I remember learning about the LIGO experiment back when it was being built, a decade ago, and at the time it seemed so amazing: a giant tube of vacuum, sealed underground and so sensitive that it could detect animals walking nearby, listening to the moving and twisting of space itself… I guess we're finally seeing that with immense human ingenuity and the most careful of engineering, the universe will offer its secrets up to us.
This also means that between LIGO and ATLAS/CMS, the last few years have screwed in the final screws on two of the big physics advances of the 20th century: quantum field theory and general relativity are now both experimentally complete, and both look nearly unassailed in their correctness. The next steps for physics look increasingly abstruse: understanding the exceptional cases, like black holes, holography, and the fundamentally computational form of the universe. It's an exciting time, and it looks more and more like we're close to the very bottom, since we have to look so far now to find anything outside our models.
>It's an exciting time, and it looks more and more like we're close to the very bottom, since we have to look so far now to find anything outside our models.
For what it's worth we thought the same thing a little over 100 years ago. We just had to figure out a few pesky things like blackbody radiation and physics would be all wrapped up.
This is a popular thinking, but actually there were people like Kelvin, Jeans, Rayleigh, Planck and many others who did not get famous who knew there were problems with the theory. In no point in time of modern science there was widespread opinion that "it's mostly done".
"fundamentally computational form of the universe", you must be a seth lloyd guy :)
But yes, it's the fringes that we'll find new physics. It's not unlike the late 19th century when newtonian + E&M seemed to account for all there was to know.
There hardest thing in fundamental physics right now is to know what questions to ask. We've got answers that work for a lot of the biggest ones that the last 100 years have been spent developing and exploring.
Well we've accounted for about 5% of the universe--the stuff we know about.
Dark matter (about 25%) seems to only interact gravitationally, which means that we've just, today, proven that we have an instrument that could possibly observe it directly. To date, all our evidence for dark matter is indirect--observing the otherwise unexplained behavior of normal matter. Today is the gravitational equivalent to Galileo pointing his first telescope at the night sky.
Dark energy (about 70%) still seems to be a total mystery.
And of course there is our inability to reconcile quantum mechanics with gravity. With each further proof of the correctness of each of those theories, the mystery of their apparent incompatibility deepens.
All of these factors lead me to believe that we may still have a long way to go in our understanding of the physical universe. I hope I'm right.
This is also why I believe it is so important to pursue nuclear energy. If we do invent further theories and experiments, it's likely that they will require even greater energy levels than we can create now, and potentially imply even greater dangers. If we can't learn to manage nuclear physics in a practical, routine way, we'll never have a hope of going beyond it (if indeed there is a "beyond.")
How do we know dark matter is some mysterious form of matter and not just small distributed particles (gas or solid) that are beyond our ability to detect? Do we have proof of a specific, exotic, non-atomic matter?
Scientists are pretty sure that dark matter is not just regular gas and dust because the amount required to create the gravity we see, would be visible. It would block or reflect a lot of the nearby starlight.
Just on the back of an envelope: If we assume the percentages in my post above apply to an individual galaxy, then there has to be 5x as much dark matter mass as lit mass. There's no way you could have 5x as much gas and dust in a galaxy as stars, and not see it.
For comparison, the sun makes up about 99.8% of the Solar System mass (500x as much mass as all the planets, dust, etc. combined).
That always confused me. We have an Oort cloud, whose members we cannot resolve very well/at all. Why do we assume only our star has such a thing? If all stars did, that isn't enough mass to explain dark matter?
Well for that explanation to scale up, the Oort Cloud would have to total about 5x the mass of the sun. That would have a pretty good chance of perturbing the orbits of all the planets, and vice versa.
A bit of Googling tells me that the current estimate of its mass is in the order of 5-10 Earth masses--not nearly enough to explain dark matter.
The total mass of the Oort cloud is guessed at (3×10^25 kg), or about five Earth masses. With dark matter, we are talking about roughly 5.6x the amount of the total solar system mass. The Oort could would need to be about 371,691x more massive than it is.
Could be an anthropic explanation for that. In a solar system with a hypothetically-"normal" Oort cloud, comets and debris from the cloud might wipe out life on the habitable inner planets every few hundred million years, never allowing it to advance to human-like levels.
So we might be here only because our solar system is surrounded by an unusual amount of nothing.
But we also look at a lot of other stars in the sky. If every single one (or almost every single one) had a massive 5x mass Oort cloud around it, it would affect the light we see from that star.
Consider that we can currently detect differences in luminosity small enough to tell whether an Earth-size planet is passing between us and the star. A 5x mass Oort cloud would be thousands of times more mass than that. It would have noticeable effect on luminosity.
And, while our sun has an Oort cloud, there are a lot of stars out there that probably don't--too small, too big, too hot, too young, too old, etc.
Google "sun percentage mass solar system" and the highlighted answer is "By far most of the solar system's mass is in the Sun itself: somewhere between 99.8 and 99.9 percent."
Please don't just disagree when you don't know what you are talking about.
I think you've misinterpreted my post. The "No" was in response to this:
> That always confused me. We have an Oort cloud, whose members we cannot resolve very well/at all. Why do we assume only our star has such a thing? If all stars did, that isn't enough mass to explain dark matter?
No, that isn't enough mass to explain dark matter, since it's only 0.1% to 0.2% of the mass of the solar system.
The text I quoted was in complete agreement with what you and others have posted. I was pointing out that the questioner's point had already been answered.
Ok, that's just a really confusing way of communicating, nobody is going to puzzle that out when the obvious way of looking at your response is disagreement with the grandparent.
Dark matter was "invented" because there wasn't enough observable mass in galactic-scale objects to account for their behavior. In other words, they acted like they had more mass than we could observe. Dark matter is basically characterized by not responding on the electromagnetic spectrum, which is what we use to do these observations. Since all the matter we know of generally does respond on this spectrum, that's why dark matter is considered to be "exotic".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Cluster is fairly good evidence that dark matter isn't just unobserved regular matter. In these massive cluster wide collisions the dark matter seems to have "kept going" (you see very strong gravitational lensing where there appears to be nothing) while regular matter that we know is subject to forces besides gravity collided together, slowed down, and became very hot.
Scientists are not prone to falling back on explaining observations via postulating a new kind of matter we can scarcely observe. Ever since the first indications of "dark matter" scientists have been attempting to explain it as something more familiar to us, some kind of atomic matter or some-such, maybe gas or dust or lots of planets or dark stars or something. At every single turn they've been stymied, and instead of eliminating the idea of dark matter as an ethereal particle they've instead eliminated other possibilities.
Don't look at the current theory of dark matter (weakly interacting massive particles) as some hare-brained scheme that scientists thought up, instead look at it as the hard-fought victor of numerous observational challenges. Dark matter is the theory that survived. We tried explaining things a zillion other ways (gas clouds, compact objects, neutrinos) and those theories just didn't match the observations. There are also a few exceptional circumstances (such as the bullet cluster) that indicate very strongly that dark matter is something different than either gas clouds or stuff like stars and planets, because in the bullet cluster we can observe the gas and the stars and planets and the mass, and each of them are in different places because each of them follow different rules when it comes to interacting during a galactic cluster collision.
An underground device sensitive enough to detect animals walking around could be useful for other things... (from ecology research to large-scale surveillance)
> quantum field theory and general relativity are now both experimentally complete, and both look nearly unassailed in their correctness
Well, we know that both theories are "wrong" in the sense that they give nonsense answers if you ask them the wrong questions. It's just that all of those questions are well beyond our ability to test experimentally.
> And then the ringing stopped as the two holes coalesced into a single black hole, a trapdoor in space with the equivalent mass of 62 suns. All in a fifth of a second, Earth time.
Am I reading this correctly, that shortly after the detector came online we just happened to observe the exact moment a billion years ago that two black holes collided?
Was that extremely coincidental? Or do these events happen all the time, and so if it wasn't those two black holes it would be two others?
> Was that extremely coincidental? Or do these events happen all the time, and so if it wasn't those two black holes it would be two others?
From the article, no one knows: "Black holes, the even-more-extreme remains of dead stars, could be expected to do the same, but nobody knew if they existed in pairs or how often they might collide. If they did, however, the waves from the collision would be far louder and lower pitched than those from neutron stars."
The predictions for the LIGO detection rate are very poor. They're based on a sample of just a handful of binary pulsars observed in our Galaxy, which would produce NS-NS mergers. The BH-BH merger rate is almost totally unconstrained, although it is generally thought to be less than the NS-NS merger rate. So the fact that a BH-BH merger was the first detection, and the fact that it was detected so soon after the sensitivity increases is evidence that the BH-BH merger rate is probably somewhat higher than expected. But we won't know for sure until LIGO detects more events and the rate can be better constrained. Sometimes you do just get lucky.
I should add that there are lots of selection biases and educated guesses in all of this, too. The signal from BH-BH mergers is louder and easier to detect from larger distances. At the same time, NSs are probably more common than BHs, but it's not really clear whether there are more NS-NS binaries than BH-BH binaries because NSs receive kicks from the supernova when they are born but BHs (probably) do not. This may have the effect of blowing apart many nascent NS-NS binaries but leaving the BH-BH binaries intact.
It's not a counting experiment, which makes the calculation of a false positive rate somewhat harder. The key for LIGO is certainly that they saw the signal coincident at two stations, far apart.
The detection uncertainty is a separate matter from the predicted rate. Sure, if you had a strong prior that GWs should be detected once in a billion years, then you would want a better detection. But as it is the priors on the detection are pretty weak and this is totally consistent with what is expected.
Others have answered other aspects of this, but as I understand it, it is not the case that we don't know how rare they (BH-BH events) are because they are so rare, we don't know how rare they are, because we don't have a really good model for them. So, we don't know how often we'd expect to detect them, once we had a detector.
From the paper: "To account for the search background noise varying across the target signal space, candidate and background events are divided into three search classes based on template length. The right panel of Fig. 4 shows the background for the search class of GW150914. The GW150914 detection- statistic value of ρˆ_c = 23.6 is larger than any background event, so only an upper bound can be placed on its false alarm rate. Across the three search classes this bound is 1 in 203 000 years. This translates to a false alarm probability < 2 × 10^−7, corresponding to 5.1σ. A second, independent matched-filter analysis that uses a different method for estimating the significance of its events [85,86], also detected GW150914 with identical signal parameters and consistent significance" (https://dcc.ligo.org/LIGO-P150914/public). Take a look at Figure 4 as well.
In case you'd like to dig deeper, the 85 and 86 mentioned are:
[85] K. Cannon et al., Astrophys. J. 748, 136 (2012).
[86] S. Privitera, S. R. P. Mohapatra, P. Ajith, K. Cannon, N. Fotopoulos, M. A. Frei, C. Hanna, A. J. Weinstein, and J. T. Whelan, Phys. Rev. D 89, 024003 (2014),
But gravitational waves are a phenomenon without equivalent. Nothing like that had been observed before. (Am I wrong?) W̶h̶e̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶L̶H̶C̶ ̶d̶e̶t̶e̶c̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶H̶i̶g̶g̶s̶,̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶e̶x̶a̶m̶p̶l̶e̶,̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶y̶ ̶h̶a̶d̶ ̶b̶e̶e̶n̶ ̶f̶i̶n̶d̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶p̶a̶r̶t̶i̶c̶l̶e̶s̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶m̶i̶l̶l̶i̶o̶n̶s̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶m̶a̶n̶-̶y̶e̶a̶r̶s̶,̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶ s̶o̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶s̶t̶a̶n̶d̶s̶ ̶ t̶o̶ ̶r̶e̶a̶s̶o̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶y̶ ̶o̶n̶l̶y̶ ̶n̶e̶e̶d̶e̶d̶ ̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶e̶v̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶c̶e̶r̶t̶a̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶y̶'̶v̶e̶ ̶f̶o̶u̶n̶d̶ ̶ i̶t̶.̶ Why are the researchers certain that their equipment and methodology results can be trusted to such high degree, if there ever has been one positive measurement?
