In March 2014, scientists working with the South Pole Telescope (SPT) announced that they had found evidence of gravitational waves.
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I played an extremely minor role on the above project. In 2011, I was living in Chicago and I dated one of the scientists working on the sensors for the new SPT. She was trying to calibrate the equipment but was getting intermittent and odd errors. I only know one-percent as much about physics as she knows, but she was so frustrated from working 14-hour days to find the problem that she asked me to help her troubleshoot the errors.
Troubleshooting computer equipment? Yes, I can do that. We worked for a couple of weeks to rule out a ton of possible causes. Ultimately, because we had ruled out nearly every other possibility, she told the rest of the team that the sensors probably had a flaw in them. She was right: the sensors had not been manufactured to the specifications provided by the team. Luckily for them, all of the sensors were uniform, they had the same flaw, and the flaw was still within a usable range.
The entire team had to work crazy hours to rewrite all of the formulas and computer code so that they could properly interpret the data detected by the SPT sensors. My role was minor: I merely helped to troubleshoot the sensor problem. But if I had not been there to help, it’s possible that they wouldn’t have detected the flaw in time to install the new sensors, so they would have had to use the old sensors, and it might have delayed all of this work by a year. (They can only work on the SPT during a few months of the South Pole’s “summer”.)
I am not mentioning this because I want to brag. I do not want any credit. I am writing about this because after I watched the TED Talk, above, and I was excited and thought it was amazing that scientists had discovered evidence of gravitational waves, I suddenly realized that this discovery was a result of the troubleshooting I had done three years ago, which made me sad.
Realizing that I helped make sure that the above discovery was not delayed by a year made me sad because I looked around this hostel dorm room and I thought, “Why? I have so many skills and I want to use them to make the world a better place, so why is my life like this? Why have I been discarded like trash?”
I do not understand.
