parameters with arms several kilometers long just sit there and listen you can't tanker with them or at least it's done as little as possible but if you want to develop things you have to constantly tweak the instruments installment of e.d.s. that's why you need something like this and then if it all works convincingly the technology is transferred and incorporated into the big data detectors. there's a unique atmosphere here at the site. from the outside the detector appears plain and in conspicuous like an ordinary installation there's little hint of the impressive things it's capable of the stand here show you stand here looking across the fields as the sun is shining it's very peaceful then you imagine how out in the universe 2 black holes have collided with each other and then a 1000000000 years later the signal arrives here you don't notice anything but the space under your feet trembles and are instruments buried in the ground registers

in order that's a great feeling that must undergo. 100 years they went down to this moment whatever calm. and for nearly the 1st half of that time it was believed to be technically impossible. that began to change in the late 1950 s. . what happened is a people began to look at the einstein theory all over again and they went to the statement that einstein had said look this is impossible to measure and they realized no maybe it's not the technology had changed. one of the then new technologies now looks like a prop from an old science fiction film. but this is actually the world's 1st attempt a building of gravitational wave detector. operators was invented by

physicist joseph weber at the university of maryland. who was a variable with joseph weber was both a pioneer and in the end maybe quite a tragic figure he certainly led the way in experimental gravitational wave research anywhere in the world the idea that he had was to. you look at what a gravitational well does to a great big piece of metal like a huge bar huge piece of metal and what it does to that metal and the gravitational wave comes along it stretches it a little bit or not and then it's gone again but the block continues to vibrate just like a bell keeps resenting after it's been struck or that vibration was what he wanted to tacked on. in theory it was a brilliant idea but in practice it proved to be a major challenge for webb and his team for the cylinder to be sensitive enough to

detect gravitational waves its atoms had to be frozen into a state of almost complete rest so the team built the device in a vacuum chamber and cooled it down. in the 1960 s. several such gravitational wave antennas later known as web os were built according to this principle you haven't you need several independent measurements to prove that he's experiment worked as planned. times then came the miracle. what you began the see was something that was were actually world shaking absolutely world shaking and by 969 he published a paper saying that he had discovered gravitational waves. that's a fact they got something and it was met with a lot of skepticism theoreticians soon realized that

a signals were actually far too strong if the sources were so intense that he could detect them with his weber guard than most of our milky way would have been destroyed by gravitational waves long ago with that kind of energy. it only took a glance at the night sky to know everything was still hunky dory with a milky way but weber's work had an impact as far as go for it also wasn't immediately clear that he was wrong and that's what people began to wonder how strong such gravitational waves could actually be because at the time it was all unknown so researchers began to duplicate these experiments to try to verify that it's obviously if it's. news of weapons suppose success also reached the max planck society in germany at the institute for astrophysics outside munich they did. cited to reproduce the cylinder experiment and they had just the right person for the job

experimental physicist heinz billing the only thing was he didn't really have much experience with astrophysics. billing help making computers and do innovations with computers that allowed the people in the astrophysics sensitive there to be able to make large scale computations in astrophysics and spelling was a pioneer at a time when computers still took up entire rooms his achievements in the field of electronics were groundbreaking. and he was known as a rigorous experimenter. belling was born in the town of sounds fatal in northern germany he was a year old when and stein published his general theory of relativity. even as a boy billing was fascinated by einstein's ideas at school he was nicknamed meister because of his math skills he seems to have been born with

a talent for invention and innovation. the electronics acts but enthusiastically took on a proposal to repeat weber's experiment the chance of proving einstein's theory was incentive enough one of the people he recruited for his team was a young physicist from atlanta. just beneath that is me over here volatile of england now in his seventies i learned about the planned experiment in an unusual way and. this one in our news in the summer was an announcement in the newspaper for them as i'd already started a doctorate and alexander funk like came home and my wife said look they're looking for someone to help measure gravitational waves and i saw the article in the media

