View Full Version : Einstein's theory of gravitational waves confirmed.
http://news.yahoo.com/einsteins-gravitational-waves-detected-scientific-milestone-153535473.html
As a science buff I find this way cool. It's pretty incredible how far we've come technology wise imo.
If a mod could quote the narrative in the article and paste it into my post that would be great? I can't seem to get it to work from my phone.
Sent from my XT1585 using Tapatalk
From Reuters:
Einstein's gravitational waves detected in landmark discovery
Reuters By Will Dunham and Scott Malone 49 minutes ago
By Will Dunham and Scott Malone
WASHINGTON/CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (Reuters) - Scientists for the first time have detected gravitational waves, ripples in space and time hypothesized by Albert Einstein a century ago, in a landmark discovery announced on Thursday that opens a new window for studying the cosmos.
The researchers said they identified gravitational waves coming from two distant black holes - extraordinarily dense objects whose existence also was foreseen by Einstein - that orbited one another, spiraled inward and smashed together at high speed to form a single, larger black hole.
The waves were unleashed by the collision of the black holes, one of them 29 times the mass of the sun and the other 36 times the solar mass, located 1.3 billion light years from Earth, the researchers said.
"Ladies and gentlemen, we have detected gravitational waves. We did it," said California Institute of Technology physicist David Reitze, triggering applause at a packed news conference in Washington.
"It's been a very long road, but this is just the beginning," Louisiana State University physicist Gabriela Gonzalez told the news conference, hailing the discovery as opening a new era in astronomy.
The scientific milestone was achieved using a pair of giant laser detectors in the United States, located in Louisiana and Washington state, capping a decades-long quest to find these waves.
"The colliding black holes that produced these gravitational waves created a violent storm in the fabric of space and time, a storm in which time speeded up, and slowed down, and speeded up again, a storm in which the shape of space was bent in this way and that way," Caltech physicist Kip Thorne said.
The scientists first detected the waves last Sept. 14.
The two instruments, working in unison, are called the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). They detected remarkably small vibrations from the gravitational waves as they passed through the Earth. The scientists converted the wave signal into audio waves and listened to the sounds of the black holes merging.
"We're actually hearing them go thump in the night," Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Matthew Evans said. "There's a very visceral connection to this observation."
'A NEW SENSE'
"We are really witnessing the opening of a new tool for doing astronomy," MIT astrophysicist Nergis Mavalvala said in an interview. "We have turned on a new sense. We have been able to see and now we will be able to hear as well."
While opening a door to new ways to observe the universe, scientists said gravitational waves should help them gain knowledge about enigmatic objects like black holes and neutron stars. The waves also may provide insight into the mysterious nature of the very early universe.
The scientists said that because gravitational waves are so radically different from electromagnetic waves they expect them to reveal big surprises about the universe.
Everything we knew until now about the cosmos stemmed from electromagnetic waves such as radio waves, visible light, infrared light, X-rays and gamma rays. Because such waves encounter interference as they travel across the universe, they can tell only part of the story.
Gravitational waves experience no such barriers, meaning they offer a wealth of additional information. Black holes, for example, do not emit light, radio waves and the like, but can be studied via gravitational waves.
Einstein in 1916 proposed the existence of gravitational waves as an outgrowth of his ground-breaking general theory of relativity, which depicted gravity as a distortion of space and time triggered by the presence of matter. Until now scientists had found only indirect evidence of their existence, beginning in the 1970s.
Scientists sounded positively giddy over the discovery.
Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory*…
"This is the holy grail of science," said Rochester Institute of Technology astrophysicist Carlos Lousto.
"The last time anything like this happened was in 1888 when Heinrich Hertz detected the radio waves that had been predicted by James Clerk Maxwell’s field-equations of electromagnetism in 1865," added Durham University physicist Tom McLeish.
Abhay Ashtekar, director of Penn State University's Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos, said heavy celestial objects bend space and time but because of the relative weakness of the gravitational force the effect is miniscule except from massive and dense bodies like black holes and neutron stars.
A black hole is a region of space so packed with matter that not even photons of light can escape the force of gravity. Neutron stars are small, about the size of a city, but are extremely heavy, the compact remains of a larger star that died in a supernova explosion.
The National Science Foundation, an independent agency of the U.S. government, provided about $1.1 billion in funding for the research over 40 years.
Done from a Galaxy S5 far, far away using thumbs and Tapatalk...
WASHINGTON/CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (Reuters) - Scientists for the first time have detected gravitational waves, ripples in space and time hypothesized by Albert Einstein a century ago, in a landmark discovery announced on Thursday that opens a new window for studying the cosmos.
The researchers said they identified gravitational waves coming from two distant black holes - extraordinarily dense objects whose existence also was foreseen by Einstein - that orbited one another, spiraled inward and smashed together at high speed to form a single, larger black hole.
The waves were unleashed by the collision of the black holes, one of them 29 times the mass of the sun and the other 36 times the solar mass, located 1.3 billion light years from Earth, the researchers said.
