Kovalik’s Nobel role seems like science fiction

When the 2017 Nobel Prize was presented on October 3 to physicists Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne, Joseph Kovalik ’81 was among the scientists who helped make it happen.

The three Nobel laureates were chosen because of their pioneering work developing the Laser Interferometer Gravity Wave Observatory (LIGO) project, which Joe has been involved in from the beginning. LIGO consists of two 4-km-long laser interferometers installed 3,000 kilometres apart, one in Washington State and one in Louisiana.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences describes these instruments as “new kinds of telescopes,” designed to measure gravitational waves rather than light. The existence of gravitational waves was predicted by Einstein in his general theory of relativity a century ago, but the waves were only detected by the LIGO two years ago. Now this project has received the Nobel.

Gravitational waves are created by very massive objects such as neutron stars or black holes, objects whose gravitational fields create “ripples” in space. In order to detect these infinitesimal waves, the interferometer must be incredibly sensitive. “It’s as if you took the distance from the Earth to the Sun, and that orbit suddenly got bigger by one atom,” Joseph explained to Selwyn House’s Veritas magazine. “That’s the sort of scale of distance we’re trying to measure.”

After graduating from Selwyn House in 1981, Joe Kovalik earned a B.S. with Honors in physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1986, and a Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1994. Nobel laureate Rainer Weiss was his PhD advisor there.

From 1982 until 1986 he worked at the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, at Caltech. From 1986 until 1995 he worked in the Department of Physics at MIT as a graduate research assistant and later as a as a post-doctoral research associate, working on understanding the thermal noise limits of the LIGO interferometer both experimentally and theoretically.

For years afterward, he worked as a laboratory scientist at the LIGO Project in Louisiana, where he was involved in all the aspects of commissioning the LIGO detector, being responsible for the operation of the laser, various control systems and measurement of detector performance.

 

Joe is now working at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “The group I joined studies how to use lasers to communicate with spacecraft all the way to Mars,” Joe says. “Eventually, we would like to stream high definition video from Mars instead of slowly sending pictures one at a time.

“There are thousands of people involved with the LIGO project now,” Joe says, “but I was there at the beginning…. The fact that we can detect the collision of black holes because they distort spacetime is quite amazing, given how small the effect is. It is also a remarkable that people were able to take a very abstract theory like general relativity and invent all kinds of fantastic scenarios, including that of black holes colliding. This seemed like complete science fiction, but it turns out to be true.”