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Black Hole Detectors Fulfill Moore’s Law

Project Category

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Project Brief

Objective: To create a series of compelling visualizations that clearly illustrate how black hole detection technology has evolved and scaled in accordance with Moore's Law.


Scope:

  • Graphic 1: A scatter-gantt plot (should I copyright the name?) showing the operational period of each detection run and the number of possible detections per year for each run. Each detection run is colored according to reflect the name/period of the detection facility, and future detection runs were denoted by dotted lines. 

  • Graphic 2: A waterfall chart showing the change in authorship numbers each year since 2003, reflecting the growth in the field. 

Team: I redesigned the graphics and Lee Billings was the managing editor. 


Data Sources: Provided by the authors, Imre Bartos and Szabolcs Marka. 


Links: 

Scientific American Article

Blog Post Link TK

This article was an opinion piece positing that the number of black hole merger detections would increase exponentially and could be described by Moore's Law. Moore's Law was initially conceived of and applied to transistors: the technological advancements in the field would result in the doubling of the number of transistors every two years without a corresponding increase in costs.


The authors provided the data and some original graphics and my job was to remake the graphics in the "house style." The first graphic conveyed the exponential growth in the number of detections per year, while the second showed that the number of authors involved in the publications had increased 5x.


I write more thoroughly about the process of remaking these graphics in two blogs, linked above. In particular, I added more context via annotations to the second graphic compared to the original the authors sent. While the first graphic shows possible detections to support their argument about Moore's law, there have been actual detections of black hole mergers and gravitational waves.


I wasn't involved with those projects, but my two best friends at Georgia Tech worked for Dr. Laura Cadonati in 2015 when LIGO detected the very first gravitational waves. It was all we could talk about for days! It felt important to note those pivotal moments in the graphic because they help tell the story of the evolution of this field, which is ultimately what the authors wanted to do, too.


Desktop Graphics

Graph showing the projected increase in the number of possible black hole merger detections per year (represented on a logarithmic scale from 0.001 to one million) from 2000 to 2045. The graph highlights the different phases of LIGO’s data collection, including Initial LIGO (2003 to 2011), Advanced LIGO (2015 to 2030), and the projected future detectors LIGO A-sharp (2031 to 2035) and Cosmic Explorer (2035 to 2045). The number of possible detections increases exponentially over time.
Waterfall chart conveys a fivefold increase in the number of authors contributing to LIGO-related papers by showing the incremental change in each year’s number of authors as a difference from the previous year’s number. Between 2003 and 2024, the number of authors increased from 358 to 1,797.

Mobile Graphics





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