 Come September you have detected gravitational waves. What does that allow us to explore and understand that we did not before? Yeah, I have long thought that the most likely thing for us to see first is collision of two black holes and If that's what we see We will then be for the first time opening up a study of Geometrodynamics How does warped space and warped time behave in a storm? We it says though. We've only seen the surface of the ocean on a calm day We've never seen a storm where they're rolling waves Breaking waves where there might even be water spouts and Similarly, we've never seen how warped space behaves and warp time behaves in a storm I think the goal of this and the great excitement is not Detecting gravitational waves is not discovering and proving that they're there it's Using them to explore aspects of the universe that we have never ever seen This is going to be a number of things will be discovered that they are very unexpected Some things will be proved that you didn't know whether they were true or not But this is a tool for doing a rich variety of science for example, if you have a compact binary system say Two neutron stars neutral star black hole black hole black hole They will be inspiring in towards each other slowly getting closer their orbital period Decreasing like with time as they grow closer together what you would expect to see there is a signal With slowly increasing frequency a chirp signal And then as they like kind of grow closer and merge, you know, you'll get this fantastically messy You know signals like you get to black holes merging with each other, you know, that that's crazy And you get this my kind of new new black hole that kind of created and you know, it's it's excited and Releases energy in gravitational waves and it will ring down Characteristic frequencies that will tell you things about like kind of the the massive the new black hole and the spin Since I got started, I've always thought that probing what's going on Right in the center of black holes or right at the outside of black holes where the Curvature of space becomes so wild. I thought that was always the most interesting interesting part of this project The theory seems so wild to me I've always thought can't be can't be that just like that and so You know, this would be our first way to really Get a handle on does space curve the way that people have been predicting all along or just something really even more wild happen at the edge when the Black holes merge and the curvature becomes really high are new particles created or does our knowledge of space time completely break down? Maybe we don't know what space is at all the deepest most fundamental physics. These are the kinds of things we could discover When I first started my career at Caltech roughly a half a century ago What I wanted to do is a discovery how how what happens then how In these this most wild of imaginable situations for space and time How does it space and time behave and the light goes going to show us And we will see this for the first time it will open up our eyes Into into deep physics that we have not previously understood our insights our understanding of space and time will be completely different 20 years from now because of LIGO plus computer simulations than it is today That's just one example of the great richness of things. This is going to do for human understanding of the universe