Before he became a physicist, Jonah Kanner was a student in Charleston public schools. In his childhood bedroom, he had a poster of Albert Einstein on the wall.
"I've always been an Einstein fan," Kanner said.
Years later, that young Einstein fan was a part of the team that proved the final part of Einstein's theory of relativity.
It was when he was a student at John Adams Middle School that he first picked up a book by Einstein called "Relativity: The Special and General Theory-A Clear Explanation That Anyone Can Understand." In the book was a one-page algebra proof that ended in the sentence "So if you're moving faster, time slows down." The proof captivated Kanner.
"You could follow the math, understand the logic and that last sentence was magical," Kanner said.
Kanner always liked math and logic.
"He was always just a great math whiz," Kanner's father, Ted, said.
Kanner's first math teacher was his younger brother, Landon, who taught him how to do two-digit subtraction. From there, his love for math only grew.
Now Kanner, 35, lives in Pasedena and works on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO for short) Scientific Collaboration at the California Institute of Technology.
Kanner is the co-chair of LIGO's data analysis group. He writes the software looking for stuff that looks like gravitational waves.
On Thursday, the LIGO team announced that for the first time in history, scientists had observed gravitational waves, recording the gravity ripples of two massive black holes colliding 1.3 billion light years away.
"For the first time we have a way of observing the universe where we're directly reading out the motion of celestial bodies in space," Kanner said.
Astronomers can now not only see space, they can hear it, opening up an entirely new way to understand the cosmos.
Being able to hear space is a layered metaphor. The scientists are measuring gravitational waves in frequencies and frequencies are how humans hear sound.
But Kanner didn't listen to the black holes right away.
"We do sometimes listen to our data," Kanner said. "But that's not what we did first."
Kanner's first glimpse at the gravitational waves was visual. He came home from work and opened an email from a colleague that contained a plot that showed the signal rising in frequency.
"I knew something special had happened," Kanner said. "But we didn't know what."
At first, Kanner wondered if it had been a test as the scientists had run tests on the instruments that day.
Instead, it was history.
It was a few weeks before Kanner finally plugged the sound into his speakers and by that point, he knew what it was.
"I knew what it was going to sound like," Kanner said.
Kanner remembers the hairs on the back of his neck standing up the first time he saw a plot that compared the observational data with the predicted frequency based on Einstein's calculations.
"Here it was, just in our data," Kanner said. "And it was identical."
And this is just the beginning. Scientists hope that in the future they'll be able to pick up more frequencies from space.
"At the moment, we're only sensitive to the largest ones," Kanner said.
The gravitational waves that were observed came from the collision of two black holes that emitted three solar masses of energy.
"It would be hard to overstate how dramatic these events are," Kanner said.
Kanner equated it to putting a microphone a short distance from a crowd. The microphone might only pick out the people who are screaming the loudest.
The goal is to improve the machines so that it can pick up more gravitational waves.
"We'll be able to hear more and more of these things, more often," Kanner said.
One of the things scientists are hoping to hear are binary neutron stars. Those neutron stars could help scientists better understand the origins of the universe. Right now, scientists know where the lighter elements (think top of the periodic table) come from and they know that some of the heavier elements (think bottom of the periodic table) are emitted when stars erupt into supernova. But there aren't enough supernovae to produce all of them.
That's where neutron stars come in.
Finding binary neutron stars could enable scientists to better understand the origins of matter.
"This is the beginning of a new kind of astronomy," Kanner said. "And that's very exciting."
Kanner isn't only in tune to the origins of the universe, he also pays attention to his own origins. He often thinks fondly of his childhood in Charleston.
"Charleston is a warm, friendly place full of kind people," Kanner said. "As I've gotten older, I've learned that's not true everywhere."
In particular, Kanner will sometimes talk with his wife, who is a high school French teacher, about his days at George Washington High School. She tells him that he's probably the only person who actually enjoyed high school.
"I had many, many, many outstanding teachers," Kanner said. "And I think it's important to say that in Charleston public schools there are a lot of outstanding teachers."
Kanner would know what it takes to be an outstanding teacher - he went on to teach high school physics after graduating from the University of Maryland in 2003.
When compared to his current job, "teaching high school was much harder," Kanner said.
After a year as a teacher, Kanner went back to Maryland to get his masters and doctorate and invited his parents to watch him defend his doctoral thesis "LOOC UP-Seeking optical counterparts to gravitational wave signals."
His father remembers being blown away.
"I didn't know what they were talking about," the elder Kanner said. "He did."
Kanner said that part of his success comes from having such a great community in Charleston, whether it was at the Charleston Youth Arts Collective, George Washington High School or with the Charleston Jewish community.
"I think what gives people the ability to take risks and the ability to do hard things is the knowledge that you have friends and family that support you," Kanner said.
Reach Daniel Desrochers at dan.desrochers@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-4886 or follow @drdesrochers on twitter.