Here we are, after almost one year and a half, lots of things have happened. As I explained on the last newsletter, after the first GraWIToN school finished, I initiated a new period on my work, learning about rendering, or said in different words, a topic classified as computer science.
This change represented a new situation in which I had to start again from scratch. Mainly because even in my case, even if I had previously coded a lot, the aim of the code was always thought to be a simulation of a physical phenomena, and in consequence, written for scientific purposes. Here it was completely different: to learn about rendering, I started searching information about some software created to be used in games, films and architecture, which are uses completely different from any other I had used before, to see how they manage to create an image. As expected, there are plenty of techniques that are used to create every image, but it results that some of them try to simulate the physical principles that allow us to see the world around us. Those techniques to create the image, are called 'Ray tracing' and actually it is closely related with physics.
For some historical reasons, almost all the research done in ray tracing has been done by computer scientists, but as I say, this was due to historical reasons. During the 60's, some research started to focus on how may be possible to simulate light in order to be able to reproduce an image. On the next decade, the research on how to simulate the light and create an image of a scene advanced, limited by the power of the computers at the current time. Here it's when the recently created scientific discipline to study computers and its applications started to research about light simulation, powered by the interest of the applications that are currently used on games and cinema where you are not able to distinguish between a real and a fake image. So in the end, they were doing a 'physical study'.
During this time, the third GraWIToN school arrived and again all the GraWIToN students, at least the ones working on optics, laser or simulation topics, could met again. In addition of all the new stuff we learnt, there was something that officially we were not able to talk publicly, but we all knew: the close publication of the paper reporting the first direct detection of gravitational waves 100 years after Einstein predicted their existence. But also, this detection resulted to be an unexpected one, two black holes doing a spiralling until they collided to form a single black hole. During these extremely energetic phenomena, many energy was radiated as gravitational waves, as much as an energy equivalent to 3 solar masses!
So, after coming back, every day was closer to the day of the official announcement and the expectation was increasing on blogs, news and twitter, speculating on the possibilities that the “sooo looong” expected first detection of gravitational waves had been finally done. And when the day arrived, all the journals were focusing on the detection, finally after 100 years since they were predicted, all the efforts done to detect them had been rewarded.
But I've done more things than the officials related with my research. On December, during three days, an event called Lights of Tuscany was held in Pisa. This event was organized by the AISF (Italian association of physics students) in Pisa with the participation of around 40 students, almost all of whom coming from other countries. During the inauguration event I offered a talk about the importance of the noise on different technical disciplines and how lot of work has been done in order to reduce it. This is important, because we don't use to think that if we don't deal with the noise, it might destroy our work, unless... you have intentionally add it!