that i was electrified with her father live. band and his doctoral thesis deciding instead to pioneer research into gravitational waves with hines filling. in the shadows the 2 scientists began to build their own resonant santana based on the web on design. but they very much much better than whether they were super technicians. and fact that's the key thing to the building group they were solid engineering physicists and they didn't cut corners they knew exactly what they were doing. we were really meticulous in carrying out the weber experiments and if we improve the amplifiers and other things and feeling oversaw it all he was reliable everything

he did was done right that's how we went through with it it's whom. despite their different personalities billing and weber had a friendly relationship. the american physicist even willingly shanties research with the germans. was not the most thorough experiment it was a very imaginative man and certainly one of the people originated the field and should get a lot of credit for that but as far as being a super. experimental scientist he was not as good as these people. together with an italian institute and a building built to separate resonant santana's and improve the instruments as best they could then they began their measurements for 3 years they used the cylinders to listen to space they hoped to pick up the longed for gravitational waves and confirm the unbelievable but the result was sobering. they saw nothing

they could answer with absolute certainty that they saw nothing it wasn't ambiguous they said the chance of us seeing something or this thing being a gravitational wave is one in a 1000000000 we have on the we were the only ones in the world to do this sort of experiment with clearly better measurements than webber's and we found nothing we thank you for so we came up with the best proof that weber's process did not exist exist. joseph weber had been mistaken it was a realisation he was never able to cope with. the search for the arm known which had begun with such high hopes now appeared to have failed.

the theory to give other theory a titian's were satisfied that their worldview was safe and sound once again but it's a bit depressing for the experimenters when it's what you've built up something worked hard and probably for nothing on the boat off the director of the institute at the time said billing get the best job of not proving gravitational waves but the question was what to do next that's. what i didn't know in munich was that across the atlantic. a completely new idea was gaining momentum. cambridge massachusetts near boston is home to the elite massachusetts institute of technology mit. and here in the early 1970 s. a new hope was germinating in the field of gravitational wave research it was

thanks to the simple thought experiment of a young professor named bray no weiss the students asked me about the weber experiments i didn't understand the weber experiments so i cooked up a technique where you could do the following to free floating masses in space what you do is you take a light start from one of these masses put a clock on this one and when it sends a light beam to this one you put a clock and stop the clock here then you send a like being back again and look at the clock over here and you look at the time it takes for the light to go from here to there and back again and you write it down and then a gravitational wave comes along it makes a slight difference in the length and you do the same experiment over and you'll find i was a different time that was the invention of a detector ok big deal. captivated by the idea why steve sided to spend

a summer doing the calculations to see if his thought experiments could be turned into a real one. and so my amazement about time i got done. it looked to me like yeah if you made it big enough and you made it with 2 legs so you had one pair one pair of masses this way another pair of glasses that way so i had an l. you could compare one where it's shrinking on the side expanding on that side you could compare the north south leg with the east west leg and you could actually do the experiment and you need only add one thing you needed you need to make it long big. there was just one big problem weiss didn't have the money for such an experiment at the time he was doing research for the american military but with the us fighting the vietnam war i had no interest in an exotic search for gravitational

waves eventually he managed to submit to a civil organization the national science foundation. he had no idea that the solution to his problem would come from a well known figure in munich. what happened was the people at the national science foundation sent my proposal to billing he saw it and it looked attractive to him he thought it was a good idea. tells me that you know he was thinking straight. and so he does what any real rational person would do we called me up and he said that sounds like an interesting idea you're proposing would you mind if we worked on that i said no how could i mine as a scientific member of the max planck society heintz building was free to pursue whatever research he chose $975.00 together with valves having clothes and a handful of new colleagues he sent to work once again the team designed the 1st

laser interferometer the forerunner of the light go to taxpayers and a cornerstone of modern gravitational wave research but at the time laser technology was still in its infancy. we had no idea about lasers it was all completely new territory where we started with a small interferometer with dimensions of around 10 centimeters that was the 1st interferometer we looked at what signals were there and then we made a 3 metre long one and then a 30 meter long lie in the federal meter. we cut out all the problems that came along and. we figured out the things we had to watch for in order to measure it as sensitively as was theoretically possible from principi have nucleus. for years finkler and his colleagues tinkered with prototypes that were considerably more complex than webber's element cylinder. they made constant