This comment is making the page formatting gross. Those special characters with the strike-throughs make the entire page over-wide, thus requiring horizontal scrolling to read comments.
The browser layout engine should break on the spaces (Chrome does). They are just normal spaces, the combining character should have no effect. You have a bug somewhere.
Also, I cannot edit nor delete it now, so tough luck!
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Because of the shape of the event, detection in two places, and more importantly, it matching the signature of the theoretical event extremely closely (especially the ringing at the end)
Isn't the point though that the gravitational wave observatories are looking specifically for "black swans" rather than just observing swans generally. So when a swan with a lower reflectivity is observed then it now fits the "black swan" profile. Could be just a swan covered in soot; you need more data to show that this swan is always black or that the lower reflectivity wasn't caused by a measuring anomaly, etc.
TFA says "they had heard and recorded the sound of two black holes colliding a billion light-years away" and "1.2 billion years ago".
And from the paper: "The source lies at a luminosity distance of 410+160-180 Mpcc corresponding to a redshift z=0.09+0.03-0.04.". (https://dcc.ligo.org/LIGO-P150914/public) Which corresponds to 1.337+0.522-0.587 billion ly (or between 750.2 million and 1.859 billion ly).
Looks like there are roughly three million galaxies within a billion light years. Seems like lots of space for black hole pairs to live in. I suppose over the coming years, these gravity wave observatories will nail down just how common they are.
So that's wayyyyyyy outside our galaxy? Any idea how many galaxies fit into a 1 billion ly sphere around the milky way? I'm guessing a shit ton, which makes the detection of a bh merger seem more realistic to me.
It was mentioned during the press conference today that gravitational waves are not affected by interstellar/intergalactic dust the same way light is. In theory, once our detectors are good enough we should be able to use gravitational wave astronomy to peer all the way back to the big bang!
This would be true in a static universe, but, during the 1.2 billion years the waves have been traveling, the universe was experiencing accelerating expansion.
For example, the edge of the observable universe is about 46.5 lightyears away, while the universe is thought to be 13.8 billion years.
I recall reading some years ago that gravitational wave would be used to prove multiverse theory. How would that scale compared to bh-bh or ns-ns mergers?
Also, have read today that this discovery backs inflationary theory, how so?
It seems highly unlikely that they could say a specific bh-bh merger was the cause. It seems implied they are triangulating the source, with two detectors?
AFAIK no multiverse theory has yet been put forth that is experimentally testable (even in theory given infinite time, energy etc.) So it's not a proper (falsifiable) scientific theory at present, merely a (in my opinion wild) conjecture.
You are suggesting possible future events that would provide evidence for a multiverse. That does not make something a falsifiable theory.
Analogy: it could happen that tomorrow Jesus Christ descends from the heavens and brings the day of reckoning. That would prove Christianity to be true, but the fact that this could happen does not make Christianity a falsifiable theory.
A falsifiable theory is a theory that predicts something that we can (in theory) measure today (possibly requiring infinite resources etc).
Your second example (which is not a multiverse theory at all) is actually a good example of a falsifiable theory. People have calculated [1] that if spacetime was folded back onto itself at even just a single point, it would leave a distinct signature in the cosmic microwave background. We do not observe this signature, so we are pretty sure spacetime does not fold back onto itself.
Ok. What if spacetime folds back onto itself over a very long distance? Wouldn't that be (viewed locally, with our limited instruments) as if another version of spacetime touches upon our version of spacetime?
Physics will always be based on observations. Consciousness is fundamentally hinged TO observation. I'd argue that the way your brain works is more fundamental to reality than the physics causing a Mhz of conduction throughout your synapses. In summary, all bullshit theories are possible in spirit of deceit. For why should good senses be wasted on a cohesive system when the mind is simply a slave to its own devices?
> no multiverse theory has yet been put forth that is experimentally testable
Just to be clear here; that's because there is no theory for a multiverse. Not yet, anyways. Nobody has put one forth yet. When you hear "multiverse" come out of physicist's mouth, it's because it's a concept indirectly related to other theories. The current popular theory which involves a multiverse is string theory. When string theorists do the math, there is some evidence that a multiverse is possible.
However, that doesn't mean much. Even if string theory was correct and little strings are really the fundamental component of everything in the universe, the multiverse part of string theory could still be wrong. The theory isn't reliant on it, it just doesn't forbid it.
The source isn't the greatest, but it shows that we can look at the CMB for indirect evidence. With higher resolution scanning years in the future, such a theory may be testable. I only mention this because the way your comment reads, it sounds like you're saying a multiverse would be inherently untestable.
Well, the number of solar-mass black holes in our galaxy is about 10^8. Since black holes form from stars, you can assume the probablity of having binaries is probably related to the probablity of having binary systems in stars, which is high. And the distance to the event is several megaparsecs (much bigger than our galaxy). The fact that they detected two 30 solar mass black holes coalescing 2 days after their sensitivity upgrades says that they almost certainly have had other, less pretty, detections in the few months they've been running their detectors for. Or they should go buy some lottery tickets.
Typically one would assume that it was not coincidental and then adjust the bounds for how often we expect the event occurs based on observations, or lack thereof.
But he neglected to mention the error bars on this, which AFAIK are huge at least for BH-BH mergers. Every time we built a new instrument, we saw something new, whether in astrophysics, or nuclear physics, or particle physics. Maybe the BH-BH rate is much higher than expected.
>> that shortly after the detector came online we just happened to observe the exact moment a billion years ago that two black holes collided?
Counterintuitive, but yes. Because it happened billions of years ago, it happened a long long way away. The sphere of objects billions of years away/ago is far larger than those closer to us. So such a detector should be detecting exponentially more very old objects than new ones. Given the rarity, I would expect nearly all detected events to have happened long long ago in galaxies far far away.
Also, models point to such events being more common in the distant past where there were more black holes (primordials) floating around than there are now.
If one event happens 1B years ago 1B light years away and another event happens at .5B years ago .5B light years away... how would we know there are two events?
The wave may contain the information necessary to describe the event that created it. If you know, perhaps by frequency, that the wave came from two super-massive black holes spinning around each other at a given rate, then you know how massive each hole should be. From that you can predict the energy of the wave. And from that you know how far away the event must be for the energy behind the wave to have spread so thin. It's basically the same process as calculating distance via cepheid variable stars.
I am not a physicist, and dont have a good mental model of gravitational waves (or general relativity at all), so maybe someone can answer my laymans question: do these waves behave like ripples in water, so a single event generates multiple repetitive, concentric waves permeating through space? That would make me think that a single massive event would be easier to detect because it would leave many repeated "echoes", ringing space for a long time after the actual event.
The article makes it sound like the detection of these waves is just a quick one-time blip though. I'd expect something as big as black holes merging to generate more longer lasting waves than just a quick blip. What is the period of these waves?
An echo is a reflection. I don't know whether gravitational waves can be reflected even in principle, but even if they can, space is so empty that in practice there's nothing to reflect them. So even a single massive event, like the one described in the article, will just send out a single expanding spherical wavefront; if you're not listening at the right moment, you'll miss it.
Sorry, "echo" wasnt the right term (hence my quotes).
What I am trying to ask is if these behave like concentric water ripples, where from a single event you get first one peak of a wave, followed by many more repeated concentric peaks gradually getting smaller in amplitude? It sounds like there is just a single momentary wavefront without any residual secondary waves? Why is that?
So if you look at the waveform of the signal, there are in fact smaller ripples after the main event. However, how long these ripples take to settle afterwards to equilibrium is related to how quickly the waves propagate. In the case of ripples on a pond, those travel at about 1 m/s; these gravitational waves travel at the speed of light, roughly 300,000,000 m/s, so we should expect it to settle to equilibrium about 300,000,000 times faster. If it takes 60 seconds on a pond, we would expect the gravitational waves to settle in about 0.0000002 s, or 200 nanoseconds.
Note that this is a _very_ rough estimate, but it should give you an idea of the order of magnitude for the settling time.
https://www.black-holes.org/gw150914 has some visualization of the event. There is the initial inspiral, and then there is a ringing afterwards. However, the entire event is over in a fraction of a second, which may be a "blip" to humans, but is very long when things happen at the speed of light.
Thanks, that's helpful. It's hard to get my head around the idea that an event so massive can be over so "quickly", without any residual longer-lasting effects.
Well it sounds like a massive ripple in the fabric of reality which passes by us in a fraction of a second, never to be seen again.
So from my non-physicist point of view, no it doesnt seem like a very long lasting effect, relative to us at least. Thanks for the snark though.
There's a theorem that black holes have "no hair": two black holes of the same mass, charge and angular momentum are indistinguishable. So the merge must happen instantaneously: if the combined black hole were "sloshing" afterwards that would violate that theorem.
"do these waves behave like ripples in water, so a single event generates multiple repetitive, concentric waves permeating through space?"
No they don't. There is a law known as [Huygens' principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens%E2%80%93Fresnel_princi...) which says that when a disturbance at a particular point creates a wave, that wave only propagates on an outwards-expanding sphere that is centered at that point of disturbance, and does not produce any effect on the interior of that sphere. This was originally formulated for light waves, but it also holds for other kinds of waves, such as sound waves or, in this case, gravitational waves. What this means is that when you look at something that's far away you see a sharp image of exactly what happened there a short time ago (the time it had taken the light to reach you), whereas if the principle did not hold, each light source would have a small "echo" after it which would blur the image.
However, one of the reasons Huygens' principle holds is that the waves are propagating over three dimensions. In contrast, water waves only propagate over two dimensions, so Huygens' principle fails. That is why ripples continue to emanate from a spot even long after the disturbance there is over. More generally, Huygens' principle holds whenever the number of dimensions is odd and fails whenever the number of dimensions is even.
[Note: I may be wrong on why Huygens' principle fails for water waves. Water waves are actually pretty complicated compared to other kinds of waves and I am not knowledgeable in all the subtleties.]
The coalescing and ring-down takes a fraction of a second. The fraction of a second refers to the duration of the event. It does not mean they caught an event a fraction of a second after they turned it on.
Are gravitational waves supposed to be that weak or is it because of the distance between us and those black holes? Do they lose power as they travel through space?
Only that in space, it drops even faster: The wavefront carries the same energy, but spread out over ever increasing length/area. For gravitational waves (or radio waves) they form spheres, not circles, and the surface size scales with r^2, not r. (Also water waves are /complicated/)
As others have said, intensity (power per unit area) decreases according to the same inverse square law that governs most effects due to localized sources in three dimensions of space. In this case, you're looking at a distance of over a billion light years, and then squaring it: that's a pretty enormous "per unit area"!
But gravity itself is also a tremendously weak force compared to the others. That may seem surprising at first, but it becomes pretty clear when I point out that a cheap little refrigerator magnet exerts enough force to overcome the gravitational pull of an entire planet right beneath it. Gravitational waves are pretty much just ripples on the top of that already tiny force.
Huh. That sounds entirely sensible and correct, and at the same time it's bugging my physical intuition a bit. I guess they're not trying to do this measurement by absorbing energy, but much more directly by just watching the change in length. I think I believe you: thanks!
