"Finding Beauty in the Darkness" - TTG

"Scientists announced Thursday that they have succeeded in detecting gravitational waves from the violent merging of two black holes in deep space. The detection was hailed as a triumph for a controversial, exquisitely crafted, billion-dollar physics experiment and as confirmation of a key prediction of Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity."

"It will also inaugurate a new era of astronomy in which gravitational waves are tools for studying the most mysterious and exotic objects in the universe, scientists declared at a euphoric news briefing at the National Press Club in Washington."  (WaPo)

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This is a big deal. Judging by the giddiness and wide eyed enthusiasm of the scientists making the announcement today, this is a mind altering, stupendously big deal. They have proven the existence of ripples in the fabric of spacetime. Perhaps some of you understand this in its fullest meaning. Or perhaps some of you, like me, are more akin to a pig looking at a wristwatch… abundant curiosity, but precious little understanding. That lack of understanding does not diminish the greatness of this achievement. In the days to come, I will endeavor to reduce my ignorance. I want to share in the giddiness of those scientists.

I can still share in the pride of this scientific achievement. It brings to mind the Robert Ardrey quote I pasted above. I read “African Genisis” in high school. It was damned near a religious experience. Quite an accomplishment considering I was surrounded by Jesuits at that time. I’m not alone in sensing the momentousness of this accomplishment for mankind. Lawrence M. Krause wrote an insightful opinion piece in the New York Times today.

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"With presidential primaries in full steam, with the country wrapped up in concern about the economy, immigration and terrorism, one might wonder why we should care about the news of a minuscule jiggle produced by an event in a far corner of the universe."

"The answer is simple. While the political displays we have been treated to over the past weeks may reflect some of the worst about what it means to be human, this jiggle, discovered in an exotic physics experiment, reflects the best. Scientists overcame almost insurmountable odds to open a vast new window on the cosmos. And if history is any guide, every time we have built new eyes to observe the universe, our understanding of ourselves and our place in it has been forever altered."  (continue reading at NYT)

TTG

Comments

[turcopolier]

TTG

The Alderson Drive must be "in there" somewhere. pl

[Farooq]

This is the main implication in layman's terms:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600791/gravitational-waves-have-been-discovered-opening-a-new-window-on-the-universe/

".....Gravitational waves will serve as a new tool for probing the secrets of the universe, in addition to more conventional means of observation, like visible light, X-rays, and infrared. The discovery opens “a new window of astronomy,” said Reitze. The researchers say it can be thought of like the end of the silent movie era, but for astronomy. “Up to now we’ve been deaf” to gravitational waves, Reitze said. “We are going to hear more from these things, including things we never expected.”"

P.S: Those of you into space scifi programs and movies do check out "The Expanse" on syfy channel
http://www.syfy.com/theexpanse/episodes

[bth]

So Colonel, could we say then that science is fundamentally improving the human race and that we are not an infinite repetition of some Greek tragedy or comedy?

I would say yes, but then I was a liberal arts major once upon a time.

[The Twisted Genius]

pl,

Oh hell yes!

[Frazier]

Beautiful and intriguing article. Thank you.

[The Twisted Genius]

Farooq,

My son speaks very highly of "The Expanse." I'll have to find a way to watch it without a cable subscription.

[ked]

They've worked long & hard to confirm this bit of Einstein's General Theory... Good! At least we don't have to hear about String Theory for awhile (one hopes). However, turning this into some sort-of Gravity Wave Inferometry Instrument overnight is unlikely. "The curve(ature) gets step at the end." It will take hard effort, time & $$$... is it as important as War Everwhere All the Time? Better than slicing the financial salami yet more finely on Wall St? Let's not be ridiculous.
Yet the promise... The promise of unveiling the mystery of dark energy & dark matter... to understand spooky entanglement at a distance... it's gotta be worth SOMETHING ... just not money at the end of the quarter. We shall see, or maybe not.

[JMH]

You can listen to the collision here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyDcTbR-kEA

[Will]

Waves are a consequence of any field theory. One a source moves, the field changes, but not at a rate faster than the speed of light. So it takes time for the field to change at a far point. If the source oscillates, that is goes back and forth, they you will have waves. This is the principle of radio.

In the electromagnetic field the quantization of the field is the photon. In the strong force, which binds protons, neutrons it is the gluon. And so forth. There is yet no accepted theory of quantum gravity like there are for the other forces.

Sometimes, in quantum mechanics, it just makes more sense to forget physical pictures, and just follow the math to wherever it leads you. Plato said Ideas are the ultimate reality, likewise, math may be the ultimate reality.

[Aleks Braddock Road]

IMO start with the books (first one, "Leviathian Wakes").

[Macgupta123]

"Or perhaps some of you, like me, are more akin to a pig looking at a wristwatch… abundant curiosity, but precious little understanding."

TTG, let me try.

1. All objects with mass have gravity (e.g., see the 18th century Cavendish experiment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavendish_experiment ).

2. Let's not worry about spacetime, relativity, etc., just imagine bodies are surrounded by their gravitational fields which represent their influence of attractive force on other bodies. Weaker far away from them, stronger close to them; and with discernable influence outside the laboratory only for quite massive bodies - asteroids and larger.

3. As a body moves with respect to us, its gravitational field at our position should change. It is usually simply not measurable; but now, for sufficiently massive bodies moving sufficiently violently, we might be able to detect these changes.

4. Well, now we have. Two blackholes of roughly 30 solar masses each, coalesced about a billion light years away, a billion years ago. They were circling each other at some 60% of the speed of light. Scientists were able to measure the very, very, very tiny jiggling this blackhole collision caused on earth.

