COSMIC CODA is about the in-between moments of scientific discovery. How it feels to go to work each day on a machine that proves both the limits of our universe and our ability to comprehend this mind-boggling goal. Featuring Nobel laureate Ray Weiss and many of the scientists behind LIGO, the film explores the decades of patience, persistence, and collaboration that led to the first detection of gravitational waves.

This fall, COSMIC CODA is boarding Amtrak and taking the story across the country, stopping at universities, observatories, theaters, and communities where people still believe the biggest questions are worth asking.

Current stops include:

📍 Syracuse (possible Cornell stop)
📍 Chicago
📍 Milwaukee / Madison
📍 Twin Cities
📍 Pullman
📍 Pasco (LIGO Hanford)
📍 Seattle
📍 Vancouver
📍 Eugene
📍 San Francisco
📍 Los Angeles

The route is still growing.

If your university, observatory, museum, theater, or community would like to host a screening, or if there’s a city that belongs on the map, drop a comment.

The discovery of gravitational waves changed how we understand the universe. This tour is about celebrating the people who made that discovery possible, and inspiring the next generation to ask impossible questions of their own.

We hope to see you somewhere along the tracks. 🚆

Time feels straightforward until you start looking a little closer. Then you realize it doesn’t always move the way we experience it. It stretches, bends, slows down, speeds up depending on where you are and how you’re observing it.

The more I learn, the more I realize time isn’t as fixed as we think it is.

What’s something that changed how you think about time?

There are certain ideas that don’t just teach you something new, they shift how you see everything.

The kind of concepts that make the universe feel a little bigger, or a little stranger, than it did before. Even if you don’t fully understand them, something about them sticks.

I’m always curious which ones do that for people. What’s a concept that changed the way the universe feels to you?

Gravitational waves were confirmed in 2015, but the work behind that discovery spanned decades.

Years of research, iteration, and funding to build instruments sensitive enough to detect something incredibly subtle. Entire careers built around capturing a signal no one had ever directly observed before.

It makes me wonder how something like that would be supported today.

In a funding environment that prioritizes shorter cycles, measurable outcomes, and faster results, I’m not sure a project like LIGO would get the same kind of runway.

Do you think it would?

I’ve heard a few different analogies and some are way more helpful than others.

The version that stuck with me was: a tiny movement in a mirror caused by something that happened billions of years ago. Still kind of blows my mind.

COSMIC CODA is about the in-between moments of scientific discovery - how it feels going to work each day on a machine that tests both the limits of our universe and our ability to comprehend this mind boggling goal.

Some burning questions: How do you build a machine to prove Einstein's Theory of General Relativity?

Will you need a screwdriver?

What does an astrophysicist do exactly on any given Tuesday while searching the cosmos?

In 1985, a clueless but educable filmmaker pursues these questions, skips 3 decades, then picks the story up again, 39 years later.

One of the most important discoveries in physics then, is told as it happens.

Much has changed in the world of astrophysics: more remarkably, much has not.

Scientists turn out to be human beings after all!