It’s not often someone gets a front-row seat to a history-making event that forever changes our understanding of the universe, but for Australian academic Dr Carl Blair, it was the ultimate case of being in the right place at the right time.

A decade ago, Blair, from the University of Western Australia’s school of physics, mathematics and computing, was in the thick of his PhD studies when he was called out to the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory – or, LIGO – in the United States.

The observatory, comprising two sites, uses lasers fired at mirrors spaced kilometres apart to measure miniscule fluctuations that signal passing gravitational waves – ripples in the fabric of space-time caused by extremely energetic cosmic events.

But there was a problem: because the detect

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