A Scientist Keeps a Secret
My friend and fellow physicist Shane Larson studies gravitational waves, but it’s his enthusiasm for science of all kinds that defines him. By day he designs sophisticated space-based lasers to detect minute warps in spacetime. At night you are more likely to find him looking through a pair of binoculars at the Andromeda galaxy, marveling that he can see something two million light years away with his own eyes.
Driving across the country from Bozeman, Montana, to his first postdoctoral appointment at Penn State, Shane devised an experiment to estimate the number of insects in the United States. He taped sheets of cardboard to the front of his car. Each evening he’d remove the card and each morning he’d replace it with a new one. At the end of the trip he counted the number of insects he’d collected. Multiplying the card’s area by the length of the trip gave him the volume of air and enough info to get the average density of insects. (By his calculations, about five million per cubic km, or 50 billion in the U.S. But who’s counting?)
As a physics professor at Utah State University, he loaded himself and 20,000 bouncy balls into a helicopter and flew above the campus. He coordinated hundreds of students to measure the time it took for the balls to drop giving a measure of the acceleration due to gravity. But he really just wanted to see what happened when all those bouncy balls hit the ground at once. Good thing he had several hundred students there for Geek Week to clean up the mess.
He even recreated the classic Cavendish experiment. A dumbbell-like rod with heavy masses at either end hangs from a long, thin thread. If you place two more masses on either side of the rod it slowly twists due to the weak gravitational attraction. The deflection of a laser affixed to the thread is proportional to the strength of gravity. With this you can measure the universal gravitational constant, one of the most fundamental numbers telling us how the universe works. Of course, he had to build one in his basement.
Given his bubbling avidity for all things science, Shane is not the kind of guy who tends to keep things to himself. As it turns out, though, the man can sit on a secret. When I met with him in Casper, Wyoming for the total solar eclipse on August 21 of this year, he was bursting with his usual playful enthusiasm. He brought his telescopes and binoculars. We made pinhole cameras out of Ritz crackers. We ate our way through stacks of Oreo cookies, first sculpting the frosting with toothpicks into models of the total eclipse. The solar corona never tasted so good.
But Shane was hiding a whopper of a secret. Just days before the eclipse, he, along with 4,000 other gravitational wave researchers, “saw” the spacetime rippling of two merging neutron stars simultaneously detected by 70 observatories on seven continents. It was a landmark discovery, observing both gravitational waves and electromagnetic waves of the same astrophysical event. And neither he nor the others in on the discovery told friends or family until the it was officially announced on October 16, making headlines worldwide.
“I knew about GW170817 while I was at #Eclipse2017.” he posted on recently on social media, referring to the August 17, 2017 observation of a gravitational wave.
I asked Shane how it felt to keep such a secret while we watched our first total solar eclipse.
“Some of my friends have asked ‘how can you have lied to us?,’ he told me, “I'm not worried I lied to you, I lied to my own mother about this!”
There were good reasons to wait for the official announcement. “The reason we want to keep everything secret is we want to check to make sure we're confident in the results,” Shane told me, “But underlying that is this nearly unattainable goal to say everything so perfectly that the results are unassailable.”
It’s a tricky bit, being a scientist. We need to get it right, for us and for our colleagues. The news cycle doesn’t allow for peer review. When we finally find our most amazing discoveries, we’d better have our ducks in a row.
For someone like Shane whose life revolves around sharing science, keeping such a secret must be unbearable. But perhaps he’s gotten a taste for it. When I spoke with him recently he hinted that there were more discoveries under wraps: “On the day of the eclipse, we had two new events in our pocket,” he said, “For all you know, I'm lying to you right now!”