Near as I can tell, they're intrinsically extremely weak, so much so that the only thing we've been able to see it all is extreme events like these black hole mergers. In theory, pretty much any time anything moves, some level of gravitational waves should be generated, though no telling if we'd ever be able to detect them.
For comparison, the wave that was detected is claimed to be "four one-thousandths of the diameter of a proton". That's about 7e-18 meters, on a baseline arm length of 4 km, so about one part in 6e20 -- about 175,000 times stronger than the waves Earth's orbit produces. And that was about 40x as strong as minimal sensitivity on LIGO, according to the article ("can detect changes in the length of one of those arms as small as one ten-thousandth the diameter of a proton").
Obviously if we were closer to the black hole collision we'd see much stronger waves. But you really do need very massive bodies accelerating very much (or equivalently orbiting very fast) to produce something that's detectable by LIGO over interstellar distances at all. The key part from this article is that the orbital period was about 1/250 of a second at the end; compare to Earth's orbital period. Going back to the formula given in the above Wikipedia entry, the frequency dependence is hiding in the "1/r" factor for the amplitude. 1/r is proportional to w^{2/3} (though it's not clear to me whether that's still true in a general-relativistic treatment; it's true enough for the Earth's orbit), which tells you how the wave amplitude scales with frequency...
ok, so some of the best minds on Earth can build a machine to detect gravitational waves from an event 1.3B light years away. This is an incredible motivation for those of us on what is possible with technology in simple terrestrial projects.
AFAIK that doesn't seem at all feasible yet. Currently you need an enormous facility, which struggles to detect anything but the most powerful gravitational waves.
The amount of energy needed to transmit via a gravitational wave is INSANE. It would involve very rapidly accelerating and decelerating a black hole / neutron star. While it might be possible to do this, it's not within the realm of something we could accomplish without several orders of magnitude technology improvements, and possibly may not be physically possible at all (moving object that heavy that quickly might require creating a black hole)--though I don't have the skill to prove or disprove that.
Even if it were possible, what sort of crazy alien would it take to burn 3 solar masses of negentropy to basically run a ping, compared to the amount of data that could be transmitted with electromagnetic waves with 3 solar masses of negentropy? It's literally dozens of orders of magnitude in difference. Any aliens that are that bad at engineering probably aren't going to grow to the point that they can shake neutron stars several times per second.
Our power generation stations are the black hole equivalent to the caveman with only access to generating fire through rubbing stones.
Based on what level of civilization you are. Rubbing two black holes in for a ping, might be the same as rubbing two stones for a spark. Advanced civilization go really advanced, to a point their activities would be undetectable to us or would appear to us the nature of reality itself.
"Advanced civilization go really advanced, to a point their activities would be undetectable to us or would appear to us the nature of reality itself."
This is science fiction, not an argument. We have no rational reason at the moment to believe this is the case, or even possible.
What we do in fact have is an increasing trend towards efficiency. Projecting that out along crazy growth curves suggests that advanced aliens are likely to be more horrified by such a waste of negentropy than we are. What can we do with that much negentropy? Nothing, basically. What can they do? Simulate many millions/billions/whoknows of human-level civilizations?
They're not more likely to be indifferent about such waste, they're more likely to prosecute you, for mass civilizational murder.
I've often thought that if civilization could advance to that point in the future, that I'd have a difficult time explaining to my great-great-great-X grandchildren that when ol' great-great-great-X-grandpa was young, you know, pouring a tank of gasoline into the car got me from point A to point B and that was it, despite it being enough energy in that one tank of gas to, say, simulate an entire human's life time. Well, kids, we didn't have that option! The tech didn't exist. So stop trying to put ol' Greats on trial for things he couldn't control, OK?
>>This is science fiction, not an argument. We have no rational reason at the moment to believe this is the case, or even possible.
There are not only rational reasons, but even evidences to support what I'm trying to say.
Look at any insect colony or bacteria, they don't even recognize our presence, let alone our technology.
>>What we do in fact have is an increasing trend towards efficiency. Projecting that out along crazy growth curves suggests that advanced aliens are likely to be more horrified by such a waste of negentropy than we are.
We the advanced aliens to ants, are indulging waste and plastic pollution like never before. And ants the aliens to bacteria might appear the same.
Efficiency and waste are very relative terms based on what level of abundance or austerity on is supposed to live on.
You can't transmit information through entangled pairs. What is instantaneous is the change of the state for the whole system (the pair) after you measure one of particles. However the result of that measurement (if it's non-trivial, i.e. if the measurement actually changes the state) is fundamentally random so the only thing you would be seeing is perfectly and instantaneously correlated noise on both ends.
I'm sorry but no, you cannot transfer information with quantum entanglement. What entanglement says is that if you have a photon and I have a photon and they are entangled and you make a measurement on some attribute of your photon, my photon will assume the complimentary state. However, the state your photon assumes when you measure it is random and once you measure it, you lose the entanglement. So, there's no way for you to encode any information in your entangled photon. Yes, I can infer what state your photon was in as soon as you measure it, this is useful for encryption as we can then compare notes after making a measurement and make sure nobody tampered with our entangled photons.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
(X) The amount of energy involved would likely destroy the planet.
(X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(X) The relative sparseness of non-dark energy in our vicinity
(X) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
> Would it be possible to listen for information transmitted via gravitational waves? Would there be any benefit over radio?
Well, if you observe a meaningful, non-natural gravity wave signal, you know that you've discovered not merely another technical situation (which you'd know if you detected the same thing in radio waves), but a phenomenally advanced one.
So, if not an advantage, there is at least a meaningful difference.
I have a question: what does this mean for theoretical physics? (except for Einstein was right) Does it settle any major debates? Does it make any competing theory more or less likely?
On the webcast, they described how this let us listen in on massive disruptions of space-time, environments we could never create to test on earth, and that could help us better compare our models to events seen in extreme cases.
It's by far the most explicit verification we've ever had that black holes exist in pretty nearly the exact form predicted by Einstein's equations of general relativity, which is pretty cool. It provides the tightest limits on any possible mass for the graviton (the presumed particle carrying the gravitational force, which is generally believed to be massless but you always have to wonder about more exotic possibilities). It gives a stunningly clear confirmation that modern numerical simulations of relativistic dynamics are an accurate reflection of nature. (And by the same token, it presumably puts limits on the strength of any potential deviation in the laws of physics from the equations used in designing those simulations.) And it probably does something to give preference to models of astrophysics in which binary systems with these characteristics are common.
Beyond that, I guess I'd say that this particular signal doesn't feel like that much of a surprise: we were already pretty confident that if a black hole binary were to merge, a signal more or less like this would be an expected result. The scientists were evidently surprised that their very first signal was so strong (this one was even borderline detectable by the previous version of LIGO), which may teach us something, but it's not revolutionary.
This is the result the theories predicted, and there's nothing for the theorists to do except gloat. If people had kept building more sensitive detectors, and kept failing to detect gravity waves, then eventually that would have been a very big deal for theoretical physics. But it didn't happen.
On the other hand, there is now a way to see dark matter. That could enable a lot of new astronomy.
A detector of this sensitivity seems like a boon for spying. Rather difficult to relocate, fortunately, but it makes me wonder about the future of the technology. No one would have looked at the first computer and envisioned an iPhone.
Not before they were solid state. Computers had their own buildings and relied on glass tubes for operation. Screens weren't on the radar. Operators were highly educated. But technology did bring us to a point where the vision became more focused, and led to what we have today.
There are many possible paths to rebutting my statement, which to be clear is idle morning musing, but your objection doesn't hold water.
Gravity for navigation, perhaps ... but I believe they use magnetic fields, not gravitational fields, to detect other subs (and also some rather sophisticated real-time degaussing to prevent said detection): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10979452
I agree that you do make a point. There is really no way for us to know what is to come. Sometimes we think we are looking at a square, but it really is a cube and we are just unable to look beyond are current perspective for whatever reason.
I would say one obstacle that stands in the way of "spying" on objects moving on the Earth's surface is that the gravitational wave energy emitted by accelerating objects on Earth would be "too small" for current detectors. Not to mention that there would be the issue of how to filter gravitational wave noise, and/or isolate frequencies. However, if it possible to build an amplifier or filter to resolve these issues, that remains to be seen - or maybe somebody else could chime in.
ok, here's an idea that someone might either build on or refute: would it be possible to build an amplifier of gravitational waves using some arrangement of microscopic and/or macroscopic objects having a "known" defined 3D physical relationship (say in a lattice), and under known interactional forces (including EM). You would have to take into account the uncertainty principle in system parameter measurement, though the propagating gravitational wave should have a deterministic effect on the potential well and thus the quantum wave(s) of the system(s). Thus, amplification through propagation in the space-time of the system might be feasible. This is of course all hand-waving, and very rough.
Maybe it's the psychology of how we (fail to) deal with different scales. Discovering new, larger, more wonderful places in the Universe doesn't make the Earth any smaller or less wonderful than it is. Our brains might "zoom out" our mental map to fit these new places in, which makes us appear smaller, but in fact it's our horizons that have grown.
Most of those very subtle gravitational waves are also rather insignificant. Normally their effects would be swamped by other forces and interactions. At least as far as we know, we are the first agents in the universe to build structures that isolate and amplify those effects in a way that allows them to be perceived and appreciated. That seems pretty significant. We may also be the only means the universe has to feel proud of this little accomplishment.
On the other hand, it's nice to know the world really does appear to be boundless. I mean in terms of the possible.
We aren't much, but we are here and it's a pretty awesome experience.
Maybe we need to be here, otherwise what is the point?
I like to think there are others too, thinking thoughts like we are. Maybe that is necessary too. Maybe nobody has reached a point in their development for more, or contact to make sense.
I find our time here and now bittersweet. So much is yet to be experienced and understood. But, then again, here and now isn't all bad. We have great science, new frontiers opening up all the time. Our stories of the future are fantastic, and there is still a lot of magic and wonder about us, the world, reality...
We may not see the best. In fact, I say none of us will, but right now is never dull.
I feel like we are just beginning to get a real grasp on reality. That seems powerful and exciting. We could have lived in much darker, harder, ignorant times.
These times may be seen that way too, or they may be a peak, with a decline to come. Nobody knows, and I like it that way.
Does this discovery make us insignificant or does it increase our understanding of the universe?
It depends on how you look at it. You are taking a pessimist's view on things that the universe is so large and we are so small that we don't matter. If you take an optimists's view on things you'll discover that we do matter and learning new things increases our significance.
From the abstract of the paper, energy equivalent to three solar masses were radiated away in gravitational waves. That's a simply incredible amount!
Possibly stupid question: Given how far away it was, and that the inverse square law applies, would the effect of these waves be visible on the human scale if we were closer? We can see the effects of the compression of spacetime with LIGO after all, so presumably we could?
Yeah,I got to the point mentioning the masses of the black holes before and after collision and said, "What, they didn't just lose three solar masses..." But, they did.
Which was the order of predictions I'd read, years back, but egads. Considering how much larger that is than a supernova, I'd be concerned to have such an event happen in this galaxy...
The energy is dumped into gravitational waves rather than electromagnetic radiation & they don’t interact with matter much. I’m not sure you’d notice it happening in the same galaxy unless you were looking for it.
This thing was a billion light years away. Say it were closer; let's put it at a single light year away.
LIGO measures wave amplitude, as far as I can tell, which goes down linearly with distance (unlike wave energy, which goes down quadratically, since it's proportional to square of the amplitude). So we could expect to see an effect about a billion times bigger.
