Said astrophysicist Michael Lam, quoted in
"In a major discovery, scientists say space-time churns like a choppy sea/The mind-bending finding suggests that everything around us is constantly being roiled by low-frequency gravitational waves" by Joel Achenbach and Victoria Jaggard (WaPo).
The simultaneous release of papers from far-flung and competitive teams using similar methodology came only after some scientific diplomacy that ensured no group tried to scoop the rest of the astrophysical community.
“We’ve been on a mission for the last 15 years to find a low-pitch hum of gravitational waves resounding throughout the universe and washing through our galaxy to warp space-time in a measurable way,” NANOGrav chair Stephen Taylor of Vanderbilt University said at a news briefing Tuesday. “We’re very happy to announce that our hard work has paid off.”...
[T]he newly announced waves are not one-shot wonders, and theorists are noodling the many potential explanations for why the cosmic sea ripples in such a fashion....
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19 comments:
We're gonna need a bigger boat.
Now you can question police radars.
This isn't breaking news to anyone who took Owsley acid in '68.
Holy really big space radars.Quantum radars. Way out there past the jailed belt.
There must be some extremely large dense objects out there,( not you puddin'), in various places fighting with each other. mmm
Kate nails it again. :)
Tensor-based car loudspeakers could be the next thing.
"and the now-defunct Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico."
Defunct. That's one way of putting it.
I wonder if these gravity wave sources will screw up the search for gravity waves from the Big Bang?
Elegant science, BTW. I look forward to reading the papers.
Original Mike said...
"and the now-defunct Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico."
"Defunct. That's one way of putting it.
I wonder if these gravity wave sources will screw up the search for gravity waves from the Big Bang?"
Gravity certainly did a number on it. That and lack of maintenance.
“We’ve been on a mission for the last 15 years ...". “We’re very happy to announce that our hard work has paid off.”
I am guessing he means that his retirement portfolio is doing quite well.
No wonder I feel queasy all the time.
Physics long ago entered the "big government" global project phase. Scientists have answered all known easy questions, so discoveries now require spending billions for the James Webb telescope or CERN or the gravity wave machine. Arecibo fell into disrepair because it found what it could find and finished its mission (IMO)...it had even been used for SETI...
LIGO gravity observatory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIGO
CERN: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN
James Webb telescope: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope
Arecibo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_Telescope
Discussion of The End of Physics
(1994) https://www.amazon.com/End-Physics-Myth-Unified-Theory/dp/0465019765
(2019) https://physics.mit.edu/news/have-we-come-to-the-end-of-physics/
So we really are just a bobber in the sea. Should inspire a Sea Shanty
Just for fun I queried Chat GPT what could gravity waves in theory be used for if the technology were sufficiently advanced. It replied that it would be useful for large bandwidth data transmission. Now let's get that figured out and maybe we could find evidence of aliens. The speed of the transmission would not be any faster than light but it would contain more data so there's that. 32k resolution on your TV and far more detailed images from satellites. Let's spend a couple of dozen billion researching that. The government pisses away that kind of money annually so might as well divert part of that spending to advancing science and technology.
I learned on the Curiosity Now channel that gravity seeks rest. Kind of why water seeks it's own level (a state of rest). Add to that that electricity seeks the path of least resistance and you have to wonder, why is the Universe so damn lazy?
That should put to bed the notion that CO2 is the thermostat of Earth.
please comment on the word noodling: as in:
theorists are noodling the many potential explanations for why the cosmic sea ripples in such a fashion....
in Oklahoma, noodling means catching a catfish with naked hands.
the Cambridge dictionary definition is: to do or think about something without giving it full or serious attention:
is this a new way to use that word?
I know that in astrophysics, there is a word spaghettification (rip into threads like sphaghetti).
So why all the food words being used in astronomy?
Gravity = spacetime. If there are waves then something or somethings are moving enough to cause space time to ripple.
The ripples are moving spacetime. Could we use those ripples to travel through space?
That explains this persistent nausea.
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