What We Can Learn from History As We Plan the Coming 3G Detectors

Isaacson Award Session

The Isaacson Award rightfully celebrates the key role that Rich Isaacson played in getting LIGO built. While the scientists of LIGO were successfully addressing the technological challenges, Rich was masterfully dealing with equally trying organizational and funding challenges. During the same period, Europeans were facing similar issues but in an international context, which shaped their challenges in a different way. While in Europe two full-scale detectors were proposed but only one was funded, in the US Rich was able to keep LIGO's two-detector proposal intact and get it funded. In this talk I will reflect on these times, in which scientists who were used to working on laboratory-scale physics and technology had to learn how to engineer some of the biggest and most expensive measuring instruments ever constructed -- in one huge leap. We are now planning an equally ambitious leap to 3G detectors in the next decade, but fortunately we are starting from a position where we collectively have much more experience with the engineering and with the cutting-edge technologies that we will need. However, I think we can still learn from this history much about the organizational challenges we will inevitably face. We should be aiming to build a 3G detector network whose sensitivity is limited by the properties of materials and the cleverness of our inventiveness, and not by organizational problems that we were unable to master.