The LIGO Lab Is Pushing the Boundaries of Gravitational-Wave Research

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.4 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 16 July 2025

⏱️ 18 minutes

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Summary

Come with Science Quickly on a field trip to the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Host Rachel Feltman is joined by Matthew Evans, MIT’s MathWorks professor of physics, to talk about the last 10 years of gravitational-wave research. Gravitational waves were discovered in 2015 by the LIGO team. Since then, innovations from the LIGO Lab have changed our understanding of the universe and made major shifts across physics. Now they’re preparing for the next generation of gravitational-wave detectors. Recommended reading: The 2015 Paper Announcing the Discovery of Gravitational Waves: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.03837 Listen to the Astonishing ‘Chirp’ of Two Black Holes Merging https://www.scientificamerican.com/video/listen-to-the-astonishing-chirp-of-two-black-holes-merging1/ 5 New Types of Gravitational-Wave Detectors Could Reshape Astrophysics https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/5-new-types-of-gravitational-wave-detectors-could-reshape-astrophysics/ E-mail us at sciencequickly@sciam.com if you have any questions, comments or ideas for stories we should cover! Discover something new every day: subscribe to Scientific American and sign up for Today in Science, our daily newsletter. Science Quickly is produced by Rachel Feltman, Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Naeem Amarsy and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was hosted by Rachel Feltman. Our show is edited by Alex Sugiura with fact-checking by Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck. The theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:27.8	slash UK slash AI for people. For Scientific American Science quickly, I'm Rachel Feldman.
0:53.3	Today we're leaving the podcast studio to take you on a field trip to the LIGO lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
1:00.3	We're going to chat with Matthew Evans, MIT's Mathworks Professor of Physics, all about the hunt for gravitational waves.
1:07.2	You'll notice that the sound quality isn't up to our usual standard, but that's because we were right there in the lab surrounded by big loud science machines.
1:14.9	If you want to see all that cool stuff for yourself, head over to our YouTube channel for an extended video version of this episode.
1:21.1	Here's our conversation with Matt.
1:23.6	Thanks so much for joining us.
1:25.2	Thank you for having you.
1:26.2	So a few years ago, we heard a lot about gravitational waves.
1:30.3	All of a sudden, many of us had not heard of them before that.
1:33.3	Could you remind us what they are and what happened that was so exciting?
1:37.3	So I guess that was almost 10 years ago now.
1:40.3	Well, that's wild. I don't want to think about that.
1:42.3	2016 was when the announcement was made.
	...

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