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Philip Ball

Science you should know

With its Nobel-winning research on gravitational waves, astronomy has turned a corner

We may soon be using GWs as routinely as radio waves and X-rays are used today

by Philip Ball / October 3, 2017 / Leave a comment
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Benjamin Knispel from the Albert Einstein Institute in Hanover explains the workings of a research satellite used in gravitational wave research. Photo: PA

This year everyone with their eye on the ball predicted the Nobel prize in physics correctly. It was obvious that it must be awarded to the researchers responsible for the epoch-making detection of gravitational waves (GWs), announced in February 2016—just weeks too late to qualify for last year’s prize.

The discovery was both an experimental confirmation of a prediction of Albert Einstein’s century-old theory of general relativity, which furnishes the current view of what gravity is, and the beginning of a new type of astronomy that uses GWs to look at extreme astrophysical events much as astronomers already use radio waves, light, X-rays and other types of electromagnetic radiation.

Gravitational waves—ripples in spacetime, in the now clichéd argot—big enough to be detected across the galaxy are generated by unimaginably violent processes such as the merging of two black holes. Masses distort spacetime much as sleeping bodies distort the flat surface of a mattress—that distortion, in Einstein’s theory, changes the trajectories of objects in ways that we conventionally describe as the result of the force of gravity. But a ruction like colliding black holes leaves spacetime “ringing,” the ripples spreading through space until they are detected on Earth as a tiny, ephemeral change in the path length of light beams reflected from mirrors along the kilomet…

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Comments

  1. Pentcho Valev
    October 3, 2017 at 19:24
    "Gravitational waves - ripples in spacetime..." Spacetime does not exist, Philip Ball, and you know that: Philip Ball: "And by making the clock's tick relative - what happens simultaneously for one observer might seem sequential to another - Einstein's theory of special relativity not only destroyed any notion of absolute time but made time equivalent to a dimension in space: the future is already out there waiting for us; we just can't see it until we get there. This view is a logical and metaphysical dead end, says Smolin." https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/10/time-reborn-farewell-reality-review Nowadays theoreticians almost universally repudiate Einstein's spacetime, explicitly or implicitly: Nobel Laureate David Gross observed, "Everyone in string theory is convinced...that spacetime is doomed. But we don't know what it's replaced by." https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26563 Nima Arkani-Hamed (06:09): "Almost all of us believe that space-time doesn't really exist, space-time is doomed and has to be replaced by some more primitive building blocks." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U47kyV4TMnE What scientific idea is ready for retirement? Steve Giddings: "Spacetime. Physics has always been regarded as playing out on an underlying stage of space and time. Special relativity joined these into spacetime... [...] The apparent need to retire classical spacetime as a fundamental concept is profound..." https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25477 "Splitting Time from Space - New Quantum Theory Topples Einstein's Spacetime. Buzz about a quantum gravity theory that sends space and time back to their Newtonian roots." https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/splitting-time-from-space/

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Philip Ball
Philip Ball is a science writer
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