The detected effect was a change in metric of one part in 6e20 if I'm not mistaken: (4e-3 * (diameter of proton))/4km based on the article's claim of "four one-thousandths of the diameter of a proton". So at one light year distance we could expect an effect of one part in 6e11.
Not really visible on the human scale, seems to me. You could detect it easily with something like the Mössbauer effect, I expect. Your typical lab bench laser interferometer has errors on the order of 1 in 1e6 as far as I can tell, so probably wouldn't be able to pick this up.
Disclaimer: I could be totally off on what a lab bench laser interferometer can do. I'm pretty confident in the rest of the numbers above.
What I didn't understand after reading the article is how do they separate out a set of waves for one specific thing vs. the many other objects sending out waves. Is it just that the set of blackholes are the strongest set of waves and thus the ones we can detect?
That, and the high frequency. For example, the Earth orbiting the Sun produces gravitational waves at a frequency that's about (factors of 2 and pi here and there) the orbital frequency; order of 1e-8 Hz. The black holes were producing 250Hz waves if I read the article right.
The longer the interferometer arms, the better you can do in sensitivity. The reason LIGO has 4000 m long arms is that it makes the experiment 4000x more sensitive than something you can do on a bench. (and their laser stabilization is excellent, improving things further)
Sure, but LIGO is sensitive at something like 1 part in 1e20, which is a lot more than 4000x better than 1 part in 1e6. I agree that their laser stabilization is likely much better, their vacuum is likely a lot better, etc. I was just surprised by how much better, I guess; 10 orders of magnitude is a lot.
Part of the reason for that is that LIGO isn't exactly a Michaelson interferometer in that it has an extra pair of mirrors in each arm. If you look at this schematic [1] then in a traditional Michaelson interferometer you would only have the mirrors that are at the end of both arms.
With LIGO there is an extra set of mirrors within the arms this allows the light from the laser to bounce between them ~100 times or so increasing the effective path length greatly.
On the other hand, we may well detect the 3 solar masses radiated away as energy. That decreases as an inverse square law, so as one solar mass is about 10^30kg, and 1kg gives off about 10^17 J, we're talking about an explosion releasing something around 10^47 J. For comparison, a 1 kiloton nuclear bomb gives off about 10^15 J.
So, inverse square that explosion... 1 light year is about 10^16m, so we square that and get 10^32m, so we're now talking about ... 10^15 J.
So, unless my maths is all off (which is possible), if this happened about a light year away, whoever's on the side facing towards the blast wouldn't get to observe very much because they'd feel as if a 1kt nuke just went off above their head. Not a great way to start the day.
Chances are it would wipe out life on Earth too, through the ensuing side-effects like lighting the atmosphere on fire, sterilising half the planet, significantly heating up the oceans, possibly even stripping part of the atmosphere away, etc.
For a great novel based around a strikingly similar premise to what was just observed (and the main reason I even bothered to calculate this), Diaspora by Greg Egan is a fantastic book.
The big question is how much of the energy would get transferred in practice.
I agree that 3 solar masses worth of electromagnetic radiation at 1 light year distance would feel like a nuke going off. What I don't know is to what extent the energy of the equivalent gravitational waves (which _would_ have a lot of energy I agree) would actually get transferred to things we care about, like the atmosphere and us. If it's a few percent, say, we'd clearly be in trouble. If it's more like what neutrinos do, it would probably be detectable but probably not by unaided human senses.
I tried doing some quick looking around for estimates of gravitational wave coupling and energy transfer and didn't find anything so far...
I would like to understand why a gravitational wave distorts length in relation to normal gravity wells; specifically is this particular to waves? Why don't lengths get distorted in a normal gravity well, or do they? In essence, what is different between a gravity wave and a gravity well, which i understand both distort space, but only the wave distorts it in a way we can measure? Does the gravity well change lengths proportionally in all directions and thus isnt measurable?
A gravity well also distorts lengths, as best I understand (which is not very well, to be honest; take everything I'm saying here with a big grain of salt).
The difference in terms of detection is that the wave does this in a time-varying, periodic fashion.
For something like LIGO, we're trying to measure length changes on the order of 1e-18 meters. We're not actually measuring the lengths of LIGO's arms to that accuracy, though. What we're measuring is the difference between the times light takes to travel down those arms. And even that's hard to measure on an absolute scale, so what we really measure is how that difference changes in time.
Or put another way, the effect of Earth's gravitational well is not really distinguishable from inaccuracies in making the two legs of the interferometer equal length to start with, and is a much smaller effect than those inaccuracies. Again, if I understand this right...
Actually, we have ample proof of the distortion of spacetime in a gravity well - gravitational lensing. It's an observed effect around very massive objects and we have been able to see it at work very well. Also, arguably, the fact that we're not falling towards the sky is itself evidence of a spacetime gradient near the Earth, but that was also explained by Newton's Law of Gravitation.
But back in 1916, Einstein also theorised, as part of his general theory of gravitation, that there would be such things as gravity waves, caused by very massive objects moving through spacetime making 4-dimensional ripples appear in spacetime. Until today, that was just an unproven theory, though everyone believed it was likely to be true. There is now solid evidence to back it.
Agree... my question, though poorly worded, is less about proof of spacetime gradients (they do in the ways you describe).
It's more about understanding what the measurable effects of a gravitational well on earth has on the LIGO experimental setup (or a similar one with infinite precision), in the absence of gravitational waves.
Well, something like LIGO can only measure gravitational waves, because it looks for changes in the geometry of spacetime. If you were to move the LIGO in and out of Earth's gravitational well, I guess then it would record a shift.
That is a good point - perhaps it would all come out as neutrinos or gravitons... then we'd be fine. I doubt such an event would result in no electromagnetic radiation at all however... Why would it? The creation of a new black hole typically releases enormous amounts of all kinds of energy, electromagnetic as well as in the form of neutrinos.
The energy was all dumped into the gravitational waves we detected, not into electromagnetic radiation: Gravity waves don’t interact with matter very much (the cross section of the graviton is believed to be extremely small) so the quantity of energy transferred to matter as the wave passes through is likewise extremely small. I haven’t run the numbers, but I’m not sure you’d notice this even from a light year away without fairly sensitive detectors.
Yup. Possibly one of the most energetic events in the Universe. Fascinating in many ways when you think about it. That mass was once matter, and somehow it got converted into gravitons.
Are there any potential competing theories this detection could also support? I'm wondering how much room there is here for confirmation bias, but I suppose that's a pretty hard thing to measure without the benefit of hindsight.
Even before this discovery, it's been pretty solidly established that any alternative theory to General Relativity would need to behave essentially identically to GR in the limits where we've been able to test it. So, for example, the "low energy limit" of string theory is general relativity (plus other content, in most cases). I'm not sure whether the loop quantum gravity folks have a working low-curvature limit yet (I'm out of touch), but that would be a requirement for them, too.
At first glance, I'd guess that this discovery only strengthens that conclusion: even a small deviation from GR might well change the detailed behavior of an immensely high curvature situation like a black hole merger, and what we saw seems to have been a spot on match for the GR-based models.
Well, they extracted a lot from the waveform: Distance, the two masses, the resulting mass. I could imagine that a competing theory gives the same waveform maybe with different values for these parameters.
A "competing theory" would first have to match the GR predictions in all the other regimes where it's already been tested. But doing that is an extremely strong constraint on a theory, to the point where the only theory that can meet it is GR itself. Physicists know this because alternative theories to GR have been constructed and tested, and they have all failed. See, for example, here:
That's a very common sentiment, but a mistaken one. Theories do not get accepted only if they match the predictions of the previous theories. People value other features besides accuracy of predictions, like simplicity and explanatory power. Just recall how Kopernik's theory of solar system got accepted. It had worse predictions than Ptolemy's scheme at the time it was introduced; Ptolemy's scheme was way better in accuracy, but utterly complex and explained little.
You're missing the point. I agree that matching the predictions of experiments (not previous theories--I'm talking about experimental results that match the predictions of GR, not just those predictions themselves) is not a sufficient condition for a theory to be accepted (which is what you are saying); but it is certainly a necessary condition (which is what I was saying).
> Just recall how Kopernik's theory of solar system got accepted. It had worse predictions than Ptolemy's scheme at the time it was introduced
Yes, and it wasn't accepted at the time it was introduced. Actually, Copernicus' theory in its original form was never really "accepted"; what was accepted was Kepler's reformulation using elliptical orbits, based on Brahe's more accurate observations. Kepler's model was more accurate than Ptolemy's, and that was a key factor in its acceptance.
I agree with you that if a new theory was to replace the old one for making specific set of predictions, it should give predictions of similar or better accuracy. But I do not think that replacement is necessary for the new theory to compete or be accepted; it is the new benefit it brings, whatever its nature may be, that is crucial. The two can temporarily both be accepted to coexist, if both have their strengths. For example, quantum theory does not make the same predictions as classical theory when it comes to classical experiments (mechanics, basic EM phenomena) and is largely useless in that domain. It only gives probabilities of results of specified experiments of certain kinds; it does not reproduce the old predictions (like definite trajectories, Moon phases or solar eclipses), but provides new results (like resonance frequencies of atoms and molecules and their bond energies). Similar thing can happen with a new theory of gravity; it may not give the same prediction for Mercury perihelion precession, but it may be able to explain other things, like why the inverse square law, why no repulsive gravity or why the mutual gravity force between electrons is so much lower than the mutual EM force. Explanation for oddities in Mercury motion could then wait for further data and repetition of calculations. It is natural to expect of any new theory to bring new results, but demanding that it reproduces all the old ones along is too much. That happens rarely and such expectation only prevents any new ideas from being considered.
> quantum theory does not make the same predictions as classical theory when it comes to classical experiments (mechanics, basic EM phenomena)
Yes, it does. Do you know how the classical limit of quantum theory works? That limit is what allows us to use classical physics in the domain where it works. If that limit didn't work, we would have a serious problem with consistency.
> It only gives probabilities of results of specified experiments of certain kinds; it does not reproduce the old predictions (like definite trajectories, Moon phases or solar eclipses)
Are you aware that all of those "old predictions" can indeed be derived from quantum theory, using the classical limit I described above? The reason that works is that, in the classical limit, quantum theory predicts a probability of 1 for one result--the classical result.
> It is natural to expect of any new theory to bring new results, but demanding that it reproduces all the old ones along is too much.
You appear to have a mistaken understanding of how new theories get accepted. New theories that don't reproduce all of the predictions of the theory they replace, in the domains where the old theory is verified by experiment, are not accepted. If general relativity had not reproduced all of the predictions of Newtonian gravity in the weak field, slow motion limit, it would not have been accepted. And if quantum theory had not reproduced all of the predictions of classical physics in the classical limit, it would not have been accepted.
As I wrote above, I agree with you on the requirements for replacement theory. My point is that a new theory of a phenomenon does not need to replace and reproduce all the results of the old theory to be considered worthwile, competing, acceptable.
Can you give an example of a new theory that was considered worthwhile even though it didn't replace and reproduce all the results of the old theory? I'm not aware of any. (The Copernicus example given upthread is not a valid example, as I said in response to that post.)
Schroedinger's theory of hydrogen atom and his wave mechanics (1926). It explained positions of emission lines of excited hydrogen, but it didn't explain how the atoms lose excitation energy as there is no c and no spontaneous emission in that theory. Larmor's older theory (1897) explained how the energy is lost - by EM radiation - and gave formula connecting acceleration and losses that is used to this day.
