Seismometer

For 13 years, the scientists of LIGO—the most ambitious, and expensive, project in the history of the National Science Foundation—had been waiting. LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, has been twenty-five years and more than half a billion dollars in the making. It involves 900 scientists and engineers, including many whose entire careers have been spent designing, building, and preparing to analyze data streaming in to LIGO. Their goal: To confirm, once and for all,…