Grant Meadors

"Out in that desert of tumbleweeds, the vast plains washed by the Missoula Floods ten thousand years ago, something changed. It's a terrific place, in the literal sense of the word: the sky is so vast there that it feels like it is about to the engulf the world. And the interferometer itself was like something out of sci-fi as well. Back then, to block 1064 nm laser light, we wore green goggles. Stepping into the interferometer's sanctum, the so-called "laser vacuum equipment area", was like entering another world of emerald color. That sun-baked summer, surrounded by scientists who sincerely believed that we could someday detect the motion of space itself, changed how I saw a life in science."

Grant Meadors is a postdoctoral scholar at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.  Grant studies the astrophysics of black-hole and neutron-star mergers and was inspired to take up scuba diving by other LIGO members. You can follow Grant on Twitter at @grantmeadors.