Pfui!
Could he predict the Death of David Bowie?
I read one article that stated that the collision that was detected happened 1.3 billion years ago. I assume that means that LIGO can tell where the gravity waves emanate from - the LIGO is directionally sensitive? And they were somehow able to tell how far away the event being detected took place?
The Nature article linked to above is great - it covers a lot of cool things that this new means of detection can deepen our knowledge about. Very cool.
The articles focus on three initial scientists - Kip Thorne of the California Institute of Technology, Rainer Weiss of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Ronald Drever, formerly of Caltech and now retired in Scotland - as the likely focus of recognition, a Nobel, etc. Apparently Drever suffers from dementia so can’t bask in the glow of this historic recognition.
Cool. Ranier V. Weiss was one of my professor (for the Junior Physics Lab) at MIT. His office was in the creaky wooden old “Radiation Lab” Building #20 that dated back to the second world war (and was torn down several years ago to make way for the Gehry-designed Stata Center).
I can’t find that bit in the article, but it’s possible that things got garbled with a way of gauging the sensitivity of the detectors used that’s been in a few of the news items—namely, that they can resolve changes in distance that are of the order of 1/1000th of the proton (charge) radius, about 10[sup]-18[/sup]m. Another comparison I heard is that it’s akin to measuring the distance between the sun and the nearest star with an accuracy up to the width of a human hair. Which is pretty damn accurate.
In the Nature article, they discuss how protons are massless, but they aren’t sure about gravitons. By comparing the two, they can figure out if gravitons move at the speed of light and are also massless or move a bit slower and have a small amount of mass. This would have big implications, apparently, on how gravity effects are modeled, I think it said.
Photons, right?
Can a gravitational wave be surfed?
Indeed :smack::smack: