Discussion for article #245891
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IMO, this is the single most significant scientific discovery in a century. Demonstrating gravitational waves do exist goes a long way to help our understanding of the universe.
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I mean … This discovery is great … but —
Don’t ya think the $$ spent on this would have been better used as tax breaks for the top earners ? ? – They would get a lot more mileage crashing some “waves” in a 200 ft, yacht than knowing a warp exists in the space-time continuum — Like this makes a difference anyway — Give the money to the wise and rich among us and it will help the stagnant economy by trickling down to the rest of us — I’ve been saving up for a 1982 chevy well, since they came out —
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Einsteins reputation grows once again.
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extraordinarily faint ripples in space-time, the hard-to-fathom fourth dimension that combines time with the familiar up, down, left and right.
AP writer lives in Flatland, apparently.
Cool Story Bro: an old friend of mine - the smartest person I have ever met - worked on LIGO when he was at CalTech in the 90s. Then he went into the NSA and got shot at in some middle-eastern country. His life path is all sharp turns and switchbacks.
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I noticed that too. Also (if I’m parsing the sentence correctly) he is using “space-time” to refer to an additional (?) single dimension.
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Even in the Eighties, when newspapers were flourishing, AP stories tended to be one-dimensional and often flatly wrong. : ) This sort of thing is just beyond them. BBC does a good job with high-end physics and I’m reading an Atlantic story right now for which I have hopes.
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I need Neil Degrasse-Tyson to explain this to me.
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This is so cool. Although we don’t know how this will change life in the future, somewhere down the road it will, Immensely. In ways we can’t anticipate.
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Someone ought to tell him that the universe may be a non-orientable manifold like a Klein bottle, and so, poof, there goes left-right.
Should have played it safe and just said “combines time with the familiar three spatial dimensions.” If he had to use descriptors, he could have said height, width, and depth, I guess, although those words are a little fuzzy. You could mention three perpendicular ways of moving: up/down, left/right, and backwards/forwards, I guess.
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Uh, it’s in some pretty tough competition:
- Einstein’s general and special relativity;
- the Copenhagen Interpretation on Quantum Physics, particularly Neils Bohr, his student Heisenberg, Einstein and Einstein’s follower Schrodinger, and Paul Dirac - that’s literally fundamental;
- discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background - that was pretty freakin’ big;
- reconciling the weak nuclear force to the electromagnetic effect, particularly by Steve Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow;
- reconciling the strong nuclear force to both the em effect and the weak force, particularly by Frank Wilczek;
- CERN’s John Stewart Bell, later a big big contributor to what we’re all on here right now, coming up with his Theorem on Localities, which was the map by which we were able to answer Einstein’s dismissal of entanglement as “spooky action at a distance” and attributable to “hidden variables” - which I’d see as right up there with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principles as the two strongest rivals to Einstein’s work on relativity;
- the 1998 finding that our universe is actually expanding in a rapidly accelerated way, by teams led by Saul Palmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Reiss, especially because it went against what everyone including they expected to find - that’s at least as technologically impressive as direction detection of gravitational waves, since we’ve expected them for over a century and have already had their existence confirmed for over 20 years, albeit indirectly; and
- the 1964 predictions in Pennsylvania, St. Andrews Scotland, and Belgium of what came to be known as the Higgs boson, which even more extraordinarily was proved out at CERN in 2012 - I’d pick that accomplishment over just about any tech-based experiment - it’s like how Wagner’s Ring Cycle as a cultural and theatrical accomplishment strides like Jolly Green over the entire valley of technologically dependent scientific discoveries over the last century.
This is big, and I’m excited, but get a grip, and at least wait for the movie starring Matthew McConaughey as Kip Thorne:
Every thing is massive,
And every thing that’s massive
Means there’s gravity
Every thing’s attractive
Even including white supremacist Donald T
Tho simultaneously repulsive
When considered asymptotically
Side by side Isaac
Maxwell, Max Planck & of course Big Al
Neils, Steve, Frank & Higgsy
And don’t you dare leave out John Stewart Bell
Every thing is massive
Every thing is E equals MC squared
Even gravity is massive
Though it only works to ensure stuff is snared …
Okay, I’d expect Randy Newman could do a lot better.
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“When massive but compact objects like black holes or neutron stars collide, they send gravity ripples across the universe.”
Sadly, this news comes one day too late.
“I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of Chris Christie jokes cried out, and were suddenly silenced.”
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“No, there is another…”
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Science is cool.
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His MATH rep, sure. But for every incredible display of imagination and extrapolation, Big Al seems also to have come up with a real stinker of a wrongo idea.
In this case, Einstein predicted that we’d never be able to detect gravitational waves at all, not just directly but even indirectly. They were first detected indirectly 22 years ago; and today’s technology is just bow edge: it’s expected that, to borrow from Trump, from now on we’ll be detecting so many gravitational waves so frequently, we’re gonna get tired of them - not really, but we’re gonna get to taking them for granted, which is maybe a good thing, maybe not.
And this was far from unique for Big Al: he blew it bad when he added a fudge factor to make the universe static, and when he finally conceded that he’d been proven dead wrong, and stupidly so given his own equations predicted expansion, by the Belgian priest LeMaitre and the American attorny-astronomer Hubble, he’s supposed to have called it “my biggest blunder”.
But then in 1935, as part of his ongoing argument with the Dane Neils Bohr over the Copenhagen interpretation for quantum physics, on which Bohr rebutted Big Al again and again ad nauseam, Einstein came up with his EPR paper, which is far from valueless, but was dead wrong in dismissing entanglement - which, it turns out, is critical to the very existence of stuff - as “spooky action at a distance”, and proven wrong by a number of enterprising experimental scientists using John Bell’s Theorem of Localities to test out whether entanglement was real, which Bell theorized it logically must be.
There was other stuff Einstein was wrong about too, but I’m certainly not arguing against him as the #1 Big Kahoona in physics. It’s just that even the smartest and best intentioned can and are wrong, even on very big things.
I don’t know how we can possibly how our politicians to a higher standard than even the smartest and best of our scientists can’t maintain.
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Appreciate the info I’m still a fan.
God this is so cool! A break through like this is going to hone our focus so that we can actually begin to see and understand the 96% (according to Neil Degrasse Tyson,) that we still don’t understand about the universe. What a fantastic day for science.
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See what you did there 
Einstein was the right kind of big Kahuna. When Szilard presented the letter to Roosevelt about that little 'ole chain reaction thingie, he said “I never thought of that” which is Big Kahuna for “way cool”, just what we’re all saying here, even us non-Kahunas.
We are human, even Big Al. So, we’re strange, we’re weird, we’re right, we’re wrong, we have good days, we have bad. As mathematician John Allen Paulos says, There’s two types of people, the ones who we all know are strange and do weird things, and the ones who haven’t met yet.
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Agree with what you said, but it’s “ad nauseam.” I used to make that mistake, too.