Advanced LIGO Documentary Project
The Advanced LIGO Documentary Project is a collaboration formed in the summer of 2015 among Caltech, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Director Les Guthman to document the Advanced LIGO search for gravitational waves, both to videotape a longitudinal record of the project for history and to make a documentary of the LIGO project's then-expected detection of the first gravitational waves.
On September 14, 2015, the Advanced LIGO Documentary team was on location filming at the LIGO Livingston Observatory when the historic detection was made.[1] Over the next five months, it had exclusive film access to document the long, careful process of scientific verification that was conducted by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration to confirm that the received signal was in fact a gravitational wave, as predicted by [Albert Einstein] more than 100 years ago.[2]
The detection was announced by LIGO at the National Press Club in Washington DC on February 11, 2016.[3]
In addition to its filming of the gravitational wave detection and LIGO's continuing science, the Advanced LIGO Documentary Project has filmed three important post-detection lectures by LIGO physicists, talks which Caltech streams: Kip S. Thorne,[4] Barry Barish [5] and Alessandra Buonanno.[6]
On June 1, 2016, LIGO creators Kip S. Thorne, Rai Weiss and Ronald Dreaver were awarded the Kavli Prize Astrophysics, the award likened to the Nobel Prize for three areas of science that did not exist at the time the Nobel Prizes were established.[7]
The same week, the Advanced LIGO Documentary Project produced the two LIGO programs at the World Science Festival in New York, including the main stage Saturday night panel moderated by physicist and best-selling author Brian Greene, featuring five of the key physicists behind the historic detection, including Rai Weiss, and four short videos from the Project's exclusive footage inside the discovery.[8]