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"For now, the faint sigh of spacetime rippling from the collision of two black holes is still momentous. But revelation turns inevitably to registration. One da
by hacker_9 9y ago
"For now, the faint sigh of spacetime rippling from the collision of two black holes is still momentous. But revelation turns inevitably to registration. One day, detecting phenomenal cosmic events through gravitational waves will not make the news."
Ok? Gravitational waves move the earth by about the width of one atom, so detecting them has always been more about verifying theories rather than anything else super exciting. What does the author expect?
- auntienomen 9y agoExperimenters don't do their work just to verify theories. (Source: I'm a theorist, but used to do experiment.) They built these 'telescopes' because they want to observe the world via a new medium. They're going to be doing cutting edge astronomy with them for decades.
- xenophonf 9y agoDude, we still do cutting edge astronomy with optical telescopes (1608) and spectrographs (1876)! I'm pretty sure the awesomeness horizon of the GW observatories is a lot longer than a few decades. ;)
- auntienomen 9y agoFair point, although I meant these specific instruments, not the more general class of instruments.
- evanb 9y agoThe measured strain corresponds to a length distortion MUCH smaller than the width of one atom. An atom is about 1 angstrom in linear size, while a proton is 1/10000 that. The measured distortion corresponds to a distance smaller than that of a proton.