Now, there is tremendous substance in the parts that perhaps most don't understand, which is how Einstein's theory makes it possible to predict, to compute what should be observed (or to deduce what happened from what was observed) with such extraordinary precision, and in a realm of physical phenomena so far from ordinary experience.

But at its root, that is what it is. Massive celestial bodies far away and long ago leave the traces of their motion via their gravity measurable on earth.

[turcopolier]

Macgupta

IMO one should be careful not to accept self deprecating modesty for actual ignorance. pl

[Babak Makkinejad]

All:

This test, even if validated, does not distinguish between the Theory of Gravity as formulated by Einstein and that formulated by Logunov.

Truth still remains to be discovered.

[Babak Makkinejad]

In the Theory of Gravity as formulated by Einstein, the gravitational field is not a field like the Electromagnetic Field of Maxwell - it is due to the topology of space-time.

The Logunov Theory of Gravity does emulate Maxwell's Theory of Electromagnetic Field with the graviton being the analogue of photon showing up explicitly as a mass term in the Field Equations of Logunov.

For Quantum Mechanics to be consistent, graviton must exist since otherwise one could violate the uncertainty relations of Heisenberg.

But the Einstein Theory of Gravity, which gives rise to Black Holes, cannot furnish such a consistent structure; graviton must be able to escape from Black Holes since outside of Black Holes space-time is flat, planets are going about their orbits in the usual manner etc.

But this contradicts the other consequence of Black Holes, nothing can escape them - or so the theory states.

There is a lot of lovely mathematics there but one cannot let oneself be seduced by Beauty in one's search for Physical Truth.

[BabelFish]

And the Moties will be found some day, I hope.

[BabelFish]

It is very good, TTG. The best since Babylon 5.

[Jack]

TTG, Sir

On the one hand the human in mankind hasn't changed much in millenia. But our intellect and quest for discovery is something wonderful. I share your joy in these leaps. Currently, I am most fascinated by the enormous leaps in discovery in molecular biology. Read up on water bears and their ability to "repair" their damaged DNA if you get a chance.

[Dr. No]

@all

1. I'd have to agree with Col Lang's remark to Macgupta. Einstein's theory puts gravitation on a completely different footing from what MacGupta understands: mass affects the fabric of spacetime (the curvature). If MacGupta's way of thinking was "good enough" no one would have invented the GTR.

2. I'm not competent to judge how seriously Logunov's theory foresees gravitational waves and how well its equations fit the LIGO readings. The scientist announcing the result seemed to think that what was being validated was Einstein's General Theory of Relativity (GTR) to a high degree of precision. Logunov's theory is definitely a minority view.

3. The curious thing is that Einstein's GTR gets validated in a big way, and Quantum has been validated in big ways, but the two theories are no closer to being integrated the one into the other.

[doug]

There had been rumors of this but the fact they have enough data to go public and publish is astonishing and wonderful. BTW, Kip Thorne was my faculty adviser when I was an undergrad transitioning from physics to engineering. He recommended that I consider a small, startup company called Intel after graduation. Sadly, I didn't.

[William R. Cumming]

Some may learn yet to surf the gravity waves?

[Ken Roberts]

Babak, others ... Thank you for mention of Logunov, whose relativisitic theory of gravity (RTG) I had not heard of previously. I am a novice in the field, so have no opinion re "which is right". But wish to share this resource link, 250-ish page book by Logunov summarizing RTG, published 2002.

http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0210005

One test method that Logunov suggests between GRT and RTG, is examining energy release from accretion of matter falling into a supermassive object. See page 7.

Apropos of this: "There is a lot of lovely mathematics there but one cannot let oneself be seduced by Beauty in one's search for Physical Truth."

Yes, but ... Hundreds of times we have observed that the mathematics can be a guide to improved understanding. I suppect we may be speaking the wrong dialect of math, and that Nature is a geometer not an algebraist -- but a few hundred years more post-Newton should suffice us to correct our course.

[Allen Thomson]

The discovery paper, which is quite well written and (mostly) not too demanding technically, is at

https://dcc.ligo.org/public/0122/P150914/014/LIGO-P150914_Detection_of_GW150914.pdf

BTW, the LIGO interferometers are fairly direct descendants of the much smaller instrument used in the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiments that preceded special relativity. SR, in turn, preceded general relativity and its prediction of gravitational waves.

[terze]

Oh boy... fully swallowed it, heh?

This so-called experiment is just a big fallacy that relieved you of several bio- of taxpayer's cash. Needless to say, there is no such things like "gravity waves" nor is space-time a "fabric", nor can there be any "ripple" there.

They just fudged this for the 100th anniversary of Einstein's flawed theory to prop up their bad science. None of it makes any sense from the POV of real science and scientific method.

To the guy above who mumbles about quantum equations and Maxwell - Maxwell was the very first guy who diverted from science and 9invented a fraud, by pulling "virtual particles" out of his most-valuable so he could fudge his flawed maths. Ever since, there are layers over layers of fraudulent theories built on top of each other - be it "gravity waves" or the whole quantum theoter, "black holes", "dark matter" or whatever fiction of your choice. None of that is science, none of it is real.

[Babak Makkinejad]

And we have watched as funding for Theoretical Physics being wasted on String Theory and its variants for over 30 years with nothing to show for it.

It is clear that protons are not made of Strings....

[Dubhaltach]

In reply to BabelFish 11 February 2016 at 11:53 PM

Only if something along the lines of the solution in The Gripping Hand can be guaranteed that warrior caste gave me the creeps