BACK STORY
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In 1985, as a naive MIT grad student, and protégé of seminal documentarian Ricky Leacock, I make my thesis film called GRAVITY. (Naiveté can be good sometimes: I didn't know how 'real' science documentaries were made, which accounts for much of the film's unorthodox approach.) GRAVITY follows MIT astrophysics grad students building a prototype gravitational-wave antenna. The lab is grim and dusty, the students mildly eccentric, the experiment itself somewhat disparaged during this era of the more glamorous quantum physics. But I finish the film, screen it once to a receptive audience of scientists, then shove it into the closet. Story over.
Or so I thought...
30 years pass by during which Rai's lab, along with labs at Cal Tech and 3 others around the world, build giant 4km long antennas under a global system called LIGO. The antennas detect the first gravitational wave in 2015 - an explosive discovery, right up there with the 2012 Higgs Boson discovery. For this, Rai, along with Barry Barish and Kip Thorne, win the Nobel Prize.
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Also, during this period, Rai's protege, Nergis Mavalvala, currently Dean of MIT's School of Science, pioneers 'Squeezing, thus launching LIGO into the quantum realm.
So I pick up the story again, shooting solo as in 1985, to provide continuity. I follow a new batch of grad students working under Nergis' protege, Lisa Barsotti, head of the squeezing project. Much has changed but, as Rai himself says, 'The movie shows people as they are; independent of composition and scale, they are the same imaginative, risky, delightful ones who make things happen and research a pleasure.'
