Mathematicians confirm the possibility of data transfer via gravitational waves
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Re: Mathematicians confirm the possibility of data transfer via gravitational waves
#2This doesn't seem surprising or particularly exciting. It still propogates at the speed of light and it is hard to produce/detect. The benefit is... Stuff can be in the way?
Re: Mathematicians confirm the possibility of data transfer via gravitational waves
#3This doesn't seem surprising or particularly exciting. It still propogates at the speed of light and it is hard to produce/detect. The benefit is... Stuff can be in the way?
Not a scientist in this field at all but could it possibly have less interference from mediums such as the atmosphere? Hence less signal loss over transmission?
Re: Mathematicians confirm the possibility of data transfer via gravitational waves
#4"The discovery could lead to a new means of data transfer in space, e.g., between space stations."
Sure, we'll be building space stations with gravitational wave transmitters as soon as we can figure out how to wiggle stars and planets in a controlled fashion to produce them. That should happen Real Soon Now.
Re: Mathematicians confirm the possibility of data transfer via gravitational waves
#5From the title of the actual paper:
"gravitational waves of nonmetricity"
It looks like these "gravitational waves" aren't the kind that LIGO has been detecting, but a hypothetical kind in a hypothetical theory of gravity that is not the same as General Relativity (there are no "gravitational waves of nonmetricity" in GR). So for this to be even possible in principle this hypothetical theory of gravity would have to turn out to be correct (and we have no evidence to suggest that GR is wrong and some other theory of gravity is correct).
Re: Mathematicians confirm the possibility of data transfer via gravitational waves
#6"The discovery could lead to a new means of data transfer in space, e.g., between space stations." Sure, we'll be building space stations with gravitational wave transmitters as soon as we can figure out how to wiggle stars and planets in a controlled fashion to produce them. That should happen Real Soon Now.
You capture a quantum black hole, slap a charge on it, and wiggle that: The Hole Man https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hole_Man
Re: Mathematicians confirm the possibility of data transfer via gravitational waves
#7This doesn't seem surprising or particularly exciting. It still propogates at the speed of light and it is hard to produce/detect. The benefit is... Stuff can be in the way?
Not a scientist in this field at all but could it possibly have less interference from mediums such as the atmosphere? Hence less signal loss over transmission?
imo it seems like data transfer would be difficult to use gravitational waves for. LIGO had to measure very tiny compressions occurring due to very very big things happening faraway in the universe (though I guess being distant isn't a prereq):
> On January 4th, 2017, LIGO detected two black holes merging into one. One of the black holes was 32 times the mass of the Sun (32 M⊙, where M denotes mass and ⊙ is a symbol for the Sun) while the other was 19 times the mass of the Sun. When they merged, they created a black hole 49 times the mass of the Sun. The coalescence instantly converted 2 solar masses of black hole mass into the energy that rattled spacetime enough to generate the gravitational waves we detected almost 3 billion years after it occurred. (Caltech/MIT/LIGO Lab)
> Despite the stupendous energy released by colliding black holes, detecting gravitational waves is excessively difficult since the effects they have on LIGO’s instruments are incomprehensibly small. This latest wave caused the spacetime occupied by LIGO’s arms to stretch and shrink by 0.000,000,000,000,000,001 (or 1×10-18) meters (a.k.a. an “attometer”). That’s 1000 times smaller than a proton!
Re: Mathematicians confirm the possibility of data transfer via gravitational waves
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not a scientist in this field at all but could it possibly have less interference from mediums such as the atmosphere? Hence less signal loss over transmission?
imo it seems like data transfer would be difficult to use gravitational waves for. LIGO had to measure very tiny compressions occurring due to very very big things happening faraway in the universe (though I guess being distant isn't a prereq): > On January 4th, 2017, LIGO detected two black holes merging into one. One of the black holes was 32 times the mass of the Sun (32 M⊙, where M denotes mass and ⊙ is a symbol…
It surely is science fiction today but from a physics point of view there's nothing that would make it impossible. So as a physicist I'd say it's merely an engineering problem ;)
Re: Mathematicians confirm the possibility of data transfer via gravitational waves
#9"The discovery could lead to a new means of data transfer in space, e.g., between space stations." Sure, we'll be building space stations with gravitational wave transmitters as soon as we can figure out how to wiggle stars and planets in a controlled fashion to produce them. That should happen Real Soon Now.
C'mon, we can already transmit data across different dimensions using a wrist watch & morse code. Yeah, bandwidth isn't that great but hey, we could use a wall clock.
Re: Mathematicians confirm the possibility of data transfer via gravitational waves
#10Not to sound condescending, but…
You can transmit data by modulating in on top of something that propagates through space? Well, big deal, who'd thought? /s
In all seriousness, the big problem is, how to create gravitational waves in a controlled manner in the first place. Because the fact remains, that gravity is, by several orders of magnitude, the weakest force in our universe and it takes stooopid amounts of energy (and I means that in an all-encompassing way, referring to anything that goes into the metric tensor) to create an even noticeable ripple in spacetime. If we break down spectrally, its easiest to detect stuff close to DC, I mean, people did it 200 years ago, so to speak, but only over short distances, and really long integration times (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavendish_experiment).
But anything meaningful for data transmission would require to operate at significant high frequencies. It's hard enough to wiggle around some "condensed energy", i.e. mass in the milligram scale at high frequencies, although in the lasers I build, the end facets of the optical filter are thrown around with accelerations on the order of 10e6 g-ees, at ~500kHz, but the gravitational waves created by that wouldn't register at LIGO even if several thousand of these, running in phase were placed right next to the test masses.
To make any sensible use of gravitational waves, we'd need to invent some form of gravitational …aser (light: laser / microwaves: maser), i.e. a gwaser. Gravitational Wave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. Okay, I admit it, this is one of these gedankenexperiments I play through in my head from time to time, trying to come up with some technological setup, that could do it. If I had to make a bet, I'd say whatever it'd be, it'd be similar to a free electron laser.
But it's foolish to even go further than rough speculation, what components it possibly may involve, because to really make headway in that direction, we'd need a workable quantum theory of gravity. And last time I've checked, that's still an open problem.
On the uphand, should we ever figure out, if one can, and if so how to build a gwaser, this would open up possibilities far beyond new modes of communication. I'm talking propulsion that uses gravitational radiation as "reaction mass" (that'd be a no brainer, since gravitational waves to carry momentum, that's why the orbits of binary black hole systems decay in the first place). But maybe even stuff that's really outlandish science fiction, maybe even not causality breaking (not all timelike curves do violate causaility; go ahead, draw a few Minkowsky diagrams, to see what I mean) FTL travel.
And given that, I'd put this mathematical result into the same category of applicability as the Alcubierre metric: A nice consequence of mathematical rigor, but without further understanding of fundamental physics of little practical interest, so far.