Joseph Larmor, LXIII, On the theory of the Magnetic Influence on Spectra ;
and on the Radiation from moving Ions, Philosophical Magazine Series 5
Vol. 44, Iss. 271, 1897
Erwin Schrodinger, Quantisierung als Eigenwertproblem. Annalen der Phys. 384 (4) (1926)
> Schroedinger's theory of hydrogen atom and his wave mechanics (1926).
This was not a "new theory" that was competing with any "old theories". It was a tentative model in a regime where no previous theory existed, and it was never claimed to cover anything outside that limited regime. It wasn't competing with any other theories, because there were no other theories to compete with. The question of whether or not Schrodinger's model reproduced the predictions of the "old" theory never arose, because there was no "old" theory. (Technically, there was a sort of "old" theory of the hydrogen atom--Bohr's model--but Schrodinger's model did reproduce all of its correct predictions, plus it added more correct predictions of things that the Bohr model got wrong.)
The position with regard to gravitational waves is very different; we already have a comprehensive, fundamental theory--General Relativity--that explains them. Any alternative theory that only explained GWs, and didn't also explain all the other experimental results that GR explains, would be a nonstarter.
> Larmor's older theory (1897)
This wasn't a separate "theory" at all; it was just a derivation of a particular formula using an already known theory, Maxwell's Equations.
Schroedinger theory certainly was a new theory of the atom and later of molecules at that time, successfully competing and largely replacing classical EM models of atoms and molecules such as Larmor's theory of molecules, although it didn't cover the EM radiation aspect and EM theory needs to be used in parallel with Schroedinger's to get, say, intensities of emission lines. I think this is a good example of what I was saying in the first post. It is the new benefit that the theory brings, not reproduction of every single result of the previous theories, that makes the new theory interesting and helps its adoption. Cases where the new theory completely replaces the old theory and reproduces all of its positive results happen too, but are not the only way how new knowledge is adopted.
> I think this is a good example of what I was saying in the first post. It is the new benefit that the theory brings, not reproduction of every single result of the previous theories
Of course Schrodinger's model didn't reproduce the results of classical EM with regard to the atom. It wasn't supposed to, because those results of classical EM were wrong. In other words, there wasn't a correct "old theory" that covered the regime the Schrodinger model covered (the atom)--there was only a wrong "old theory".
As far as using Schrodinger's model plus classical EM theory to get results like emission line intensities, there also there was no correct "old theory"; there was only a wrong "old theory" (classical EM by itself, which did not predict emission lines at all, let alone their intensities--it predicted a continuous emission spectrum). Also, this hybrid classical-quantum model was known to be incomplete at the time; it was only used because nobody had yet figured out how to quantize the EM field.
> It is the new benefit that the theory brings, not reproduction of every single result of the previous theories
Once again, this is not the situation under discussion in this thread (gravitational waves). In the case you describe, the results of the previous theories were wrong in the regime the new model covered, so there was nothing to reproduce; there was no correct "old theory" for the new theory to compete with.
In the case of gravitational waves, we have a correct "old theory"--General Relativity--so any new theory that did not match that correct old theory would be a nonstarter. I am not aware of any case where a new theory was accepted as interesting when there was a correct old theory covering the same regime and the new theory did not reproduce its results.
> It wasn't supposed to, because those results of classical EM were wrong.
You're badly mistaken. Although nobody succeeded in obtaining the emission line frequencies of gases out of the classical EM theory, the theory did correctly give other results consistent with observations. One of them is the formula for emission intensity that connects energy radiated with second derivative of electric moment; it goes back to Larmor's work. This was the result the new theory would preferably reproduce or at least be consistent with. Wave mechanics wasn't consistent with it - the hydrogen atom oscillates indefinitely in wave mechanics. Schroedinger himself viewed this as a deficiency and planned to get back to it - check the ending part of his seminal papers on wave mechanics. The classical formula is taught to this day both in macroscopic EM theory and quantum optics courses, although there are some deficiencies and problems about the formula that Larmor did not know.
> In the case of gravitational waves, we have a correct "old theory"--General Relativity--so any new theory that did not match that correct old theory would be a nonstarter.
I do not think any physics theory could even be "correct" in the sense of Platonic ideals, but I do not know what you mean by "correct". I do not claim a new theory could completely replace the old one before it could deliver the same or better results. I claim theory has value and is accepted based on its new benefits, not its superiority in every aspect the old theory was superior before. Calling incomplete theory non-starter makes no sense to me, as all theories, including General Relativity, are incomplete.
No, I'm not; you're just mistaken about which classical results I was referring to. I meant the results of classical EM that predicted that atoms could not exist--because the electrons would radiate until they fell into the nucleus. And what classical formula tells you how much the electrons will radiate because of their acceleration due to responding to the electric field of the nucleus? Larmor's formula.
In other words, Larmor's formula was not a "theory"--it was a particular result derived within a theory. The particular result happened to be correct, within a particular limited domain; but the underlying theory that was used to derive it could not explain why it was correct--because the same theory, and indeed the same particular result--the same formula--made other predictions that were obviously egregiously wrong (like predicting that atoms would collapse).
> nobody succeeded in obtaining the emission line frequencies of gases out of the classical EM theory
You're drastically understating the failure of classical EM here. It's not that classical EM couldn't predict the particular frequencies of emission lines. It's that classical EM couldn't predict the existence of emission lines at all. Classical EM predicted that atoms would emit a continuous spectrum of radiation--not radiation sharply peaked at particular frequencies.
> The classical formula is taught to this day both in macroscopic EM theory and quantum optics courses
Sure, because within its domain of validity, it works fine as an approximation. But that's all it is--an approximation. And we explain why the approximation works, and why it works only within a particular domain of validity, by reference to the more complete underlying theory--quantum electrodynamics.
> I do not know what you mean by "correct".
I mean "makes predictions that match the results of experiments".
> all theories, including General Relativity, are incomplete.
I agree; but there's a big difference between:
- A theory that is incomplete because it doesn't cover absolutely everything, including where we haven't tested yet and won't be able to for the foreseeable future, but makes correct predictions everywhere we can actually test it; and
- A theory that is incomplete because it makes predictions about some things that are obviously at variance with observation, even though it makes correct predictions about others.
GR is an incomplete theory in the former sense; and theories that are incomplete in that sense can still be used to safely rule out competing theories that don't match their predictions in regimes where those predictions have been extensively confirmed.
However, classical electromagnetism is an incomplete theory in the latter sense; it made obviously wrong predictions, like the ultraviolet catastrophe and the instability of atoms. And even the correct predictions it made, like using the Larmor formula to predict radiative properties of atoms, were only obtained by using the theory inconsistently: by first assuming, contrary to the classical EM prediction, that atoms could be stable at all, and then working out what classical EM said about how these impossible objects (impossible according to classical EM) could radiate.
In a situation like that, you can't safely use the theory to rule out other theories, because the theory contradicts itself, and you can prove anything from contradictory assumptions. That's why classical EM physicists couldn't say "well, the Schrodinger theory can't be right, because I can't use it to derive the Larmor formula". You can't consistently use classical EM to derive the Larmor formula either; you have to sweep certain things under the rug and wave your hands that somehow or other it's ok.
In a situation like the latter, yes, you're right that anything that can give some handle on making predictions is going to be at least tried. But that's a very different situation from the former situation, where we have a correct theory that, within its domain of validity, doesn't have any of those issues. The only issue with GR is that it's not a quantum theory, which means, in the eyes of many physicists, that it's incomplete; but that incompleteness has no practical consequences whatsoever. It certainly is not a reason to entertain alternative theories of gravitational waves that get other predictions wrong that GR gets right.
Any observer will observe the same speed of light in their location.
Any effect of gravitational fluctuations in spacetime on the speed of light is a bit like a car driving on a race track that has treadmills scattered around it pointing in various directions and speeds. The car's speedometer will always read the same value because it's measuring the speed of its tires on whatever it's driving on.
The mechanical and software engineering underlying these research endeavors is breathtaking. The laser apparatus, LISA pathfinder, ELISA - how on earth do they calibrate/debug/test such complex systems?
... and I shudder to think that more often than not, anything I code in C/C++ will segfault on first run.
As with most physics experiments for the last 40 years, nothing new was discovered that we didn’t already predict. Confirming something widely believed to be true isn't nearly as valuable as finding out we don't understand something. This is actually one of the reasons I dropped out of my physics phd program.
Because this is astrophysics and not particle physics, this discovery is just the beginning! We don't know the rates of these mergers, the distribution of the masses of the binary components, what electromagnetic signature accompanies the events (if any)...
We've known gravity waves existed since the Hulse-Taylor pulsar, so just observing them for the first time is not nearly as interesting as the science to come in the next decade. Advanced LIGO is a powerful new tool that will open up exciting new observations.
One thing I don't quite understand - how can the "chirp" from LIGO be unambiguously categorized as extraterrestrial in origin? The waveform shown onscreen in the NYtimes video looks like an extremely noisy signal - not sure if that's the actual sampled data or just an artistic rendition. Couldn't there be a variety of physical disturbances that explain a sine-tone sweep like that, given how sensitive the instrument is to physical vibrations?
There are two independent sites, 2000 miles apart. Additionally, each site has two perpendicular experiments: one shows contraction when the perpendicular one shows expansion. Orientations at both sites are aligned I presume.
Pedanticly, it'd have to be while he was alive since the Nobel Committee won't nominate anyone who's deceased. Rosalind Franklin would've surely received one for her work on DNA (among others who passed before their work was recognized).
In a very real way it was. There were two completely geographically separate instruments which recorded the same signal with a delay that is consistent with the light travel time between them.
In the future this will get better when VIRGO in Italy and KAGRA [2] in Japan come online. Then we will have 4 independent detectors which will be able to verify that same signal is observed at the same time.
Obviously of course given the transient nature of what is being observed once the merger has occurred it will very rapidly stop producing gravitational waves so we will not be able to measure the same event again.
" On 14 September 2015, while Drago was on the phone with a LIGO colleague in Italy, his pipeline sent him an email alert—of which he receives about one each day—telling him that both LIGO detectors had registered an “event” (a nonroutine reading) 3 minutes earlier, at 11:50:45 a.m. local time. It was a big one. “The signal-to-noise ratio was quite high—24 as opposed to [the more typical] 10,” he says."
Note this is a stellar black hole merger of several tens of solar masses.
Imagine the disturbance of a galactic core black hole mergers of millions of stellar masses. These are probably much rarer, but do occur when galaxies merge.
If this happened in the centre of the Milky Way, we're about 25k light years away.
Let's say 2 1 million solar masses black holes merged there... and they also gave off about 3/60 of their mass as radiation, that's about 100'000 solar masses being radiated 25k light years away.
Using my calculation in the other post, we're talking 10^52 Joules. Across a distance of 25'000 light years, or about 10^20 metres, that's then decreased by 10^40 (inverse square) so we're left with about 10^12 Joules...
Which is good news! If that happened in the Milky Way, we would probably survive it - though we'd definitely notice some strange atmospheric effects...
Honest question: there is any example of Einstein being proved wrong?
Was he indeed always right on his theories for phenomenons before they could be proved by experiments; or is that the case that we only hear about when he is proved right?
He was a proponent of hidden variable theory, which tried to reconcile quantum mechanics with determinism, famously saying "God does not play dice". People often say that hidden variable theories were proven impossible, and thus Einstein was proven wrong. That's not quite true, and only local hidden variables have been ruled out.
It also disparages his contribution to the scientific discussion to just state that he was "proven wrong".
Bohr's argument in the discussion was a bit of a mess and I couldn't pull anything out of his rebuttal to EPR other than an assertion that QM behaves the way it does and not to pay any attention to the man behind the curtain. Its a very philosophical argument with very little scientific content and he just proposes that the QM math is correct because its correct, as far as I can tell.
