A team of scientists announced on Thursday that they had heard and recorded the sound of two black holes colliding a billion light-years away, a fleeting chirp that fulfilled the last prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
That faint rising tone, physicists say, is the first direct evidence of gravitational waves, the ripples in the fabric of space-time that Einstein predicted a century ago. (Listen to it here.) It completes his vision of a universe in which space and time are interwoven and dynamic, able to stretch, shrink and jiggle. And it is a ringing confirmation of the nature of black holes, the bottomless gravitational pits from which not even light can escape, which were the most foreboding (and unwelcome) part of his theory.
More generally, it means that a century of innovation, testing, questioning and plain hard work after Einstein imagined it on paper, scientists have finally tapped into the deepest register of physical reality, where the weirdest and wildest implications of Einstein’s universe become manifest.
The entirety of today I’ve been in awe over just how far science has come. The idea of measuring a ripple in spacetime at 1/100,000 of a nanometer, about the width of an atomic nucleus, using lasers and mirrors – I don’t know, it’s just awe-inspiring what we, as humans, can do when we get together in the name of science, instead of fighting each other over endless strings of pointlessness.
The experiment design is just as ingenious. They actually create fake signals from time to time to make sure that they weren’t fooling themselves.
And even a detector with the sensitivity of LIGO cannot detect the active ingredient in homeopathic bullshit.
Yes, and I have multiple bridges in multiple Universes to sell you as well.
Please try not to be so gullible.
In my opinion, this is, by far, the coolest thing physicist discovered this century! We’re still at the beginning of the century, but I think it’ll be tough to top this one. The Higgs Boson was really cool, too, but just the thought that space-time can warp is beyond imagination.
I’m a mechanical engineer, so I have classical mechanics ingrained in my brain. It took me a while to even wrap my head around relativity and the space-time concept. Cool video that helped me understand it a little better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlTVIMOix3I
They’re expect tens of events per year now. This then will allow us to at least raise the question whether we can observe what happens when relativity meets quantum mechanics.
Stephen Hawking recently announced, with much controversy and misunderstanding, that he didn’t think black holes (in purely relativistic formulations) exist because the quantum effects at the event horizon created a firewall. If true, could it effect how gravitational waves are emitted and hopefully we’ll collect enough events eventually to see anything.
* I don’t actually know what I’m talking about. I’m only an enthusiast.
Here’s a REALLY good channel for all this sciency stuff:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7_gcs09iThXybpVgjHZ_7g/videos
That’s PBS Space Time – a really good program covering things like gravity waves and relativity and the like.
We should all take the time to try and understand a little:
https://youtu.be/zyYSGYz6fGs?t=2m
About the unimaginably small:
https://youtu.be/zyYSGYz6fGs?t=22m30s
Dude, the placebo effect is real. So how can we use it for humanities benefit? Enter homeopathy 😉
If you think about it, neither of our comments are in conflict. Homeopathy is just a placebo (at best). But placebos have no active ingredient to detect either.
The difficulty is when do you abandon a placebo for real medical treatment? If the answer is never, then that’s a problem.
I do have friends that have crazy ideas on what keeps them healthy or what cures a cold that have no basis in medical research. But, I do believe there is a strong placebo effect in place, so as long as their cures don’t harm them and don’t prevent them from seeking real medical care when necessary, I re-enforce their beliefs to boost the effect.
The only issue I have is one of the common ones is a really bad one for my personal medical conditions. So, I have to excuse myself from that…
I think a big part of the problem is that we seem to have a lot of unneeded medicines for not-very-serious illnesses. Then let’s not forget that we now know most cancer treatment studies simply have not been reproduced.
Could you elaborate?
Thanks in advance.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483531a.html
I look at it like this. If you believe in and use homeopathy (or mediums, or palm readers, or astrology, or name your snake oil) you are probably just a harmless new age hippy. Whatever, as long as your not hurting someone else that is your business.
But if you SELL homeopathy (or whatever) you are a bottom feeding scumbag. Your either criminally negligent or perpetrating fraud – either way you should get shut down.
Taking advantage of ignorance to turn a buck isn’t “new age”, its just sleazy.
