Guide for Complete Beginners

Note

This page is for anyone curious about gravitational waves and Sage — regardless of background. No physics, no machine learning, no programming experience is assumed.

How to get started with zero programming experience

You do not need to install anything to begin. All the introductory tutorials run in Google Colab — a free, browser-based Python environment provided by Google. You only need a Google account.

Step 1 — Learn a little Python. Python is the programming language Sage is written in. It is designed to be readable and beginner-friendly. A few hours with any free tutorial will give you enough to follow along with the Colab notebooks. Good places to start:

You do not need to become an expert — you just need to understand variables, lists, functions, and how to run a cell in a notebook.

Step 2 — Open a Colab tutorial. The quickstart page links to Colab notebooks that run real parts of Sage in your browser. Start with notebook 1 (signal generation) and read every cell carefully, including the explanations between the code.

Step 3 — Be patient with yourself. Researchers spend years learning this material. You will not understand everything immediately, and that is completely normal. The goal at this stage is to build intuition — to develop a feel for what the data looks like, what the network is doing, and why each step exists. Understanding comes in layers, and each time you revisit something you will notice things you missed before.

What you will need (eventually)

As you progress beyond the tutorials, you will want to understand:

  • More Python — particularly the NumPy and PyTorch libraries, which handle numerical data and neural networks respectively. Both have excellent official tutorials.

  • Basic signal processing — what a Fourier transform does, what “frequency” and “amplitude” mean for a time series. Khan Academy covers the underlying maths clearly.

  • Basic machine learning concepts — what a neural network is, what training means, what a loss function does. The fast.ai course (free, online) is one of the best introductions available.

  • Some GW physics — the LIGO Scientific Collaboration publishes accessible introductory articles, and the Nobel Prize website has clear explanations written for a general audience.

None of this needs to happen before you start. Pick up each piece as you need it.