Hey there! Thanks for listening to Shortwave. We'd love to know what you think about this podcast.

Please help us out by telling us what you like and how we could improve by completing a short

anonymous survey at npr.org slash shortwave survey. You're listening to Shortwave

from NPR. So, ok, tennetapi, nitaniku, mako yurukku, ki, kori gray. Hi, I was just

giving a greeting in blackfoot and I gave my blackfoot name, which is wolf's path and also my name,

kori gray. I'm Regina Barber and I've known kori for years. We've connected at conferences as

fellow scientists of color. I am a senior operation specialist at the LIGO Hanford Observatory in

eastern Washington state. LIGO measures ripples in space called gravitational waves.

Yeah, so what are gravitational waves? For, I guess the main thing I would say that all of this comes

from Albert Einstein. It comes from his general theory of relativity in 1915. Basically, gravity is

just how masses bend the space around them and that's the idea of what gravity is in general

relativity. If you take this mass and accelerate it in space or space time, those accelerations vibrate

space times and those vibrations, those wiggles in space time are what gravitational waves are.

LIGO stands for laser interferometer gravitational observatory and kori has worked there since

the beginning. He waited 17 years to see evidence of two black holes colliding into each other.

The first direct evidence of gravitational waves, 100 years almost to the day after Einstein's

prediction. Yeah, you can't write a script to make it better than what actually happened. Wow,

yeah, tell me more. My shift was from 4 p.m. to midnight and so I handed off to the operator who's

doing the graveyard shift starting at midnight and I always joked that around by the time I got home

and was putting my head on my pillow and closing my eyes. That's about when the signal passed through

the earth, passed through me and it passed through all of us. I'm looking at my arms because I have

a tattoo. It's September 14th, 2015. Tell us a little bit more about like how what this meant to you

...