Lyne Starling Trimble Public Event Series

An Eclectic Array of Expertise: The Federal-Level Site Selection History of LIGO

Tiffany Nichols, Northeastern University

Friday, May 2, 2025
5:45pm, Reception
6:30 to 7:30pm, Lecture and Q&A

American Center for Physics
555 12th Street NW, Suite 250
Washington, DC 20004

Abstract

Physicists and social science scholars claim that two powerful US senators battled for the placement of the large-scale interferometers of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). They also claim that LIGO’s Livingston, Louisiana, location was placed in the south due to political connections and a lack of large-scale instruments in the region. I argue that collapsing this history in this way provides a limited picture of how LIGO’s sites were chosen. Using historical methods and legal analysis, I show that the selection process was far more complex than a decision rooted in Congress and focused on the lack of instruments in a particular region. Spanning from the early 1980s to the early 1990s, I elucidate how LIGO’s site selection is the result of many layers of review by an array of experts including gravitational physicists, engineers, science policy analysts, attorneys, and contracts managers across LIGO Laboratory, the National Science Foundation, National Science Board, and Congress. Each of these actors had to consider budget justifications, local acceptance of such facilities in their areas, and the scientific suitability of the candidate sites for hosting a gravitational wave detector, among numerous additional factors. My approach reveals the previously obscured importance of local acceptance and scientific soundness to maximize the possibility of detection and the success of this ambitious endeavor.

Speaker Biography

Tiffany Nichols is a Legacy Survey of Space and Time Discovery Alliance (LSST-DA) Catalyst Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor of History and Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University. Prior to joining Northeastern, she was a Presidential Postdoctoral Associate in the Departments of Astrophysical Sciences and History at Princeton University. Tiffany’s research interests are at the intersection of history, science, physics, technology, environment, and law. Her current book project focuses on how place, surrounding environment, and laboratory are embedded in the output signals of LIGO. Tiffany completed her PhD in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. Prior to her PhD studies, she earned both a bachelor of science in electrical engineering and a juris doctor at the University of Virginia. She has also held positions at the RAND Corporation and was a practicing attorney in the areas of intellectual property litigation and patent prosecution and portfolio management.