“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Wednesday, February 10, 2016

What Is LIGO?

It's a place or places in the USA where they've invented a really beautiful simple experiment for gravity wave detection. It's so easy to understand yet so so deep.

Very roughly there are two parallel mirrors and two laser beams measuring the distance between them. When you eliminate all the "noise" eg seismic activity from data about their movements, and they're still not exactly aligned, there are gravity waves.

The point being that they're rippling through everything right now, if they're real. Because the Big Bang released one heck of a gravitational ripple.

Intuitively there must be gravity waves because we already see how spacetime can be warped to become a lens, for example. If it's that floppy then you can wave it like a sheet.

Have you ever been under a parachute where people rippled it? They used to do it at this club called Whirlygig in London. In like 1989. The dj was called Monkey Pilot :)

2 comments:

cgerrish said...

Wavy Gravy

Unknown said...

i read your complete article it's sounds really beautiful places


Regards
Aana