I learned about LIGO while reading Brian Greene's book "The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality." He wrote the book in 2004 before the LIGO facilites achieved design sensitivity. When I found out I could employ the idle time on my home computer to help with the analysis, I jumped at the chance. I am 47, (in 2010) I live in central Indiana (USA) and I am a lifelong curious science nerd, with an emphasis on mechanics and physics. I think superstring theory will eventually prove to be a uniting framework for general relativity and quantum mechanics, and I hope in my lifetime that scientists (and lots of distributed computing people like me) will discover conclusive proof of things like gravity waves, the Higgs boson, and other elements of 20th Century theoretical physics. What an amazing age of discovery we live in!
I run Einstein@Home because I am a lifelong student of physics and cosmology. Although I am not trained formally in these disciplines, I read as much as I can get my hands on because it is so fascinating. I enjoy being able to participate in a small way with the analysis.
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