Gravity Waves Detected

[Ulfengaard]

Amazing. Cheers, Einstein.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/scien ... .html?_r=0

In short, two black holes merged, and we detected the gravitational waves. As some folks have expressed interest on this board, I thought I would post this for everyone.

[Gilberreke]

Yeah, it was sooooo mind-blowing when I read that. This is like the Higg's boson of relativity.

[devak]

Yeah, it was sooooo mind-blowing when I read that. This is like the Higg's boson of relativity.

Honestly, it's MUCH better and MUCH more significant than the Higgs ever was. The Higgs is pretty much what we expected it to be and it didn't really lead to new science as hoped.

But gravity waves? man we can look at the universe in a completely new way. When Antonie van Leeuwenhoek created the first microscope, he discovered microbes. (he didn't really elaborate on that research, sadly, else Microbiology would've been invented decades earlier). When we built the first radios, we discovered the cosmic background radiation. When we build nuclear detonation detectors after the cold war, we detected gamma ray bursts.

Every time we created a new detection method we discovered completely new phenomena. With gravity waves, we may finally gain new insights into Dark Matter, but it can also be our first real insights into what's going on inside black holes. We might even discover events never before dreamed of, or thought of.

[FlowerChild]

Honestly, it's MUCH better and MUCH more significant than the Higgs ever was. The Higgs is pretty much what we expected it to be and it didn't really lead to new science as hoped.

I should really do my own research on this, but since you seem knowledgeable and want to talk about this, what impact does this have on general relativity? At first glance I'm not sure it would jive with the concept of 4D space time. Or is it that these "gravity waves" don't represent gravity itself, as light waves would, but are a side effect of it or are waves traveling in the medium of gravity / the 4th dimension, or is this all just unknown right now? :)

[abculatter_2]

I should really do my own research on this, but since you seem knowledgeable and want to talk about this, what impact does this have on general relativity? At first glance I'm not sure it would jive with the concept of 4D space time. Or is it that these "gravity waves" don't represent gravity itself, as light waves would, but are a side effect of it or are waves traveling in the medium of gravity / the 4th dimension, or is this all just unknown right now? :)

From what I could tell in the video in the article, the gravity waves are basically like sound waves, but in space-time rather then the atmosphere. A strong enough gravitational force essentially causes space-time to stretch and compress to such a degree that these stretches and compressions radiate outward, much like sound waves or ripples in a pond.

[FlowerChild]

From what I could tell in the video in the article, the gravity waves are basically like sound waves, but in space-time rather then the atmosphere. A strong enough gravitational force essentially causes space-time to stretch and compress to such a degree that these stretches and compressions radiate outward, much like sound waves or ripples in a pond.

Yeah, I posted the above right after waking up and seeing this thread, immediately getting all excited before my first coffee was ready ;)

Watching and reading now. Very cool stuff.

[Veracity]

what impact does this have on general relativity?

Actually, this doesn't have any impact on General Relativity theorywise. The gravitational waves we found are pretty much exactly what GR predicts. Frequently when you discover something major in experimental physics it's out of line with predictions and you have to go back and redo the theories, but this time everything was as expected so it's just validation.

[Gilberreke]

Honestly, it's MUCH better and MUCH more significant than the Higgs ever was. The Higgs is pretty much what we expected it to be and it didn't really lead to new science as hoped.

But gravity waves? man we can look at the universe in a completely new way.

Oh, I realize that it's a new way of looking at the universe and how important that is, but we weren't even entirely sure it would work. The fact that it shows gravity waves to be a thing is in my eyes the first important step (previous "proof" was way less direct and more of the "this shows they are probably a thing, we should build something to be sure" variety). Now we are sure! And we have a machine that can start looking!

It's so exciting :)

Also, the first detection we had pretty much proves black holes to be real, which is another wow moment. Again, previously, there was still room to debate black holes might not actually be a thing and this will go a long way to really cement that concept. Very exciting stuff :)

[BinoAl]

Also, the first detection we had pretty much proves black holes to be real, which is another wow moment. Again, previously, there was still room to debate black holes might not actually be a thing and this will go a long way to really cement that concept. Very exciting stuff :)

I didn't realize the existence of black holes was still something that was debated, I only ever saw debate on some of their effects. How were the phenomena observed explained by those arguing against their existence?

[Gilberreke]

I didn't realize the existence of black holes was still something that was debated, I only ever saw debate on some of their effects. How were the phenomena observed explained by those arguing against their existence?

I'm not really an expert on this.

I think Einstein himself didn't believe in black holes, I know there's a lot of crackpot theories (Electric Universe, etc) around that try to figure out ways to make everything work without black holes. If I'm not mistaken, black hole properties are very contested with lots of new theories, accepted or not, springing up (what's a naked singularity? Do black holes radiate energy? Does the information get lost or is it stored in the singularity? Etc...).

Exotic star theories do away with stellar black holes, but not supermassive black holes. Basically, general relativity as a theory, plus observations we already made, make it so that supermassive black holes have to be a thing, or general relativity is wrong. Could it be wrong? Sure. Once we combine quantum mechanics with general relativity, black holes might not be a thing at all. Certain models of string theory already exclude black holes from being possible at all.

So yes, being able to more directly study black holes through gravity waves might give us more evidence that they actually exist. We can predict what gravity waves from a black hole must look like and compare. That's a stronger way of looking at them than just looking at stuff orbiting something we can't see and assuming it has black hole properties.

Like I said, I'm really not an expert, feel free to correct me where I'm wrong.