EPR made a logical cogent argument. It was based on the philosophical principle of the locality of physics. They translated that into the mathematics of Quantum Mechanics and proposed a simple experimental test. Later that was refined by Bell and tested experimentally by Aspect and others. It was the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper that laid the groundwork of how to test the non-locality/hidden-variables of QM though.
EPR moved the scientific discussion forwards much more than Bohr did, but it turns out the test they proposed showed that the position they favored was incorrect.
Also Einstein was arguing first and foremost that physics must be _local_. That's in opposition to the "spooky action at a distance" bit that he didn't like. Since local hidden variables are ruled out then he really was proven "wrong".
TL;DR I think Bohr's argument is rubbish, and Einstein's is solid, but the Universe is a bitch and doesn't care...
I don't know if you can say he was proven wrong, but the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox was put forward to demonstrate that quantum mechanics must be incomplete, because to accept it implied "spooky action at a distance".
Today, most physicists accept the spooky action at a distance rather than the idea that QM is incomplete.
He (kind of) had to add the cosmological constant to GR just so the universe wouldn't collapse onto itself and instead be static. The idea of the unchanging universe was maybe partly due to personal or religious preconceptions. So at least in his mind the universe was static, which of course was proven "wrong" by the discovery that the universe is expanding. This was not a proper scientific theory of his, rather a preconception, like his aversion to the randomness of Quantum Physics (again, religion it appears).
Of course, being Einstein, he was again on the right side of the argument when the universe was much later discovered to be accelerating, again requiring a cosmological constant (or some similar fudge factor).
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 326 ms ] threadThis also means that between LIGO and ATLAS/CMS, the last few years have screwed in the final screws on two of the big physics advances of the 20th century: quantum field theory and general relativity are now both experimentally complete, and both look nearly unassailed in their correctness. The next steps for physics look increasingly abstruse: understanding the exceptional cases, like black holes, holography, and the fundamentally computational form of the universe. It's an exciting time, and it looks more and more like we're close to the very bottom, since we have to look so far now to find anything outside our models.
For what it's worth we thought the same thing a little over 100 years ago. We just had to figure out a few pesky things like blackbody radiation and physics would be all wrapped up.
But yes, it's the fringes that we'll find new physics. It's not unlike the late 19th century when newtonian + E&M seemed to account for all there was to know.
There hardest thing in fundamental physics right now is to know what questions to ask. We've got answers that work for a lot of the biggest ones that the last 100 years have been spent developing and exploring.
You forgot about dark matter.
And the devices required to probe Plank length/mass/energy are way beyond even our imagination.
That's been going on for a few hundred years now.
Dark matter (about 25%) seems to only interact gravitationally, which means that we've just, today, proven that we have an instrument that could possibly observe it directly. To date, all our evidence for dark matter is indirect--observing the otherwise unexplained behavior of normal matter. Today is the gravitational equivalent to Galileo pointing his first telescope at the night sky.
Dark energy (about 70%) still seems to be a total mystery.
And of course there is our inability to reconcile quantum mechanics with gravity. With each further proof of the correctness of each of those theories, the mystery of their apparent incompatibility deepens.
All of these factors lead me to believe that we may still have a long way to go in our understanding of the physical universe. I hope I'm right.
This is also why I believe it is so important to pursue nuclear energy. If we do invent further theories and experiments, it's likely that they will require even greater energy levels than we can create now, and potentially imply even greater dangers. If we can't learn to manage nuclear physics in a practical, routine way, we'll never have a hope of going beyond it (if indeed there is a "beyond.")
Just on the back of an envelope: If we assume the percentages in my post above apply to an individual galaxy, then there has to be 5x as much dark matter mass as lit mass. There's no way you could have 5x as much gas and dust in a galaxy as stars, and not see it.
For comparison, the sun makes up about 99.8% of the Solar System mass (500x as much mass as all the planets, dust, etc. combined).
A bit of Googling tells me that the current estimate of its mass is in the order of 5-10 Earth masses--not nearly enough to explain dark matter.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=mass+of+the+solar+syst...
So we might be here only because our solar system is surrounded by an unusual amount of nothing.
Consider that we can currently detect differences in luminosity small enough to tell whether an Earth-size planet is passing between us and the star. A 5x mass Oort cloud would be thousands of times more mass than that. It would have noticeable effect on luminosity.
And, while our sun has an Oort cloud, there are a lot of stars out there that probably don't--too small, too big, too hot, too young, too old, etc.
That leaves just 0.2% for all the planets, dust, Oort cloud, Kuiper belt, etc. So ... no.
Please don't just disagree when you don't know what you are talking about.
> That always confused me. We have an Oort cloud, whose members we cannot resolve very well/at all. Why do we assume only our star has such a thing? If all stars did, that isn't enough mass to explain dark matter?
No, that isn't enough mass to explain dark matter, since it's only 0.1% to 0.2% of the mass of the solar system.
The text I quoted was in complete agreement with what you and others have posted. I was pointing out that the questioner's point had already been answered.
In reality, it's something we have no idea what it is, except that it's not visible and a big source of gravity.
Don't look at the current theory of dark matter (weakly interacting massive particles) as some hare-brained scheme that scientists thought up, instead look at it as the hard-fought victor of numerous observational challenges. Dark matter is the theory that survived. We tried explaining things a zillion other ways (gas clouds, compact objects, neutrinos) and those theories just didn't match the observations. There are also a few exceptional circumstances (such as the bullet cluster) that indicate very strongly that dark matter is something different than either gas clouds or stuff like stars and planets, because in the bullet cluster we can observe the gas and the stars and planets and the mass, and each of them are in different places because each of them follow different rules when it comes to interacting during a galactic cluster collision.
You mean like ether?
Well, we know that both theories are "wrong" in the sense that they give nonsense answers if you ask them the wrong questions. It's just that all of those questions are well beyond our ability to test experimentally.
Actual paper here: http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116...
Am I reading this correctly, that shortly after the detector came online we just happened to observe the exact moment a billion years ago that two black holes collided?
Was that extremely coincidental? Or do these events happen all the time, and so if it wasn't those two black holes it would be two others?
From the article, no one knows: "Black holes, the even-more-extreme remains of dead stars, could be expected to do the same, but nobody knew if they existed in pairs or how often they might collide. If they did, however, the waves from the collision would be far louder and lower pitched than those from neutron stars."
I should add that there are lots of selection biases and educated guesses in all of this, too. The signal from BH-BH mergers is louder and easier to detect from larger distances. At the same time, NSs are probably more common than BHs, but it's not really clear whether there are more NS-NS binaries than BH-BH binaries because NSs receive kicks from the supernova when they are born but BHs (probably) do not. This may have the effect of blowing apart many nascent NS-NS binaries but leaving the BH-BH binaries intact.
I guess you could count one looong wave as a series of one-time events/measurements, but it could as well be a loooong interference.
In case you'd like to dig deeper, the 85 and 86 mentioned are:
[85] K. Cannon et al., Astrophys. J. 748, 136 (2012).
[86] S. Privitera, S. R. P. Mohapatra, P. Ajith, K. Cannon, N. Fotopoulos, M. A. Frei, C. Hanna, A. J. Weinstein, and J. T. Whelan, Phys. Rev. D 89, 024003 (2014),
To put it another way, you need a single black swan to prove that black swans exists (to whatever sigma).
Also, I cannot edit nor delete it now, so tough luck!
I may have pushed the analogy too far!
And from the paper: "The source lies at a luminosity distance of 410+160-180 Mpcc corresponding to a redshift z=0.09+0.03-0.04.". (https://dcc.ligo.org/LIGO-P150914/public) Which corresponds to 1.337+0.522-0.587 billion ly (or between 750.2 million and 1.859 billion ly).
Looks like there are roughly three million galaxies within a billion light years. Seems like lots of space for black hole pairs to live in. I suppose over the coming years, these gravity wave observatories will nail down just how common they are.
That's some serious range!
For example, the edge of the observable universe is about 46.5 lightyears away, while the universe is thought to be 13.8 billion years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe#Misconcept...
I assume you mean 46.5 billion?
Also, have read today that this discovery backs inflationary theory, how so?
It seems highly unlikely that they could say a specific bh-bh merger was the cause. It seems implied they are triangulating the source, with two detectors?
Or if spacetime folds back onto itself?
Analogy: it could happen that tomorrow Jesus Christ descends from the heavens and brings the day of reckoning. That would prove Christianity to be true, but the fact that this could happen does not make Christianity a falsifiable theory.
A falsifiable theory is a theory that predicts something that we can (in theory) measure today (possibly requiring infinite resources etc).
Your second example (which is not a multiverse theory at all) is actually a good example of a falsifiable theory. People have calculated [1] that if spacetime was folded back onto itself at even just a single point, it would leave a distinct signature in the cosmic microwave background. We do not observe this signature, so we are pretty sure spacetime does not fold back onto itself.
[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1108.2842
Just to be clear here; that's because there is no theory for a multiverse. Not yet, anyways. Nobody has put one forth yet. When you hear "multiverse" come out of physicist's mouth, it's because it's a concept indirectly related to other theories. The current popular theory which involves a multiverse is string theory. When string theorists do the math, there is some evidence that a multiverse is possible.
However, that doesn't mean much. Even if string theory was correct and little strings are really the fundamental component of everything in the universe, the multiverse part of string theory could still be wrong. The theory isn't reliant on it, it just doesn't forbid it.
I also wouldn't say that it's entirely untestable. There are a couple things that could be indicative of a multiverse that some physicists have looked for: http://phys.org/news/2010-12-scientists-evidence-universes.h...
The source isn't the greatest, but it shows that we can look at the CMB for indirect evidence. With higher resolution scanning years in the future, such a theory may be testable. I only mention this because the way your comment reads, it sounds like you're saying a multiverse would be inherently untestable.
Interested to know what they were shooting for when they spun this experiment up.
Counterintuitive, but yes. Because it happened billions of years ago, it happened a long long way away. The sphere of objects billions of years away/ago is far larger than those closer to us. So such a detector should be detecting exponentially more very old objects than new ones. Given the rarity, I would expect nearly all detected events to have happened long long ago in galaxies far far away.
Also, models point to such events being more common in the distant past where there were more black holes (primordials) floating around than there are now.
The volume of a constant-thickness spherical shell is O(r^2).
The article makes it sound like the detection of these waves is just a quick one-time blip though. I'd expect something as big as black holes merging to generate more longer lasting waves than just a quick blip. What is the period of these waves?
What I am trying to ask is if these behave like concentric water ripples, where from a single event you get first one peak of a wave, followed by many more repeated concentric peaks gradually getting smaller in amplitude? It sounds like there is just a single momentary wavefront without any residual secondary waves? Why is that?
Note that this is a _very_ rough estimate, but it should give you an idea of the order of magnitude for the settling time.
A massive ripple in the very fabric of reality?
Hawking, for instance, believes that the Hawking Radiation from a black hole encodes the information that went into creating the hole.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox...
No they don't. There is a law known as [Huygens' principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens%E2%80%93Fresnel_princi...) which says that when a disturbance at a particular point creates a wave, that wave only propagates on an outwards-expanding sphere that is centered at that point of disturbance, and does not produce any effect on the interior of that sphere. This was originally formulated for light waves, but it also holds for other kinds of waves, such as sound waves or, in this case, gravitational waves. What this means is that when you look at something that's far away you see a sharp image of exactly what happened there a short time ago (the time it had taken the light to reach you), whereas if the principle did not hold, each light source would have a small "echo" after it which would blur the image.