I think one day, we will unlock the secrets of the universe. That is, if we don’t destroy ourselves first.
Whatever happens, the most important thing is that I’ve got a new gravitational wave ringtone for my phone.
Edited 2016-02-12 02:29 UTC
We are doing it already on a daily (-ish) basis.
This marks the successful test of another prediction made by the theory of relativity. As far a scientific theories go, it has been very long-lived and successful. There have been many times that we have tested the theory and it could have been wrong, or not quite right, but it continues to give correct predictions to our experiments.
Very impressive work, both then to develop the theory and now to test it.
As if we didn’t already know how much of a genius Einstein was this confirms it once again. This is going to lead to an even greater understanding of the Universe.
Edited 2016-02-12 04:05 UTC
This is momentous. The rare kind of discovery that peels back another layer of mystery to reveal how our universe (or our perception of it) works.
I could have joked and said – we can measure gravity waves smaller disturbing the already noisy earth by a subatomic size … we can have billions of people on untethered devices partaking the multimedia internet, we can photograph Pluto at close quarters ….
… Yet we still can’t do an open source desktop!
But I won’t make such a joke. Oops.
Seriously though – the is more food than people on earth and we can’t get that right….
HI,
A was thinking of something more like…
Einstein: Been dead for over 60 years but he’s still making “waves”… 😉
– Brendan
Interestingly, Einstein also predicted your joke:
“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”
You might think working together is the solution to these problems. But wars and fear of war brought us computers, cheap electronics and encryption. And the free market works by creating competition.
I don’t think we’d have those without wars and competition. At least all statistics for wars and violence point down.
So we kind of needed wars, it truly is a strange world to life in.
Thank you Mr Morden.
Hmm the Shadws are everywhere, they are gethering strengt…. Don´t have anything to do with this person if you don´t absolutly have to
Disagree. We can have scientific discoveries, as long as there is a decent profit margin in them. More basic ones like this, well we need government support. We’ve been doing ok since the end of the cold war. Could be better, but not terrible. We’ve still found the higgs and gravitational waves.
And the higgs was the result of international co-operation at an unprecedented scale.
And what event, more than any other, fuels the governments to support the sciences at an unprecedented scale?
I’m not saying businesses are the biggest investors in fundamental research.
My opinion is: the government is the biggest venture capital funder of all ! They fund long term projects with great risk of failure.
A simple example of the long term investment is the Internet, it’s a 10 year project from ARPANET to the protocols that underpin the Internet right now (not sure if that was perceived as a risky project, but at least it’s an example of long term investment).
What I meant is: it’s kind of strange how ARPA (currently called DARPA) ended up being the organisation that funded it. Their incentive was the cold war.
Edited 2016-02-12 22:11 UTC
You’ve hit the nail on the head. Nothing seems to motivate our species like the threat of annihilation, or the possibility of annihilating someone else. It’s twisted, but even the very scientific equipment that made this discovery has come, in no small part, from our desire to kill one another. Without conflict, humanity stagnates. It’s an ugly truth.
Violence isn’t the only possible source of conflict. Notice for instance how the natural world is full of pathogens, parasites, and general unfairness.
War got us a lot of the way here. That doesn’t mean it’s a good choice for moving forward.
I doubt most people think it is, save perhaps some of our politicians with money interests in it. Doesn’t change the way things have been though, and unfortunately the way things are likely to continue until more people consciously decide to stop making the violent choices. Most people don’t decide to go to war in order to fuel progress, yet progress s often the result. One does not have to like a fact in order to understand that it is reality.
Edited 2016-02-12 16:55 UTC
Is there undeniable proof of this on the long term?
This is an interpretation of reality, not reality itself. Justifying a belief makes it more true, so thinking that war has the side effect of fostering progress might make people who are not directly hit by conflicts more willing to accept war as a rule. It might have some influence on policy making and stuff, so I think there might be some ethical issues with promoting this Weltanschauung.
Progress in itself is often seen as something necessarily positive, while defining “progress” and accepting the partial disconnection of at least part of its meanings from the quality of people’s lives is necessary as well. Measuring the strength of the link between technological progress and medical progress would be needed as well in order to paint a more realistic scene…
Can you please dial down the condescension a bit?
