Gravity waves

[gugi]

The rumor has been officially confirmed; LIGO has detected waves of gravity!

Einstein's gravitational waves found at last : Nature News & Comment

[Hirlau]

Does this mean that if we (Earth) bump into a Black Hole,, all that will be heard by the rest of the Universe is a "Chirp"?

,,,,,,,,,,,I feel so insignificant,,,,,

Thank you for the positive start to my day Gugi,,,,,

[Ernie1980]

I saw this in the morning! It's amazing to me that Einstein predicted this almost 100 years ago and we were only now able to officially prove it.

[Jimbo]

This was the last of Einstein's predictions to be confirmed? I've got no idea what was being measured (ie what "strain" is) but measuring something in the order of 10^-21 is pretty good! Shame there was no corroboration from an independent source.

James.

[gugi]

Shame there was no corroboration from an independent source.

Yeah the cost of the toy is around $600M and this kind of money used to buy a US presidential seat.
Still, it's an order of magnitude less than the cost of 'observing' the Higgs boson, so there are a handful more around the world and we'll likely see more stuff in the future.

There was a project to create a space version of it called LISA but it was shut down few years ago. May be after Elon Musk puts people on Mars he'll build something like that

Interestingly, Einstein didn't believe in gravity waves, or quantum mechanics for that matter.

[gugi]

I saw this in the morning! It's amazing to me that Einstein predicted this almost 100 years ago and we were only now able to officially prove it.

My favorite quote on the subject is from 1929 by Dirac:

The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty lies only in the fact that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble.

Our modern technology in ordinary objects like computers (including cell phones, gps, drugs, etc.) is the result of getting better at solving and applying a near century old mathematical theory.

[tintin]

i've long suspected that there were gravitational waves. some days i just can't seem to hold on to things, seem to be always dropping my tools at work. as if they are being sucked out of my hands. (there is no such thing as gravity: the earth sucks!)

[Maladroit]

This was the last of Einstein's predictions to be confirmed? I've got no idea what was being measured (ie what "strain" is) but measuring something in the order of 10^-21 is pretty good! Shame there was no corroboration from an independent source.

James.

I think "strain" has the same meaning as it has when used in engineering, i.e. a measurement of distortion: new length minus old length divided by old length. Delta L if you like. So the passage of the gravity wave distorts space time of the order of 10^-21

[10Pups]

Very interesting indeed. This will require some serious contemplation on how it may effect my TOE.