[Detour] Searching for Black Hole Collisions at the LIGO

[Detour] Searching for Black Hole Collisions at the LIGO

This episode explains how scientists built a machine so sensitive that your heartbeat standing next to it would ruin the experiment...and why they put it in the middle of the Washington desert. We walk through the control room where gravitational wave detections happen, with a working LIGO scientist as our guide. We explain what it means that space itself can stretch and squeeze, and why the signal they caught in 2015 had been traveling for 1.3 billion years before anyone caught it. We talk about Einstein getting fact-checked by a journal reviewer, refusing to believe it, and eventually being proven right sixty years after he died. And we look at what's coming next: a detector in space with arms two and a half million kilometers long that might — just might!!!— let us hear the echo of the Big Bang.

Joshua Tree National Park

Joshua Tree isn't just about weird trees and cool rocks. This episode tells you why those "trees" are not actually trees and what a rain shadow actually does to a landscape. We explain why the Oasis of Mara—the place where Serrano and Chemehuevi people had lived peacefully for generations—got claimed by the state of California in 1875 and sold to the Southern Pacific Railroad without their consent. We meet Minerva Hamilton Hoyt, the wealthy socialite who shipped seven freight cars of desert plants across the country to convince people this place was worth saving. And we talk about what's happening right now: animals so desperate for water they're showing up in people's backyards, and what that means for the future of the desert.