improvements to the laser vacuum and mirror system. bearings project grew and with it the hope that they might after all confirm einstein's hypothesis of the existence of gravitational waves. they discovered not only that the idea was good but also discovered a lot of things that i hadn't thought about i've not thought of. the problems that i had not thought of in my description of how this might work and they made significant. creative advances in the whole idea of doing this. the laser interferometer would be hines billings final research project he retired in 1982 at the age of 68 but he vowed he would live to see the discovery of gravitational waves.

his successor was constant dance man who already had plans not only to share the valuable research with his american colleagues but to build his own launch detector . but history had other plans. for the annoyance to go ya in the early 990 s. i had say our proposals were at about the same stage as the american like o. proposals for large interferometers for. but in the us it happened very quickly like i was approved as a line item in the congressional budget. in germany something happened that we all wanted to happen namely reunification but in the aftermath of reunification there was no money for a while. there was went to the east for us and it was. in the early 1990 s. 2 decades after the technology was invented the us began constructing 2 large

interferometers one was built here in 100 washington the other in far off louisiana line go technology to relies on at least 2 independent measuring stations it would take another 20 years to fine tune both detectors. in a science main hall david shoemaker shows us how the advances made over 40 plus years of work finally came together to bring success. the basic idea as we said is that gravitational waves stretch and screen space and those 2 arms that we use to measure those lengths are down in this direction for kilometers and down in that direction for kilometers the 2 come together at what we call the vertex where the v.m. splitter is that splits that laser light into 2 equal passes to go down the 24

kilometer long arms that laser is in a very very clean room it's then threaded into the vacuum system matched with mirrors that are this large into the beam size which is correct to then go down the 4 kilometer length not spreading any more than to about 10 centimeters in diameter that's the basic notion of the system everything that remains is a matter of keeping noise away. and soon they will well prepared when on september the 14th 2015 a tiny signal reached after a long journey it was the echo of a cataclysmic cosmic event. the

timing could have been better of course because in the us most everyone was still in band. as well that's why it was around 2 am and 5 am in the us here it was just before noon so our people were all the way along with one of the researchers marco drago was sitting at his computer and watching but. then it went be. the people. b. is an alert and whenever the detector is recorded data several computer programs run alongside them if the same unusual thing happens and both detectors at the same time sequence like within 10 milliseconds there is an alert. and suddenly there it was a clear signal drago couldn't make sense of it at 1st so he consulted a colleague together they puzzled over some sort of signal that had been picked up

in the us. that's the 1st everyone who saw it thought it was a test signal and that wouldn't have been unusual test signals are constantly fed into the data stream when the detectors are recording but normally there'd be an entry in the database saying test signal and scientists it was confusing so finally they called the u.s. control room and asked if it was a test signal and they said tests everyone here is asleep. but not for much longer the excitement grew steadily into my go control center the american soul so i began to wonder what the instruments had recorded normal activities were temporarily suspended i was in maine and i looked at the screen on the 14th of the book and i see

a very interesting thing it says at least it says fix that day has been cancelled we always fix things on tuesdays i see the same message at hanford fix a day has been cancelled why why has fixed that they've been cancelled all of a sudden there was a message from david shoemaker to me look on this planet for a secret location on the web and you see something and there was this way for. but it was still far too early to celebrate possible errors still had to be considered everything from simple noise to a hacking attack nothing was ruled out the search had gone on too long to risk it with a premature announcement and we were very very scared of reproducing the webber deal. that was that they had all of our minds that we could ruin the whole field by making a false claim and this is after having spent now close to $1000000000.00 there

couple different faces to it right there is there is the intellectual acknowledgement that it must have been a real signal and then there's the change in world view from all of the decades that you spent trying to make an instrument that could possibly do something to the time after when that 1st signal was was observed so i think i was intellectually content that we've actually detected something after a few weeks and it's with months and months and months after that i would still wake up in the morning and ask myself if that really happened. then after 4 months and checking the signal. ladies and gentlemen. we have to check to gravitational waves we did it. only once there was no longer any doubt did the research is allow themselves a discrete sense of triumph.