However, one of the reasons Huygens' principle holds is that the waves are propagating over three dimensions. In contrast, water waves only propagate over two dimensions, so Huygens' principle fails. That is why ripples continue to emanate from a spot even long after the disturbance there is over. More generally, Huygens' principle holds whenever the number of dimensions is odd and fails whenever the number of dimensions is even.
[Note: I may be wrong on why Huygens' principle fails for water waves. Water waves are actually pretty complicated compared to other kinds of waves and I am not knowledgeable in all the subtleties.]
Here's a better article:
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/gravitational-waves-e...
This is right. Soon we'll have a much more precise value for "all the time!"
Distance. A billion light-years is a very long distance, and the inverse-square law applies.
As others have said, intensity (power per unit area) decreases according to the same inverse square law that governs most effects due to localized sources in three dimensions of space. In this case, you're looking at a distance of over a billion light years, and then squaring it: that's a pretty enormous "per unit area"!
But gravity itself is also a tremendously weak force compared to the others. That may seem surprising at first, but it becomes pretty clear when I point out that a cheap little refrigerator magnet exerts enough force to overcome the gravitational pull of an entire planet right beneath it. Gravitational waves are pretty much just ripples on the top of that already tiny force.
For comparison, the wave that was detected is claimed to be "four one-thousandths of the diameter of a proton". That's about 7e-18 meters, on a baseline arm length of 4 km, so about one part in 6e20 -- about 175,000 times stronger than the waves Earth's orbit produces. And that was about 40x as strong as minimal sensitivity on LIGO, according to the article ("can detect changes in the length of one of those arms as small as one ten-thousandth the diameter of a proton").
Obviously if we were closer to the black hole collision we'd see much stronger waves. But you really do need very massive bodies accelerating very much (or equivalently orbiting very fast) to produce something that's detectable by LIGO over interstellar distances at all. The key part from this article is that the orbital period was about 1/250 of a second at the end; compare to Earth's orbital period. Going back to the formula given in the above Wikipedia entry, the frequency dependence is hiding in the "1/r" factor for the amplitude. 1/r is proportional to w^{2/3} (though it's not clear to me whether that's still true in a general-relativistic treatment; it's true enough for the Earth's orbit), which tells you how the wave amplitude scales with frequency...
Based on what level of civilization you are. Rubbing two black holes in for a ping, might be the same as rubbing two stones for a spark. Advanced civilization go really advanced, to a point their activities would be undetectable to us or would appear to us the nature of reality itself.
This is science fiction, not an argument. We have no rational reason at the moment to believe this is the case, or even possible.
What we do in fact have is an increasing trend towards efficiency. Projecting that out along crazy growth curves suggests that advanced aliens are likely to be more horrified by such a waste of negentropy than we are. What can we do with that much negentropy? Nothing, basically. What can they do? Simulate many millions/billions/whoknows of human-level civilizations?
They're not more likely to be indifferent about such waste, they're more likely to prosecute you, for mass civilizational murder.
I've often thought that if civilization could advance to that point in the future, that I'd have a difficult time explaining to my great-great-great-X grandchildren that when ol' great-great-great-X-grandpa was young, you know, pouring a tank of gasoline into the car got me from point A to point B and that was it, despite it being enough energy in that one tank of gas to, say, simulate an entire human's life time. Well, kids, we didn't have that option! The tech didn't exist. So stop trying to put ol' Greats on trial for things he couldn't control, OK?
There are not only rational reasons, but even evidences to support what I'm trying to say.
Look at any insect colony or bacteria, they don't even recognize our presence, let alone our technology.
>>What we do in fact have is an increasing trend towards efficiency. Projecting that out along crazy growth curves suggests that advanced aliens are likely to be more horrified by such a waste of negentropy than we are.
We the advanced aliens to ants, are indulging waste and plastic pollution like never before. And ants the aliens to bacteria might appear the same.
Efficiency and waste are very relative terms based on what level of abundance or austerity on is supposed to live on.
[0]http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/137-physics/genera...
[1]https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/78118/quantum-en...
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante (X) Physics-based
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
(X) The amount of energy involved would likely destroy the planet.
(X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(X) The relative sparseness of non-dark energy in our vicinity
(X) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(X) I don't want the government reading my email
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(I'm sorry, but I couldn't resist)
"The collision unleashed the energy of a billion trillion Suns in a fraction of a second."
I naively assume that shorter distances would require less energy.
Well, if you observe a meaningful, non-natural gravity wave signal, you know that you've discovered not merely another technical situation (which you'd know if you detected the same thing in radio waves), but a phenomenally advanced one.
So, if not an advantage, there is at least a meaningful difference.
Sorry I am not vary knowledgeable on the topic.
Beyond that, I guess I'd say that this particular signal doesn't feel like that much of a surprise: we were already pretty confident that if a black hole binary were to merge, a signal more or less like this would be an expected result. The scientists were evidently surprised that their very first signal was so strong (this one was even borderline detectable by the previous version of LIGO), which may teach us something, but it's not revolutionary.
On the other hand, there is now a way to see dark matter. That could enable a lot of new astronomy.
Not really. Portable computers were envisioned quite a long time ago.
There are many possible paths to rebutting my statement, which to be clear is idle morning musing, but your objection doesn't hold water.
Submarines already do this to detect other vessels AFAIK.
I would say one obstacle that stands in the way of "spying" on objects moving on the Earth's surface is that the gravitational wave energy emitted by accelerating objects on Earth would be "too small" for current detectors. Not to mention that there would be the issue of how to filter gravitational wave noise, and/or isolate frequencies. However, if it possible to build an amplifier or filter to resolve these issues, that remains to be seen - or maybe somebody else could chime in.
edit: typos, clarity
Funny choice of words. Screens were "on the radar" systems which prompted the development of one of the earliest forms of computer memory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory
(I don't know if anyone envisioned shrinking those vats of mercury down to pocket size, however.)
Maybe it's the psychology of how we (fail to) deal with different scales. Discovering new, larger, more wonderful places in the Universe doesn't make the Earth any smaller or less wonderful than it is. Our brains might "zoom out" our mental map to fit these new places in, which makes us appear smaller, but in fact it's our horizons that have grown.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_country_pe... there were nearly 200,000 books published in the UK in 2011. That doesn't make the works of Shakespeare insignificant.
Wherever we went on earth we've colonized quickly. If we can do that to space, universe might be our backyard.
On the other hand, it's nice to know the world really does appear to be boundless. I mean in terms of the possible.
We aren't much, but we are here and it's a pretty awesome experience.
Maybe we need to be here, otherwise what is the point?
I like to think there are others too, thinking thoughts like we are. Maybe that is necessary too. Maybe nobody has reached a point in their development for more, or contact to make sense.
I find our time here and now bittersweet. So much is yet to be experienced and understood. But, then again, here and now isn't all bad. We have great science, new frontiers opening up all the time. Our stories of the future are fantastic, and there is still a lot of magic and wonder about us, the world, reality...
We may not see the best. In fact, I say none of us will, but right now is never dull.
I feel like we are just beginning to get a real grasp on reality. That seems powerful and exciting. We could have lived in much darker, harder, ignorant times.
These times may be seen that way too, or they may be a peak, with a decline to come. Nobody knows, and I like it that way.
It depends on how you look at it. You are taking a pessimist's view on things that the universe is so large and we are so small that we don't matter. If you take an optimists's view on things you'll discover that we do matter and learning new things increases our significance.
Also I wonder, in this form as humans, can anyone really comprehend what this all means, beyond the Math and experimental confirmations?
What if we are living in a simulation, and just being played?
Possibly stupid question: Given how far away it was, and that the inverse square law applies, would the effect of these waves be visible on the human scale if we were closer? We can see the effects of the compression of spacetime with LIGO after all, so presumably we could?
Which was the order of predictions I'd read, years back, but egads. Considering how much larger that is than a supernova, I'd be concerned to have such an event happen in this galaxy...
LIGO measures wave amplitude, as far as I can tell, which goes down linearly with distance (unlike wave energy, which goes down quadratically, since it's proportional to square of the amplitude). So we could expect to see an effect about a billion times bigger.
The detected effect was a change in metric of one part in 6e20 if I'm not mistaken: (4e-3 * (diameter of proton))/4km based on the article's claim of "four one-thousandths of the diameter of a proton". So at one light year distance we could expect an effect of one part in 6e11.
Not really visible on the human scale, seems to me. You could detect it easily with something like the Mössbauer effect, I expect. Your typical lab bench laser interferometer has errors on the order of 1 in 1e6 as far as I can tell, so probably wouldn't be able to pick this up.
Disclaimer: I could be totally off on what a lab bench laser interferometer can do. I'm pretty confident in the rest of the numbers above.
With LIGO there is an extra set of mirrors within the arms this allows the light from the laser to bounce between them ~100 times or so increasing the effective path length greatly.
[1] https://www.nsf.gov/news/speeches/colwell/rc03_ligo/img009.j...
So, inverse square that explosion... 1 light year is about 10^16m, so we square that and get 10^32m, so we're now talking about ... 10^15 J.
So, unless my maths is all off (which is possible), if this happened about a light year away, whoever's on the side facing towards the blast wouldn't get to observe very much because they'd feel as if a 1kt nuke just went off above their head. Not a great way to start the day.
Chances are it would wipe out life on Earth too, through the ensuing side-effects like lighting the atmosphere on fire, sterilising half the planet, significantly heating up the oceans, possibly even stripping part of the atmosphere away, etc.
For a great novel based around a strikingly similar premise to what was just observed (and the main reason I even bothered to calculate this), Diaspora by Greg Egan is a fantastic book.
I agree that 3 solar masses worth of electromagnetic radiation at 1 light year distance would feel like a nuke going off. What I don't know is to what extent the energy of the equivalent gravitational waves (which _would_ have a lot of energy I agree) would actually get transferred to things we care about, like the atmosphere and us. If it's a few percent, say, we'd clearly be in trouble. If it's more like what neutrinos do, it would probably be detectable but probably not by unaided human senses.
I tried doing some quick looking around for estimates of gravitational wave coupling and energy transfer and didn't find anything so far...
The difference in terms of detection is that the wave does this in a time-varying, periodic fashion.
For something like LIGO, we're trying to measure length changes on the order of 1e-18 meters. We're not actually measuring the lengths of LIGO's arms to that accuracy, though. What we're measuring is the difference between the times light takes to travel down those arms. And even that's hard to measure on an absolute scale, so what we really measure is how that difference changes in time.
Or put another way, the effect of Earth's gravitational well is not really distinguishable from inaccuracies in making the two legs of the interferometer equal length to start with, and is a much smaller effect than those inaccuracies. Again, if I understand this right...
But back in 1916, Einstein also theorised, as part of his general theory of gravitation, that there would be such things as gravity waves, caused by very massive objects moving through spacetime making 4-dimensional ripples appear in spacetime. Until today, that was just an unproven theory, though everyone believed it was likely to be true. There is now solid evidence to back it.
It's more about understanding what the measurable effects of a gravitational well on earth has on the LIGO experimental setup (or a similar one with infinite precision), in the absence of gravitational waves.
At first glance, I'd guess that this discovery only strengthens that conclusion: even a small deviation from GR might well change the detailed behavior of an immensely high curvature situation like a black hole merger, and what we saw seems to have been a spot on match for the GR-based models.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternatives_to_general_relati...
