They are detected: 100 years after their prediction by Einstein.
See here].
I think this time it is not a canard, like the polarisation of the Cosmic Background Radiation].
Very cool. And it’s stuff like this that makes me chuckle a scientific “bloviaters” who go on and on about how this or that technology is impossible, for example faster than light travel. Based on current understanding, sure, but you can’t predict what new things will be proven in the future, even a mere 100 years from now, that’ll make FTL travel, for example, seem obvious.
Surf’s up!
(And Einstein, reportedly, doubted that technology would ever be able to detect his prediction.)
So will astronomers now be able to use gravitational waves to get a clearer picture of the universe?
Or science has warped into putting the cart before the horse.
After reaching a barrier that refuses human comprehension, science just contrived a matrix that allows for self-fulfilling theories.
:lol: That was a joke. Just a joke!
But I do run these thoughts through my head sometimes. I think we all probably do.
I watched a documentary on LIGO a few months ago. It was actually a Cal-Tech Doc about gravity. The speaker talked heavily about LIGO and how it was designed to work.
I understood about 2% of what he was talking about.
So will astronomers now be able to use gravitational waves to get a clearer picture of the universe?I think they have already been doing that theoretically. And the latest news is very counter-intuitive to what science has been thinking for awhile. edit for clarification... The latest news on the general picture of the Universe is not solely derived from these Gravitational Wave Theories. I think they are getting a picture that is showing that the whole Universe model is way more simple than some folks thought.
They are detected: 100 years after their prediction by Einstein. See here]. I think this time it is not a canard, like the polarisation of the Cosmic Background Radiation].Dang you beat me to it. Did being close to CERN give you an edge? ;-P
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gravitational-waves-discovered-from-colliding-black-holes1/ About 1.3 billion years ago two black holes swirled closer and closer together until they crashed in a furious bang. Each black hole packed roughly 30 times the mass of our sun into a minute volume, and their head-on impact came as the two were approaching the speed of light. The staggering strength of the merger gave rise to a new black hole and created a gravitational field so strong that it distorted spacetime in waves that spread throughout space with a power about 50 times stronger than that of all the shining stars and galaxies in the observable universe. Such events are, incredibly, thought to be common in space, but this collision was the first of its kind ever detected and its waves the first ever seen. Scientists with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) announced on Thursday at a much-anticipated press conference in Washington, D.C. (one of at least five simultaneous events held in the U.S. and Europe) that the more than half-century search for gravitational waves has finally succeeded. … Albert Einstein first predicted gravitational waves in 1916 based on his general theory of relativity, but even he waffled about whether or not they truly exist. Scientists began seeking these ripples in spacetime in the 1960s but none succeeded in measuring their effects on Earth until now. LIGO’s discovery, accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters, not only provides the first direct evidence for gravitational waves but also opens the door to using them to study the powerful cosmic events that create them. “It’s a huge deal," says Luis Lehner, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario who is unaffiliated with the LIGO project. “It has pushed the fundamental theory of gravity forward in a very strong way and gives us an incredible tool to probe very deep questions of the universe." ...
So will astronomers now be able to use gravitational waves to get a clearer picture of the universe?I think they have already been doing that theoretically. And the latest news is very counter-intuitive to what science has been thinking for awhile. edit for clarification... The latest news on the general picture of the Universe is not solely derived from these Gravitational Wave Theories. I think they are getting a picture that is showing that the whole Universe model is way more simple than some folks thought. As I have heard more about the detection of gravity waves, I understand that it is an admirable feat. We have some more confirmation of the validity of Einstein's general theory of relativity. And we now know that, conceivably, gravity ways might be used to detect new information about the universe. But conceivably and actually, seem to me to be a long way apart. I doubt that we are going to be able to manipulate gravity waves, any time soon, if ever. So, it seems to me that the best that can come from this is to build gravity wave detectors to listen for these waves, on the off chance that a ripple might turn up and that they might tell us something about parts of the universe that we have not been able to see.
So they say. These are great achievements. But I still wonder how the excitement translates over to the general public’s perception.
In this field I sometimes wonder what would be more beneficial…
Proving things right or proving things wrong? Or a mixture of both?
One of the main things this new development has done is proved correct math, that has been known for a long time.
