Dissertation Grant: Engineering Stillness: The History of Site Selection and Signal Epistemological Development of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO)

该奖项支持一个关于激光干涉仪引力波天文台（LIGO）的科学史博士论文研究项目。该项目有两个目标。它将提供一个更好的理解，通过汉福德（华盛顿）和利文斯顿（路易斯安那）的配对地点被选中的过程，以及科学家和工程师如何使用LIGO来区分背景噪声和引力波信号。为了从大量的噪声中提取非常小的信号，LIGO必须排除所有在两个地点都不存在的局部干扰；为了最大限度地从背景中过滤掉这些干扰，科学家和工程师不得不选择相对安静的地点。一旦选定地点，他们必须确定和了解所选地点的当地干扰（例如伐木活动、地震和交通）的来源和特征，以保持和提高探测引力波的能力。对当地生活的社会学理解成为表征当地干扰的过程中不可或缺的一部分，从而成为从背景噪声中识别引力波信号的更大目标。研究人员使用“信号认识论”这个新术语，指的是在LIGO干涉仪中获取、组合和应用有关振动的技术和社会知识的混合体。这项研究的结果将为LIGO未来额外的大型干涉仪和其他大型物理实验企业的选址提供资源，这些企业由于其仪器的灵敏度和尺寸而必须考虑土地，它将作为一个案例研究，为其他国家资助的大型科学项目提供见解。这个关于LIGO早期历史的研究项目有三个不同的组成部分。首先，分析了LIGO的选址过程。其次，研究了LIGO信号认识论的构建，特别是关于LIGO的环境如何与干涉仪的操作和输出信号相关的问题。第三，它研究了保持干涉仪灵敏度和相对于实际地理位置静止的实验环境的重要性，以便LIGO科学家能够从背景噪声中提取出令人难以置信的微小引力波。该项目解决的首要问题是土地特征和位置选择如何影响大规模物理实验，以及土地和领土的考虑如何成为在这些地点进行实验的不可或缺的问题。现有文献使用社会学方法来研究选址过程中的人际关系。相比之下，本研究通过档案记录分析来分析LIGO的发展、放置、设计演变、实验运行以及对引力波信号与地面背景噪声之间区别的理解，填补了我们认识上的一个关键空白。该项目将关注那些居住在LIGO站点周围土地上的人们的经历，目的是展示他们与土地的关系和知识如何成为LIGO引力波实验和数据解释的一部分。在选址过程中，将当地知识与非驻地专家所获得的知识相结合，是该项目的一个新特点。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This award supports a doctoral dissertation research project in history of science on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). The project has two goal. It will provide a better understanding of the process through which the paired sites of Hanford (Washington) and Livingston (Louisiana) were selected, and of how scientists and engineers using LIGO came to distinguish background noise from gravitational wave signals. To extract a very small signal from vast amount of noise, LIGO must exclude all local disturbances not present at both sites; to maximize the likelihood of being able to filter out such disturbances from the background, scientists and engineers had to choose relatively quiet sites. Once the sites were chosen, they had to identify and understand the sources and characteristics of the local disturbances (e.g., logging activity, earthquakes, and traffic) at the selected sites in order to maintain and improve the capacity to detect gravitational waves. A sociological understanding of local life became integral to the process of characterizing local disturbances and so to the larger aim of discerning gravitational wave signals from the background noise. The novel term “signal epistemology” is used by the researcher to refer to the acquiring, combining, and applying a hybrid of technical and social knowledge about vibrations within LIGO's interferometers. The results of this research will serve as a resource for future site selection by LIGO for the placement of additional large-scale interferometers and other large-scale physics experiment enterprises which must consider the land due to the sensitivity and size of their instruments, and it will serve as a case study that provides insights for other nationally funded big science projects. This research project on the early history of LIGO has three distinct components. First, it analyzes the LIGO site selection process. Second, it examines the construction of LIGO's signal epistemology, especially with respect to the question of how LIGO's environment pertains to the operation and output signals of its interferometers. Third, it studies the importance of maintaining interferometer sensitivity and a still experimental environment relative to its actual geographic location, so that LIGO scientists can extract the incredibly minute gravitational wave from the background noise. The overarching issue addressed by the project is the perennial question of how land characteristics and placement choices affect large-scale physics experiments and how considerations of land and territory became integral to the performance of experiments on such sites. Existing literature uses sociological methods to examine interpersonal relationships in the site selection process. By contrast, this research fills a critical gap in our understanding by using archival record analysis to analyze LIGO's development, placement, design evolution, experimental runs and its understanding of distinctions between gravitational wave signals and terrestrial background noise. The project will address the experience of those who occupy the land surrounding LIGO's sites, with the aim of showing how their relationships with and knowledge of the land became part of LIGO's gravitational wave experiments and interpretation of data. The points of intersection between local knowledge and the knowledge acquired by non-resident experts entailed in site selection is a novel feature of the project.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.