A very LIGO Christmas

A Christmas hymn.

Angela’s image came in a rush, escaping the repressed confines of Loretta’s subconscious. She appeared as an emaciated youth, track marks on her arms, eyes blank and cadaverous — as if she had come home one last time, still stinking and sleep-deprived after a stint on Godknows-which downtown street. Sitting in her rocking chair, Loretta stopped knitting and set aside the almost-finished sweater...

Strawman LIGO II Design: A Quantum Limited Interferometer for LIGO

of design The basic optical configuration is a power-recycled and signal-recycled Michelson interferometer with Fabry-Perot ‘transducers’ in the arms. This requires the addition of a signal recycling mirror to the suspended optics at the output ‘dark’ port, and changes in the RF modulation and control systems. The control system relies on a hierarchy of actuators in the seismic and suspension s...

A Christmas tree cataract

A 70-year-old man referred for cataract surgery, had on examination a palette of colored needle-shaped opacities in the cortex and anterior nucleus of the lens, consistent with unilateral Christmas tree cataract. This type of cataract result from the accelerated breakdown of membrane associated proteins. The peptides and amino-acids accumulate in the lumen of the reticular meshwork, and cystine...

Dream of a Christmas lecture

We recall the origins of differential calculus from a modern perspective. This lecture should be a victory song, but the pain makes it to sound more as a oath for vendetta, coming from Syracuse two milenia before. A visitor in England, if he is bored enough, could notice that our old 20 pound notes are decorated with a portrait of Faraday imparting the first series of ”Christmas lectures for yo...

Saving Grace: a Christmas story.