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Binary Star Discovery Allows Scientists To Detect Invisible "Gravity Waves"

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Dr. Feelgood: B.L.A.T.T.A.
07/09/09

In reply to Binary Star Discovery Allows Scientists To Detect Invisible "Gravity Waves"
Yeah yeah, gravity waves, great...
DOES NO ONE NOTICE THE FIERY EYES OF THE EVIL DEMIURGE?!

(...okay, don't panic...don't panic...)

AHHHhhhhhh......!
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Edited by Dr. Feelgood: B.L.A.T.T.A. at 07/09/09 12:48 PM

transbastard
07/09/09

In reply to Binary Star Discovery Allows Scientists To Detect Invisible "Gravity Waves"
I wonder what gravity will turn out to be. Personally, I go with the Gravigremlins playing tug-of-war. Read all about in my paper in Science, right after established science finally admits its cowardice and bows to my brilliance.
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nonpareil
07/09/09

In reply to Binary Star Discovery Allows Scientists To Detect Invisible "Gravity Waves"
I'm still dubious about gravity waves. I understand that if they exist, they're very weak (and tough to detect), but the notion of gravity being anything other than a force resulting from a distortion in spacetime is hard for me to swallow.
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Doctor Who?
07/09/09

@nonpareil: This page from NASA gives a pretty good description of it: http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/features/topics/gwaves/gwaves.html

Plus, their analogy makes sense. I should probably do more reading on this at some point, though.
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Edited by Doctor Who? at 07/09/09 11:16 AM Doctor Who? was starred Doctor Who? was unstarred

kagekiri
07/09/09

@Doctor Who?: Nice link.

What's funny is that I remember the whole theory of gravity being a depression or indent in the fabric of space-time from a Calvin and Hobbes comic more than any physics class.
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Chip Overclock
07/09/09

@nonpareil: I've had the same struggle with the concept. My mental model is that the distortion in space time propagates at the speed of light, but I can't quite come to grips with a "wave like nature" for it. But I really like the idea of generating gravity waves 180 degrees out of phase, using something akin to Bose Gravity Cancelling Mass Phones.
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Log1c
07/09/09

@nonpareil: Force has to propagate somehow. Sound is just a pressure wave (force), so imagine gravity and gravity waves in the same fashion.
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Mathmos
07/09/09

@Doctor Who?: Interestingly, noise in the gravity wave detection experiment GEO600 corresponds well to a prediction for a holographic universe. I'm not sure whether this story was reported in io9. here's one related link:

http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw145.html

As an aside, the new commenting system doesn't seem to work for me in IE8, though it's ok in Firefox and Opera.
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Mathmos
07/09/09

@Log1c: If what I recall from early physics classes is correct, gravity waves are more analogous to electromagnetic waves as a consequence of moving electric charge.
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Edited by Mathmos at 07/09/09 1:14 PM Mathmos was starred Mathmos was unstarred

Anekanta - killed by a cacodemon
07/09/09

@Log1c: That still leaves me wondering about the nature of the medium those waves propagate through... My physics knowledge is admittedly only passing, but exactly what is space-time anyway?
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Log1c
07/09/09

@Mathmos: That makes complete sense, when you consider how a 'complete' theory of gravity would work with the Higg's Boson and etc etc... so particle interaction in electromagnetic terms (ie without a transmission medium) is pretty solid.
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Log1c
07/09/09

@Anekanta: Space-Time is pretty simple, its a 4 dimensional representation of the position of anything (usually particles) with a timestamp.

A simple matter is that my current position (arbitrarily) is 100ft, -93ft, 25ft at t = 5:17:23... or in vector form [100 -93 25 5:17:23]...
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stereobot
07/10/09

@nonpareil: I think planets and stars basically make "holes" in space - kind of like the holes in swiss cheese. But the matter does cause a distortion in the space, like the planet/star "pushes space out of the way" so it can exist there. That distortion is actually compressed space, so an object falling into a gravitational field is really just falling into a part of space that has been made "smaller" because the planet or star is pushing that "space" out of its way so it can exist. The space around it isn't really "smaller" per se, its just more space squished into a smaller area - so the object falling into it is just traveling through more space faster and will likely collide with the planet/star because the gravity (or compressed space) is greater closest to the surface. You would think the compressed space would have a repellent effect, but I guess we would have to know what space is made out of (Dark Matter) to answer that. Dark Matter will probably answer a lot about gravity.
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