I agree about violence being a source of technological progress. My disagreement is about it being the only major source of progress.
Edit: maybe more to the point…
a) My culture at least tends to have a somewhat biased view of technology. Look at science fiction, probably 80% of it focuses on weapons and transportation tech. Not much stuff about the effect of domestic tech developments – indoor plumbing, appliances, you name it – which can have at least as much impact.
(Not necessarily for the better, either. See for instance the cotton gin, and slavery in the US South.)
b) Since this is an OS news site, let’s drag in software examples. MapReduce and Hadoop, for instance, are not developments on the scale of the original computers, but they are developments, and not spurred on directly by violent conflict. Hell, the same applies to UNIX.
Edited 2016-02-12 17:34 UTC
All I meant was: wars have motivated people to do a lot of things in the past. And some turned out to be good and useful in other settings.
Not saying we need more wars. Statistics show we are actually becoming less violent as a species on average every decade.
I’ll even say that wars or competition in a free market still might not be the route to solve problems certain problems. For example finding cures for cancer. Which demand lots of investment with a lot of risk of failure (finding out the potential solution didn’t work).
FWIW I was responding to darknexus, not to you. In part because said poster has pushed certain… morally extreme viewpoints, in other threads. (And sorry for the late reply, one of the ad servers was hanging and preventing OSNews from loading.)
I’m still not sure if I can agree with what you’re saying, simply because there are too many unknowns and nothing to compare to. And technology isn’t purely a response to existential threats, it can also be general problem solving.
Basically I’m not convinced we would be technologically worse off if WWII hadn’t happened. Technologically different, yes, but not necessarily worse off.
(Also, while the application of science gets a boost during wars, a lot of the theoretical groundwork has historically occurred during peacetime. Special Relativity for instance… And people were researching radioactivity before the first World War broke out.)
…
BTW, I’m not sure if the statistics on violence are actually accurate. And while violence per capita at least appears to be dropping, we’re still in pretty bad shape globally.
If you look up the statistics, it’s better pretty much everywhere. It’s a clear trend over the ages.
Edited 2016-02-13 19:59 UTC
Maybe I should add something:
I’m not a 100% sure, but I think we might have invented most things we needed from being invented through conflict. Maybe better rockets would be a good development, but I don’t want to risk a war with rockets and what I think we really need is more efficient rockets, which might not be what you get from wars anyway.
So I’m all for no more conflict. 🙂
Wars lead to increased collaboration between people. It is therefore people coming together for a common cause that leads to the progress not the war itself.
I like your positive look on this subject. I hope I agree.
What a twisted logic.
Yes, indeed wars increased collaboration such as how to make rockets be it for space exploration or to annihilate other human beings. Russia and the U.S. divided among themselves the German tech for them to accelerate the development of missile technology. We can collaborate without ever needing wars(and its happening now), to say otherwise is a form of insanity.
You misunderstand. I agree with you. I am not saying war is the only thing that causes collaboration but that the advances gain during periods of war happen not because of the war, but because of collaboration. If people collaborated more instead of trying to screw each other over for profit / fame the advances would come just as fast.
No we don’t need wars, that just the statist conditioning you (we all really) have been subjected since you were born. I.e. This experiment, and the results it provided, is actually a great example of war not being needed to conduct massive advances in basic scientific research.
I’m just saying: certain inventions might not have happened without wars. Not saying we need wars to move forward.
I actually believe, even if it’s a very small chance, but it might be true: technological progress might be on a Moore’s Law like trajectory, ever increasing (Singularity anyone ?).
I’m just saying we needed some of these inventions to get on the path we are now on.
Please list those inventions as a result of wars.
The entire space programs of the cold war was a result of mutual suspicion of each other.
are you certain that would have not happened anyway, even if a while later?
Look at the money (and freedoms) people were willing to throw at it. Compare it to now or any other time in history. The lives at risk, the extreme uncertainty.
Hell, the superconducting super collider in Texas would have discovered the Higgs Boson way sooner and they didn’t even want to throw a comparatively small amount of money at that.