puts in the foregoing you've been searching for something for dozens of years and then it suddenly there there's no moment when you shout eureka i've found it but there is an awareness that something very special has just happened. creeps up very slowly it takes weeks. old in december 27th seen on my go project founders were awarded the greatest on a insights. first and foremost among them was professor rayner weiss after more than 40 years of research he received the nobel prize in physics. none of it would have been possible without. the work of the researchers in munich and heinz billing was able to keep his vow he was 102 when he heard the news the

gravitational waves had finally been detected. and closer for it said he knew that was a great sense of achievement and all the work wasn't in vain to know for sure and if you had actually led to research that's now expanding and growing through that and because it was a relief that all our work had a purpose after all and seen how the dickens. there are now 5 launch detectors around the world more than a 1000 scientists are cooperating every day recording more and more gravitational waves and that's just the beginning. the latest project takes laser interferometers a step further out into space. the plan is to launch 3 satellites in

2030 for each equipped with a laser. the arrow satellites will form a giant triangular consternation measuring 2 and a half 1000000 kilometers on each side. of. the triangle named lisa short for laser interferometer space antenna well albeit. thanks to its immense size it will be an even better detector of gravitational waves. but once we build laser interferometers in space we can use them to detect the most. as an aging objects in the universe remember namely the super massive black holes that are at the center of large galaxies and if we can do that then we can eventually listen so far out

that will reach the end of the universe and that is that will be the big bang or if we can listen far enough out that the signals have been travelling for 13800000000 years then we'll have detected the entire universe evictee it. only gravitational waves can tell us what the big bang was really like they can bring us closer than ever before to answering one of humanity's greatest mysteries . it will take time before we will really solve it but already the 1st detected gravitational waves have directed proven the existence of black holes for the 1st time and told us about colliding neutron star and on a cosmic events. that's not a bad start for such a young field. and

when we 1st started looking at the sky is as human beings we saw it galaxies and everything looked pretty stationary but when you start looking at an x. rays or you start looking at it and radio waves you find out there's a madhouse out there collisions going on things are sex floating this plasma flying all over the place things are radiating and oscillating and it would be absolutely a miracle. if when we open up now this gravitational wave way of looking at the universe there are things we have never even thought about. and i'm only 63 and with the best of health i might live to 120 that's another 57 years i'm only halfway there that's the 15th and everything that's happened in the last 63 years is incredible as the go it will go online. this year so i'll get to hear the big bad. somewhere out there that signal is already on its

way the only question is when it will reach us. move against illegal gold diggers. in peru's jungles this takes heavy weapons the price of gold skyrocketed during the pandemic and the number of forbidding mines is exploding. with a company a special unit in their dangerous work against reckless environmental destruction on the global 3030 minutes on d w. to go africa and back to the fisa court when century kaunas

become wandering headsman it's because of an ecological with a limitation and southern africa abolishing fenced in graceland keeps oil from becoming depleted and protects the habitats of wild animals shedding ancient skill that's a contribution to a sustainable future eco gofer guy a. 90 minute support t.w. . good life on earth one of a kind to end. a gigantic coincidence. that samples. previously the earth was just a messy chemistry and i want all the. wonders of the i'm.

going to listen to the creation of our solar system with our planet is a bit like winning the lottery but there is a little. relief earth. starts february 11th oh and b.t.w. . this is day that we news and these are our top stories a russian court has ordered opposition figure alexei navalny to present to serve out a 3 and a half year sentence he was detained last month for violating the terms of his probation was accused of failing to check in with authorities because he was in germany recovering from a near fatal.