I mean obviously there’s more to it than that, it provides a new “telescope”. Hopefully this new “telescope”(I don’t know why I’m putting the word in quotes, it meets the definition.)
will provide more data to make more math with. New theories etc…There’s no reason to think it won’t.
Hopefully it can be a tool to upset the apple cart. Get new perspectives etc…Again, I think it will.
Or…or is the excitement really about the completion of an endeavor by scientists that was very costly, to prove that practically known knowns were indeed fact?
Because alot of it was just that!
That’s the thing…we don’t know, you and I.
Like I said, I hope this thing is something that can open new doors. All of it does to one extent or another. Piece by piece.
It’s all math. That’s where the answers lie.
That’s my take.
They are detected: 100 years after their prediction by Einstein. See here]. .GdB, I've been reading about attempts to detect gravity waves seems like forever. The instruments have been incredible. But, now that physicists and cosmologists finally have their detection and some basic measurements . . . Where do they go from there? What does it mean so far as understanding the universe? Care to give it a shot? Anyone else?
Here is what I can add to this as a physicist myself (masters degree from the University of Utah) and the author of a relativistic simulator called relspace.
It is about what you see in that video of the two black holes circling each other.
You might notice a kind of line around the two black holes where the stars on either side seem to be moving in different directions. What is going on is that the stars inside that line are actually duplicates of all the stars outside the line on the other side. This is because at a certain distance light gets bent all the way around the black hole to come at us from the other side. In fact, if you looked really close would see another such line closer to the black hole where the light goes around the black hole twice, and other one even closer for three times and so on. Now the truth is that this isn’t really a motion picture of the light around a black hole but a computer simulation like one I have done myself in my simulator, which is why I know about this stuff.
And by the way if you could see something like this with your naked eye then you are way too close and are unlikely to survive the experience. No, not from getting sucked in which is unlikely because of angular momentum but from the tidal forces which will rip you to shreds. Even if it didn’t the gravitational acceleration would be so huge you would be zipping by the thing too fast to get glimpse of it. This is all because the black holes are really small in size for their mass, so to see one like that means you are too close.
Too give you an idea of how small they are, here are three kinds of remnants from a collapsed star.
white dwarf - mass of the sun squashed to about the size of the Earth. This is not actually a star but a cooling remnant, but it is very hot and because of the small size take a very long time to cool down (longer than the age of the universe).
neutron star (pulsar) - mass of the sun squashed to about the size of city (11 km radius). By size alone this would take even longer to cool down but it loses energy in ways other than simply thermal radiation (as a pulsar) which makes them loose a lot of their initial energy much faster.
black hole - mass of the sun squashed to a point, but the black circle where light doesn’t escape is 3km in radius. Of course the black holes in this case are 36 and 29 solar masses so you multiply the radius by this amount to get 108 km and 87 km for the radii of these black circles. But then the gravitational forces are correspondingly bigger so this makes no difference to the difficulties of actually seeing what the video shows with your own eyes.
Mitch, with your knowledge of physics, do you have any insights as to how technologies might be developed to take advantage of the existence of gravity waves? We are being told that it will enable us to detect things (astronomically speaking) that we could not detect before, because gravity waves go where light waves cannot. But I don’t see how we can technologically take advantage of that, since we (obviously, I think) cannot produce gravity waves of any significance.
Thanks Mitch, that was interesting.
Mitch, with your knowledge of physics, do you have any insights as to how technologies might be developed to take advantage of the existence of gravity waves? We are being told that it will enable us to detect things (astronomically speaking) that we could not detect before, because gravity waves go where light waves cannot. But I don't see how we can technologically take advantage of that, since we (obviously, I think) cannot produce gravity waves of any significance.Exactly. I think it is only useful to detect and study extreme gravitational events. A lot of hoo ha is being made over the confirmation of black holes but we had plenty of evidence for them already by their effects on other things. This is first time seeing them directly, however. The confirmation of General relativity's prediction of gravity waves is the real fruit of this development. However... It occurs to me that another extreme gravitational event is the big bang. So I googled this and what do you know, it looks like scientists have been studying these too.
Brian Greene Explains The Discovery Of Gravitational Waves https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s06_jRK939I Published on Feb 11, 2016 A landmark day for Einstein and our understanding of the universe: the detection of gravitational waves. Brian Greene explains the discovery.