"Ladies and gentlemen, we have detected gravitational waves. We did it," said California Institute of Technology physicist David Reitze, triggering applause at a packed news conference in Washington.
"It's been a very long road, but this is just the beginning," Louisiana State University physicist Gabriela Gonzalez told the news conference, hailing the discovery as opening a new era in astronomy.
The scientific milestone was achieved using a pair of giant laser detectors in the United States, located in Louisiana and Washington state, capping a decades-long quest to find these waves.
"The colliding black holes that produced these gravitational waves created a violent storm in the fabric of space and time, a storm in which time speeded up, and slowed down, and speeded up again, a storm in which the shape of space was bent in this way and that way," Caltech physicist Kip Thorne said.
The scientists first detected the waves last Sept. 14.
The two instruments, working in unison, are called the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). They detected remarkably small vibrations from the gravitational waves as they passed through the Earth. The scientists converted the wave signal into audio waves and listened to the sounds of the black holes merging.
At the news conference, they played an audio recording of this: a low rumbling pierced by chirps.
"We're actually hearing them go thump in the night," Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Matthew Evans said. "There's a very visceral connection to this observation."
'A NEW SENSE'
"We are really witnessing the opening of a new tool for doing astronomy," MIT astrophysicist Nergis Mavalvala said in an interview. "We have turned on a new sense. We have been able to see and now we will be able to hear as well."
While opening a door to new ways to observe the universe, scientists said gravitational waves should help them gain knowledge about enigmatic objects like black holes and neutron stars. The waves also may provide insight into the mysterious nature of the very early universe.
The scientists said that because gravitational waves are so radically different from electromagnetic waves they expect them to reveal big surprises about the universe.
Everything we knew until now about the cosmos stemmed from electromagnetic waves such as radio waves, visible light, infrared light, X-rays and gamma rays. Because such waves encounter interference as they travel across the universe, they can tell only part of the story.
Gravitational waves experience no such barriers, meaning they offer a wealth of additional information. Black holes, for example, do not emit light, radio waves and the like, but can be studied via gravitational waves.
Einstein in 1916 proposed the existence of gravitational waves as an outgrowth of his ground-breaking general theory of relativity, which depicted gravity as a distortion of space and time triggered by the presence of matter. Until now scientists had found only indirect evidence of their existence, beginning in the 1970s.
Scientists sounded positively giddy over the discovery.
"This is the holy grail of science," said Rochester Institute of Technology astrophysicist Carlos Lousto.
"The last time anything like this happened was in 1888 when Heinrich Hertz detected the radio waves that had been predicted by James Clerk Maxwell’s field-equations of electromagnetism in 1865," added Durham University physicist Tom McLeish.
Abhay Ashtekar, director of Penn State University's Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos, said heavy celestial objects bend space and time but because of the relative weakness of the gravitational force the effect is miniscule except from massive and dense bodies like black holes and neutron stars.
A black hole is a region of space so packed with matter that not even photons of light can escape the force of gravity. Neutron stars are small, about the size of a city, but are extremely heavy, the compact remains of a larger star that died in a supernova explosion.
Moose-Knuckle
02-12-16, 02:07
I geeked out over this while listening 80's post-punk . . .
FromMyColdDeadHand
02-12-16, 08:01
I still think that they are going to come back and say, "Opps, we didn't see what we thought we saw." I thought they were measuring things at 10^-19m, which is smaller than the size of an atom, but I saw that the design limit is 10^-21m.
I really want to see if they can figure out why gravity is so weak. Is it just leaking in as a phenomena of another dimension and how this helps with Grand Unified Theory.
Outlander Systems
02-12-16, 08:21
Bad...ASS!!!! Thanks for sharing this.
If memory serves, this is the second (and more important) theory of Einstein that has been confirmed... to a degree. I hesitate to say proven as yet.
To underscore Einstein's brilliance, he made these calculations almost a century ago devoid of the technology we now enjoy. There is a reason he is held as the gold standard to "genius".
I thought the Higgs-boson particle was the "holy-grail"? Guess not...
If memory serves, this is the second (and more important) theory of Einstein that has been confirmed... to a degree. I hesitate to say proven as yet.
To underscore Einstein's brilliance, he made these calculations almost a century ago devoid of the technology we now enjoy. There is a reason he is held as the gold standard to "genius".
I thought the Higgs-boson particle was the "holy-grail"? Guess not...
And the kicker is, he was weak at math (compared to many of his contemporaries) and it was others who often "did the math" on his ideas to see what they would find. He was help back by his "poor" math skills it's been said. I tend to think it was likely his strong point in that he had to tap into his imagination and creativity to develop his ideas leaving the minutia to others.
And the kicker is, he was weak at math (compared to many of his contemporaries) and it was others who often "did the math" on his ideas to see what they would find. He was help back by his "poor" math skills it's been said. I tend to think it was likely his strong point in that he had to tap into his imagination and creativity to develop his ideas leaving the minutia to others.
Weak at math compared to other physics minded folks... certainly not when compared to me (or my wife the engineer!)