Compare all this to the F-35ing JSF. In it’s short run it’s managed to waste more money than the entire Space Shuttle program over its entire life time. And the thing can barely fly let alone make into space… how many times the Space Shuttles have? When there’s wars to be won and imaginary bogeymen to defeat, people will be crazy with money.
Let’s take some examples from the field of computing:
– modern cryptography
– modern general purpose computing
Also (D)ARPA funded a bunch of stuff:
– Internet (ARPA funded the development of ARPANET and Internet for over 10 years)
– self driving cars
I wonder if we would have had modern cryptography without conflict between countries.
For another example:
Advanced computing architectures usually first show up in High Performance Computing, or “Supercomputing”, systems. After a few years that technology then makes it’s way into enterprise and eventually consumer products. At any given time, half of the top supercomputing systems are usually in the US at various Department of Energy labs (Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Sandia, Livermore, etc.), which, more often than not, are primarily used for nuclear weapons simulations and research.
Sometimes we do have to admit that even fun and games can lead to something.
I do think a lot of GPU work went from PC/console games to General Purpose GPU computing in super computers and other fields like machine learning.
I think this is the first time you and I agree 100%. Bravo, very well said.
Frankly, when I see people arguing that war and fear of war may foster the adoption and development of new technologies it send shivers through my spine. How can we be so sure of that?
Lets examine some counter arguments:
– By war and by violence, millions of young people died before they were able to show their full potential. How many could be like Einstein, Newton, Euler and Archimedes (the last one thought to be killed by a stupid invader) ?
– By war and violence, lots of knowledge were destructed and had to be developed again (see Roman Empire concrete tech or Greek lost techs). Lots of time wasted;
– Because of war mongers, lots of things about knowledge were not shared. Again, think how much this hindered the progress of human beings;
– Because of stupid wars, billions of people suffered or died young and as so had their ONLY LIFE compromised. There is not enough richness on our solar system to compensate just one of them.
I would actually argument the opposite, war and fear of war hindered progress.
Unluckily we are violent, perhaps, it is programmed on ours genes, but it is not something RIGHT EDUCATION can not fix.
Edited 2016-02-13 16:35 UTC
As anyone who has read many papers and articles about big discoveries in the scientific arena, I know it’s better to sit and wait for the scientific method run it’s full course.
I’m very excited about the implications of this discovery but there will be lots of peer reviewing to take place (yes we don’t just depend on the guys doing the measurements alone!). But if we can see more results like this in the future and remove all doubts of their source it’s a big day for physics!
I was going to post something similar but did not want to be the guy that “spoils the party”.
The margins are too thin and there are lots of unknowns yet.
Anyway, looking forward for a huge confirmation by the research community.
Einstein mind and imagination were truly impressive, almost unbelievable / superhuman. Impressive also was the quality of Germany science at that time. It was very said that the sequence of events there resulted on one of the worst periods for humankind.
Apparently, Thom is now removing comments he does not like and even deleting users without any explanation or warning.
Really mature. Yet somehow after reading his “opinions” for some time I’m not surprised at all.
This is a serious accusation for a site with comment moderation and where the most important assets are really the comments.
I thought the instance of Thom about disagreement was like “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”.
Do you have any proof to back your claims ?
He has done this before, though in the past he has admitted when he’s done it and locked the thread as it had degenerated into pointless insults. I don’t remember what it was exactly, but a few years back we had a thread that somehow degenerated into some sort of Mormon vs other Christian hate. He deleted the thread and locked it, then put up a post on why it had been done. I’m sure it’s in the archives somewhere, however I can’t seem to locate it.
All this is to say that I doubt he deleted a user without either a. warning or b. a reason. If he were going to delete people he disagrees with, I’d have been gone long ago.
Did anyone catch the relatively slow rotation of the black holes before the merge? I imagine material so dense that it cannot pack together any further, so it should be basically a couple of marbles stuck together, each with 10-30 sun masses. The ripples of gravity must be space-time disruption of some type otherwise the relatively close distance should be imperceptible if they are aligned parallel or perpendicular to us.
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