Gravitational waves discovered?

January 11, 2016 • 2:54 pm

If they’re real, this is a stupendous discovery. Read about them here and here, and here’s a tw**t by Lawrence Krauss

42 thoughts on “Gravitational waves discovered?”

  1. I will stay tuned. Your postings save me countless hours searching for stories like this.

    BTW, do you think they are prevalent at sporting event? 😉

    2. That’s Mexican waves. Which will be illegal in the US if the Trump gets elected. 😉

      cr

      1. I live in Las Cruces, NM, where the Mexican Wave is achieved by rapidly fanning an open mouth while eating a Roberto flat enchilada.

    1. Image: Visualization of gravity waves. Image Credit: Werner Benger / Wikimedia.

      If I recall correctly, it’s a depiction of the merger of two neutron stars before they collapse into a black hole. (It’s not quite inevitable that they’d go to a black hole, but there’s not a lot of space between the 2 x 1.39 M-sol minimum masses for a neutron star and the maximum of about 3 M-sol.)

  3. Excellent news. It is wonderful how physics recently has been finding confirmation of some of the big ideas of the last century.

    I don’t think anyone seriously doubted the existence of gravitational waves, as General Relativity is a pretty sound theory, but they are astonishingly difficult to detect. It has taken a century of hard work to reach this point.

    Let’s hope for an official announcement soon.

      1. As I understand it, Einstein’s real objection was to the shut-up-and-calculate instrumentalism of the Copenhagen school. His thought experiments about entanglement have proved much more fruitful in advancing our understanding of it. So I think it’s unfair to chalk this up as an error on his part.

      2. That’s subtly different. Gravity waves are a consequence of General Relativity. If GR is right, then there are gravity waves.

        Likewise, quantum entanglement is a prediction of quantum mechanics. If quantum theory is correct, then there is quantum entanglement.

        Einstein’s prediction of the gravity waves is based on solid theoretical science, his rejection of quantum entanglement is based on a personal prejudice i.e. a dislike of quantum theory.

        1. Nitpick: “gravity waves” are something totally different, and much more mundane. The waves in spacetime in GR are “gravitational waves”.

    2. Einstein also thought his cosmological constant was a sort of blunder…in it hides >90% of the possible universe…dark matter and dark energy.

      1. in it hides >90% of the possible universe

        I think you mean the observed universe ; what is possible, but isn’t is probably a lot larger.

    3. There is very little doubt that gravitational radiation exists, both for theoretical reasons and because decay of the orbit of closely bound systems containing a pulsar (which won the Nobel Prize for Physics for Hulse and Taylor in 1993) exactly matches the prediction from general relativity, where the radiation carries away energy, causing the orbits to decay.

      The exciting part will be that the radiation will carry information about the final stages of the merger of black holes, allowing new tests of GR in the regime of strong gravitational fields.

  5. This is one of few websites that can explain science in a way I can understand, without dumbing down too much. So I’m staying tuned as well.

  6. Exciting, though a social rumor rather than the usual official speculation over a promising-but-not-final data release. It may be a day of some gravity.

      1. Had a colleague once who, any time discussions got too far-fetched, would hold up a pencil. When everyone was looking at it, he would let it fall to the table and remark “I see they left the gravity on”.

        cr

  9. Fingers crossed. In order to do my part my legs are also crossed, and I shall toss some salt over my shoulder. Or was that sugar?
    Oh, oh.

  11. By coincidence, before going to the movies (Danish Girl : spoiler – she isn’t), I was listening the the Science in action pre-recorded Xmas edition which included an interview with someone who’d be on duty at LIGO on Xmas Day.

  12. Many astronomers are a bit miffed that he didn’t wait for the official announcement, so that the appropriate people get credit, and just in case there is a mistake in the interpretation of the data that is found before the public release.

  13. I attended a talk on Sunday by Dr David Nice of Lafayette College who is a researcher on a competitive method called NANOGrav, which uses pulsars to probe spacetime for gravity waves. He thought the LIGO team was much closer than his team to success

  18. I have a two requests of Lawrence Krauss. Stop spreading rumors, and apologize to my colleague, Gabriela Gonzalez. She is spokesperson for the LIGO science collaboration, and our work is now being impeded by the publicity you have generated.

    It is no secret that the collaboration has high hopes of a discovery, because the newly upgraded detectors are performing well. BUT, scientific integrity demands that if a candidate for first detection were to appear, we would need many months to analyze the data before we could be confident that it was not a false alarm. We need a long period of calm and quiet for a proper result.

    And we hope to avoid the kind of disappointment experienced by the most recent claim to discover gravitational waves (google “BICEP2 gravitational wave result bites the dust thanks to new Planck data”.) So please, cool it. We will reveal all in good time.

    signed, Warren Johnson, Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Louisiana State University

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