But you are correct. He had an unparalleled sense about things that he could imagine quite well and yet had difficulty in properly articulating the thought. The relativity idea was originally his but arguably first reached mathematically by a British physicist IIRC (they were both pursuing the idea separately and reached the conclusion within days of each other-- again, arguably). The British guy relinquished the credit to Einstein without quarrel. The British guy, again IIRC, was a much superior mathematician. I think he was a math guy first, physicist second or something like that and was able to solve the equation much faster than Einstein.
Weak at math compared to other physics minded folks... certainly not when compared to me (or my wife the engineer!)
Per above in brackets "compared to many of his contemporaries"
But you are correct. He had an unparalleled sense about things that he could imagine quite well and yet had difficulty in properly articulating the thought. The relativity idea was originally his but arguably first reached mathematically by a British physicist IIRC (they were both pursuing the idea separately and reached the conclusion within days of each other-- again, arguably). The British guy relinquished the credit to Einstein without quarrel. The British guy, again IIRC, was a much superior mathematician. I think he was a math guy first, physicist second or something like that and was able to solve the equation much faster than Einstein.
I suspect, having known some theorists in other areas who are/were also weak (compared to contemporaries) in the math for which they hypothesize. The way I survived courses like biochem, molecular physiology, etc was to get a handle on the "bog picture" of what was happening as my math was by gard my weakest area. Not being able to rely on "the math" forced me to "get it" often at levels and in ways others did not, people who always got far higher grades in those topics than I did. That it was his not being a math guy that was in fact his edge that forced him to use conceptual approaches vs pure math.
We agree...
One discussion I had regarding coaching/managing in baseball. The idea being that many times the player who had natural physical gifts in playing the game had a harder time of managing or coaching because things came so easy they often didn't "get it". Then take a guy who didn't have those gifts (of course, relative to the superstar; to succeed in MLB to even make the show, you have physical gifts already), had to work that much harder and think well about how to succeed... they tend to make the best coaches.
Forgetting a moment the seedy and egotistical side of Pete Rose for instance. He didn't have the best "gifts". But he worked his butt off and did so for a very long time. As a manager, he had an unusually uncanny grasp of tactical game situations within his head and could play that game of chess thinking ahead 5-6 moves unlike few others. However, ego and gambling was his downfall.
My wife's best friend's father is the retired chief of rad/nuke safety at a major university. His PhD in physics is in something to do with electromagnetism. For fun he solves "unsolvable" math problems; or, problems that 99% of people cannot solve.
He said his PhD adviser and mentor was a student of Einstein at Princeton, and had a shit ton of stories about Einstein. Very cool to be that close to arguably one of the top 10 scientists of all time.
My wife's best friend's father is the retired chief of rad/nuke safety at a major university. His PhD in physics is in something to do with electromagnetism. For fun he solves "unsolvable" math problems; or, problems that 99% of people cannot solve.
He said his PhD adviser and mentor was a student of Einstein at Princeton, and had a shit ton of stories about Einstein. Very cool to be that close to arguably one of the top 10 scientists of all time.
It has bee said many times, he was not a terribly nice guy socially speaking and could be a bit of the jerk. No group I'm aware of would ever list him as anything but in the top ten, often top three of all time. Newton one of the few who could give him a run for the $. When he couldn't find a way to explain some of his ideas, he invented calculus to help him explain. WTF?
FromMyColdDeadHand
02-12-16, 14:18
I like how The Economist explains science stuff:
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21692851-gravitational-waves-at-LIGO-century-after-Albert-Einstein-predicted-them
Covers most of what I have seen and goes into 'what it means'.
If memory serves, this is the second (and more important) theory of Einstein that has been confirmed... to a degree. I hesitate to say proven as yet.
To underscore Einstein's brilliance, he made these calculations almost a century ago devoid of the technology we now enjoy. There is a reason he is held as the gold standard to "genius".
I thought the Higgs-boson particle was the "holy-grail"? Guess not...
I think you're using the non-scientific definition of the word "theory" in a scientific context.
Scientific theories are not proven.
So when do I get my death ray?
FromMyColdDeadHand
02-13-16, 00:06
So when do I get my death ray?
In some parallel universe, you already have......
Moose-Knuckle
02-13-16, 01:19
So when do I get my death ray?
Right after the U.S. government releases Nikola Telsa's notes and work ups on it.
I think you're using the non-scientific definition of the word "theory" in a scientific context.
Scientific theories are not proven.
Well golly gee willikers and shut my mouth! No s--- sherlock! You see, I thought I was having a casual conversation amongst layman using "common understanding " language in an Internet gun forum. I didn't realize that I was writing a formal synopsis in "Science" magazine.
Thank you for the enlightenment!
Well golly gee willikers and shut my mouth! No s--- sherlock! You see, I thought I was having a casual conversation amongst layman using "common understanding " language in an Internet gun forum. I didn't realize that I was writing a formal synopsis in "Science" magazine.
Thank you for the enlightenment!
I use the term theory 'cause I'm too lazy to write hypothesis every time. :neo:
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