#SoCaltech Calum Torrie
“The entire school—everyone from the janitors, the support staff, the teachers, all the children and the headmaster—they were all there. School canceled for the afternoon. Standing room only. And I was responsible for presenting the LIGO mosaic and saying something memorable and lasting, so that was pressure.
“I told the kids about the enormous number of questions I would ask at that age at that school—and telling the kids how important the teachers were in my journey because of the time they would take to answer those questions.
“And, of course, I told them that I failed in my first career—which was to become a professional soccer player. The kids found it hilarious that here was me as the deputy director of LIGO, working at Caltech, and that was my second-choice profession.
“The framed version of the LIGO mosaic that the kids helped create is now in an area where they pass by it all the time. I guess it's guerrilla marketing: having the kids seeing this scientific mosaic again and again. Maybe it will spark them into doing something fantastic.”
Calum Torrie is the head of system science and engineering for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), and the LIGO associate director for Caltech. In June, he visited Cardonald Primary School, his childhood school in Glasgow, Scotland, to talk about his work and present a framed mosaic of 1,156 science-themed pictures made by the pupils, each placed so as to represent the historic gravitational-wave signal picked up by the twin LIGO observatories a decade ago. The visit was organized by researchers from the University of Glasgow, where Torrie is also an honorary research fellow. LIGO is funded by the National Science Foundation and operated by Caltech and MIT, which together conceived and built the project.
#SoCaltech is an occasional series celebrating the diverse individuals who give Caltech its spirit of excellence, ambition, and ingenuity. Know someone we should profile? Send nominations to magazine@caltech.edu.