was from Eastern Europe he
was a complete atheist but when we got
tired of our quantum homework we would
get in these great discussions about God
I remember him telling me stop your
Sunday morning journeys stay in bed and
relax
yep get ready for the week after
sometime I had to kind of believe him
because I wasn’t making much progress
out there that taking that path didn’t
help much either but I was still
interested in doing something so what I
ended up doing was just visiting
churches less and less and reading the
Bible more and more I tried to read it
in high fidelity I tried to forget what
everything was said about it and just
read it in context and over three years
I read that book three times from cover
to cover and it slowly started making
sense well back in the laboratory I was
making much better progress than I was
trying to figure out god I actually
finished the experiments in a timely
fashion I was very pleased with our
results and more importantly my mentor
was very pleased we did not detect
gravity waves calculations at that time
showed that we needed a much much larger
detector one placed far from noisy
technology Square as matter of fact we
needed two detectors so that we can
validate and verify that the actual
signal came and was celestial in origin
well eventually the dream they come true
the largest National Science Foundation
project ever funded the laser
interferometer gravitational Observatory
or LIGO experiment there it is this was
a gigantic machine this one is out in
the washing Washington State State the
arms of this interferometer are four
kilometers long so sensitive was this
machine that it could detect bicycles
just bicycling along next to the
detector the pitter-patter of feet it
could detect actually ocean waves and
crashing waves 200 miles away and
weather patterns on the other side of
the continent but get this for eight
full years this detector
it’s sister detector in Louisiana did
not detect gravity waves it still had
too much noise coming in it wasn’t
sensitive enough but perseverance and
extra work came and made this thing even
more sensitive so that by 2015 it could
now detect movement down to 10 to the
minus 19 meters or movement less than
the size of an atomic nucleus now it was
ready to listen and indeed in the past
two years it detected four collisions
attributed to colliding black holes but
the miracle event occurred on the 17th
of August of last year when two
colliding neutron stars similar objects
that generate gravity waves and
simultaneously light waves was produced
and detected it was a miracle event
because conventional telescopes found
the light and the instruments this
instrument found the gravity waves it
took 50 years from conception to
detection it took a lot of perseverance
and a lot of hard work a little bit of
luck getting National Science Foundation
funding certainly that helps but no
ultimately this would have not have
happened if noise was not reduced to an
absolute minimum the gentleman who was
helping me 35 years ago today professor
emeritus Rainer Weiss actually sent me
his greetings from Sweden just after he
received the Nobel Prize in Physics for
his contribution in the detection of
gravity waves I remember working with
Ray Weiss and after I finished that
project with him I went on to graduate I
continued on working in energy densities
nuclear physics and eventually energy
policy in climate issues which brought
me to the energy policy and climate
program today in the AAP of the
cragger’s school but during those few
years after my work with Ray Weiss I
worked throughout but there are thorny
issues involved with the Bible and
Christianity I became a Christian I
really didn’t have to dumb down any my
thinking as a matter of fact when you
consider science and God you had to be a
clear thinker
there’s no lazy thinking there’s no room
for that there for me
the important thing was to take careful
steps measure test riot put in the
practice and continue and perseverance
is one of those things that whether
you’re faithful or scientific you have
to it’s kind of like knowing something’s
out there and persevering until you find
it but perseverance is one of those
dirty words today that it’s difficult
five years six years but 50 years of
consider this no one would think that
gravity waves are not difficult to
detect they’re very subtle objects and
general relativity is an extremely
abstract concept but the dynamics of our
universe are ultimately controlled
through gravity and understood in the
framework of general relativity now
think about the spiritual parallel of
that one I’ll leave you with this
thought wherever you are in your walk
today
take time in your busy noisy life to
tune down the noise and as you do so
think about this
I believe the faint sounds of eternity
are always there and we can hear them as
long as we make the effort but turn down
the noise thank you [Applause]