LIGO

LIGO (2020)

The thrilling inside story of the discovery of gravitational waves from deep space, 2015-1017. We filmed this dramatic and emotional peak in the lives of the 1,000 rebel scientists who risked their careers in a $1 billion search for these exquisite messengers from warped space, and in the process revolutionized our understanding of the universe.

Date of release
2020-10-01
TMDB
9.0 / 10 (1)
Runtime
1h 24m
Genres
Documentary
Director
Les Guthman

Interesting facts

LIGO is a 2019 American documentary film that tells the inside account of the discovery by the international LIGO Scientific Collaboration of the first observation of gravitational waves in September 2015, a discovery that led two years later to the Nobel Prize in Physics for LIGO physicists Rai Weiss, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish. In December 2019, National Geographic named the LIGO detections at the top of its list of "The 20 Top Scientific Discoveries of the Decade".

Production

LIGO was written, directed and edited by Les Guthman. It was produced by the Advanced LIGO Documentary Project and XPLR Productions in a collaboration with the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, Caltech and MIT, and financed by a grant from U.S. National Science Foundation and support from MathWorks, Caltech and MIT.

Production on the documentary began in August 2015. Three weeks later, Guthman was on location with his crew at the LIGO Livingston Observatory near Baton Rouge, Louisiana when the historic detection, which was not expected for another year, was made.

In August 2017, as the film was about to go into post-production, LIGO made a second major discovery, GW170817, and then in October the Nobel Prize was announced. The script for LIGO was adjusted, requiring additional photography, and its last shoot was with Weiss, Thorne and Barish in Stockholm, along with more than 50 of their colleagues in December 2017.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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