New Territory

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My first news of GW150914 came from checking my smartphone on the morning of September 14. Sergey Klimenko had just sent an e-mail inquiring about a loud event in the data several hours before. The tone of Sergey's message got my attention; it was clear he thought the data quality looked fine and that this event was very significant. 

My immediate conclusion was that a hardware injection had been made but had not been flagged. I thought that Eric Thrane might have inserted the injection, but he reported a short time later that he did not. I concluded that the blind injection team must have done a test without telling the rest of us. This surprised me, given that they provided no advance warning, but it seemed within their prerogative to do such a thing.

Shortly into the weekly detector characterization call at noon, Mike Landry announced that the blind injection team had stated definitively they had done no injections. I sat upright at that point and listened (in a bit of a daze) as Alan Weinstein asked -- very slowly -- for confirmation: "Do you mean to say that this was not a blind injection?" When Mike confirmed that yes, there had been no injection, I realized that we had just entered uncharted territory.

Name and (optional) affiliation to appear on the website: Keith Riles, University of Michigan

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