 The most remarkable thing that we found we could only discover with the new instruments we built. Two black holes, solar mass black holes, about 30 solar masses each orbiting around each other and crashing together. It's the most violent event ever recorded. It's the amount of energy released in that event was a 10 billion billion billion times larger than all of the energy in the world's nuclear arsenals. Huge. What that did is it was to cause a ripple in space-time. It's caused space-time to send out a wave. This event does not generate any light. It doesn't shine any electromagnetic waves, it doesn't give off neutrinos. The only way to see that event is with a laser interferometer, gravitational wave detector. So we build the world's best ever laser interferometer. Two L shapes four kilometers long and we tune that up so that it's going to respond to these very weak signals. Though these signals were generated by hugely enormous events they are very very small because space-time is really stiff. They're so small that we're trying to measure how Earth move one proton closer to the Sun. When I first heard about the sensitivity that we needed for gravitational wave detection I thought that's crazy. We're never going to see it. But after a while you kind of start working through the problems and start working through the technology challenges and before you know it 20 years later we're in a position where we now have the measurement technology that we need to get the sensitivities where we thought gravitational waves should be and now see gravitational waves for the first time. It's very exciting. One of the big deals about this is that we can see further back in the universe much earlier in time than we can with the electromagnetic spectrum and so that is already a big deal because obviously one of our holy grails is to understand the beginning of the universe. It's awe-inspiring. It has opened up a new way for us to sense the universe, a new carrier. This era where we use gravitational waves and electromagnetic waves we call that multi-messenger astronomy. That is the dawn. Today we're announcing the dawn of this new era. The hidden promise of LIGO has always been to see things that we didn't know were there and this system a to a 30 solar mass binary black hole no one knew existed and it was the very first thing we saw that that's that's amazing. This is a very exciting time for science so with this this is just the first detection this is just the beginning and once the gravitational waves start rolling in we can go from doing just single detections to to really doing some interesting astrophysics. I've been working this field for so long that you sort of almost get used to saying it'll happen soon it'll happen soon it'll happen soon and it's just really very satisfying from a scientific perspective to think of all the challenges that have been overcome by the international community. To see the culmination of this decades of labor of many people many incredible inspiring people and it's been wonderful to be a part of this entire journey. It's absolutely fantastic it's actually amazing that I designed something I built something I installed it and now it's actually used in the instrument to actually detect those gravitational waves it's static it's fantastic it's absolutely brilliant it's a really good feeling I'm very proud of that.