Luis Lehner spends much of his day working on a problem the vast majority of us couldn’t even grasp, much less solve: how to create a theoretical model to guide the search for gravitational waves.
If he succeeds, the big winners will be the scientists doing the searching—at places like the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) in Livingston Parish. Lehner would be famous, LSU would get bragging rights and man’s understanding of the universe would grow accordingly.
But Lehner, a native of Cordoba, Argentina, who came to the United States in 1994 to get his Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh, says gravitational waves are really hard to detect because the signal is as weak as a day-old kitten. At the same time, deep space is very noisy.
“It’s like a crowd full of people talking, and you want to point them to a particular person that you know is in the room,” Lehner says. “If you know how his voice sounds, then the experiment would have a better chance of finding that person.”
It’s a high-stakes race, with teams of scientists around the world working on the same puzzle and no prizes for second place.
“When the problem has been answered, it doesn’t matter if you came up with the answer the day after,” Lehner says. “You could have wasted 10 years of your life.”
What’s the point of all this number crunching to run down a space oddity? Two reasons, Lehner says. For one thing, attacking big science problems always produces handy, marketable technology—think the Space Race. But that’s not the main thing.
“I think human kind has a desire to know why we’re here and what is our purpose, and know more about our universe, our surroundings. We need to do that. We need to know.”
If you could have a job other than you’re own, what would it be?
“Playing soccer I guess in one of the most important teams in the world.”
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