> Just recall how Kopernik's theory of solar system got accepted. It had worse predictions than Ptolemy's scheme at the time it was introduced
Yes, and it wasn't accepted at the time it was introduced. Actually, Copernicus' theory in its original form was never really "accepted"; what was accepted was Kepler's reformulation using elliptical orbits, based on Brahe's more accurate observations. Kepler's model was more accurate than Ptolemy's, and that was a key factor in its acceptance.
Yes, it does. Do you know how the classical limit of quantum theory works? That limit is what allows us to use classical physics in the domain where it works. If that limit didn't work, we would have a serious problem with consistency.
> It only gives probabilities of results of specified experiments of certain kinds; it does not reproduce the old predictions (like definite trajectories, Moon phases or solar eclipses)
Are you aware that all of those "old predictions" can indeed be derived from quantum theory, using the classical limit I described above? The reason that works is that, in the classical limit, quantum theory predicts a probability of 1 for one result--the classical result.
> It is natural to expect of any new theory to bring new results, but demanding that it reproduces all the old ones along is too much.
You appear to have a mistaken understanding of how new theories get accepted. New theories that don't reproduce all of the predictions of the theory they replace, in the domains where the old theory is verified by experiment, are not accepted. If general relativity had not reproduced all of the predictions of Newtonian gravity in the weak field, slow motion limit, it would not have been accepted. And if quantum theory had not reproduced all of the predictions of classical physics in the classical limit, it would not have been accepted.
Joseph Larmor, LXIII, On the theory of the Magnetic Influence on Spectra ; and on the Radiation from moving Ions, Philosophical Magazine Series 5 Vol. 44, Iss. 271, 1897
Erwin Schrodinger, Quantisierung als Eigenwertproblem. Annalen der Phys. 384 (4) (1926)
This was not a "new theory" that was competing with any "old theories". It was a tentative model in a regime where no previous theory existed, and it was never claimed to cover anything outside that limited regime. It wasn't competing with any other theories, because there were no other theories to compete with. The question of whether or not Schrodinger's model reproduced the predictions of the "old" theory never arose, because there was no "old" theory. (Technically, there was a sort of "old" theory of the hydrogen atom--Bohr's model--but Schrodinger's model did reproduce all of its correct predictions, plus it added more correct predictions of things that the Bohr model got wrong.)
The position with regard to gravitational waves is very different; we already have a comprehensive, fundamental theory--General Relativity--that explains them. Any alternative theory that only explained GWs, and didn't also explain all the other experimental results that GR explains, would be a nonstarter.
> Larmor's older theory (1897)
This wasn't a separate "theory" at all; it was just a derivation of a particular formula using an already known theory, Maxwell's Equations.
Of course Schrodinger's model didn't reproduce the results of classical EM with regard to the atom. It wasn't supposed to, because those results of classical EM were wrong. In other words, there wasn't a correct "old theory" that covered the regime the Schrodinger model covered (the atom)--there was only a wrong "old theory".
As far as using Schrodinger's model plus classical EM theory to get results like emission line intensities, there also there was no correct "old theory"; there was only a wrong "old theory" (classical EM by itself, which did not predict emission lines at all, let alone their intensities--it predicted a continuous emission spectrum). Also, this hybrid classical-quantum model was known to be incomplete at the time; it was only used because nobody had yet figured out how to quantize the EM field.
> It is the new benefit that the theory brings, not reproduction of every single result of the previous theories
Once again, this is not the situation under discussion in this thread (gravitational waves). In the case you describe, the results of the previous theories were wrong in the regime the new model covered, so there was nothing to reproduce; there was no correct "old theory" for the new theory to compete with.
In the case of gravitational waves, we have a correct "old theory"--General Relativity--so any new theory that did not match that correct old theory would be a nonstarter. I am not aware of any case where a new theory was accepted as interesting when there was a correct old theory covering the same regime and the new theory did not reproduce its results.
You're badly mistaken. Although nobody succeeded in obtaining the emission line frequencies of gases out of the classical EM theory, the theory did correctly give other results consistent with observations. One of them is the formula for emission intensity that connects energy radiated with second derivative of electric moment; it goes back to Larmor's work. This was the result the new theory would preferably reproduce or at least be consistent with. Wave mechanics wasn't consistent with it - the hydrogen atom oscillates indefinitely in wave mechanics. Schroedinger himself viewed this as a deficiency and planned to get back to it - check the ending part of his seminal papers on wave mechanics. The classical formula is taught to this day both in macroscopic EM theory and quantum optics courses, although there are some deficiencies and problems about the formula that Larmor did not know.
> In the case of gravitational waves, we have a correct "old theory"--General Relativity--so any new theory that did not match that correct old theory would be a nonstarter.
I do not think any physics theory could even be "correct" in the sense of Platonic ideals, but I do not know what you mean by "correct". I do not claim a new theory could completely replace the old one before it could deliver the same or better results. I claim theory has value and is accepted based on its new benefits, not its superiority in every aspect the old theory was superior before. Calling incomplete theory non-starter makes no sense to me, as all theories, including General Relativity, are incomplete.
No, I'm not; you're just mistaken about which classical results I was referring to. I meant the results of classical EM that predicted that atoms could not exist--because the electrons would radiate until they fell into the nucleus. And what classical formula tells you how much the electrons will radiate because of their acceleration due to responding to the electric field of the nucleus? Larmor's formula.
In other words, Larmor's formula was not a "theory"--it was a particular result derived within a theory. The particular result happened to be correct, within a particular limited domain; but the underlying theory that was used to derive it could not explain why it was correct--because the same theory, and indeed the same particular result--the same formula--made other predictions that were obviously egregiously wrong (like predicting that atoms would collapse).
> nobody succeeded in obtaining the emission line frequencies of gases out of the classical EM theory
You're drastically understating the failure of classical EM here. It's not that classical EM couldn't predict the particular frequencies of emission lines. It's that classical EM couldn't predict the existence of emission lines at all. Classical EM predicted that atoms would emit a continuous spectrum of radiation--not radiation sharply peaked at particular frequencies.
> The classical formula is taught to this day both in macroscopic EM theory and quantum optics courses
Sure, because within its domain of validity, it works fine as an approximation. But that's all it is--an approximation. And we explain why the approximation works, and why it works only within a particular domain of validity, by reference to the more complete underlying theory--quantum electrodynamics.
> I do not know what you mean by "correct".
I mean "makes predictions that match the results of experiments".
I agree; but there's a big difference between:
- A theory that is incomplete because it doesn't cover absolutely everything, including where we haven't tested yet and won't be able to for the foreseeable future, but makes correct predictions everywhere we can actually test it; and
- A theory that is incomplete because it makes predictions about some things that are obviously at variance with observation, even though it makes correct predictions about others.
GR is an incomplete theory in the former sense; and theories that are incomplete in that sense can still be used to safely rule out competing theories that don't match their predictions in regimes where those predictions have been extensively confirmed.
However, classical electromagnetism is an incomplete theory in the latter sense; it made obviously wrong predictions, like the ultraviolet catastrophe and the instability of atoms. And even the correct predictions it made, like using the Larmor formula to predict radiative properties of atoms, were only obtained by using the theory inconsistently: by first assuming, contrary to the classical EM prediction, that atoms could be stable at all, and then working out what classical EM said about how these impossible objects (impossible according to classical EM) could radiate.
In a situation like that, you can't safely use the theory to rule out other theories, because the theory contradicts itself, and you can prove anything from contradictory assumptions. That's why classical EM physicists couldn't say "well, the Schrodinger theory can't be right, because I can't use it to derive the Larmor formula". You can't consistently use classical EM to derive the Larmor formula either; you have to sweep certain things under the rug and wave your hands that somehow or other it's ok.
In a situation like the latter, yes, you're right that anything that can give some handle on making predictions is going to be at least tried. But that's a very different situation from the former situation, where we have a correct theory that, within its domain of validity, doesn't have any of those issues. The only issue with GR is that it's not a quantum theory, which means, in the eyes of many physicists, that it's incomplete; but that incompleteness has no practical consequences whatsoever. It certainly is not a reason to entertain alternative theories of gravitational waves that get other predictions wrong that GR gets right.
I am unfamiliar with modern alternatives to comment.
Why are we surprised at gravitational waves when 2 black holes collided?
This is less "wow, look at what an unexpected result we found!" and more that we finally managed to measure something we've been looking for.
Or, put another way, is the speed of light only a constant because we measure it in constant gravity?
Any effect of gravitational fluctuations in spacetime on the speed of light is a bit like a car driving on a race track that has treadmills scattered around it pointing in various directions and speeds. The car's speedometer will always read the same value because it's measuring the speed of its tires on whatever it's driving on.
... and I shudder to think that more often than not, anything I code in C/C++ will segfault on first run.
We've known gravity waves existed since the Hulse-Taylor pulsar, so just observing them for the first time is not nearly as interesting as the science to come in the next decade. Advanced LIGO is a powerful new tool that will open up exciting new observations.
In the future this will get better when VIRGO in Italy and KAGRA [2] in Japan come online. Then we will have 4 independent detectors which will be able to verify that same signal is observed at the same time.
Obviously of course given the transient nature of what is being observed once the merger has occurred it will very rapidly stop producing gravitational waves so we will not be able to measure the same event again.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgo_interferometer
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KAGRA
" On 14 September 2015, while Drago was on the phone with a LIGO colleague in Italy, his pipeline sent him an email alert—of which he receives about one each day—telling him that both LIGO detectors had registered an “event” (a nonroutine reading) 3 minutes earlier, at 11:50:45 a.m. local time. It was a big one. “The signal-to-noise ratio was quite high—24 as opposed to [the more typical] 10,” he says."
If this happened in the centre of the Milky Way, we're about 25k light years away.
Let's say 2 1 million solar masses black holes merged there... and they also gave off about 3/60 of their mass as radiation, that's about 100'000 solar masses being radiated 25k light years away.
Using my calculation in the other post, we're talking 10^52 Joules. Across a distance of 25'000 light years, or about 10^20 metres, that's then decreased by 10^40 (inverse square) so we're left with about 10^12 Joules...
Which is good news! If that happened in the Milky Way, we would probably survive it - though we'd definitely notice some strange atmospheric effects...
Was he indeed always right on his theories for phenomenons before they could be proved by experiments; or is that the case that we only hear about when he is proved right?
Bohr's argument in the discussion was a bit of a mess and I couldn't pull anything out of his rebuttal to EPR other than an assertion that QM behaves the way it does and not to pay any attention to the man behind the curtain. Its a very philosophical argument with very little scientific content and he just proposes that the QM math is correct because its correct, as far as I can tell.
EPR made a logical cogent argument. It was based on the philosophical principle of the locality of physics. They translated that into the mathematics of Quantum Mechanics and proposed a simple experimental test. Later that was refined by Bell and tested experimentally by Aspect and others. It was the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper that laid the groundwork of how to test the non-locality/hidden-variables of QM though.
EPR moved the scientific discussion forwards much more than Bohr did, but it turns out the test they proposed showed that the position they favored was incorrect.
Also Einstein was arguing first and foremost that physics must be _local_. That's in opposition to the "spooky action at a distance" bit that he didn't like. Since local hidden variables are ruled out then he really was proven "wrong".
TL;DR I think Bohr's argument is rubbish, and Einstein's is solid, but the Universe is a bitch and doesn't care...
I don't think Eistein would've liked those much either due to 'spooky action at a distance'.
Today, most physicists accept the spooky action at a distance rather than the idea that QM is incomplete.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_paradox
Of course, being Einstein, he was again on the right side of the argument when the universe was much later discovered to be accelerating, again requiring a cosmological constant (or some similar fudge factor).