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Monster gravitational waves spotted for first time

nature.com

211–220 of 221 posts

Re: Monster gravitational waves spotted for first time

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The earth going around the sun produces gravitational waves, and some of the energy is lost. If all of that energy could be harnessed; it would be sufficient to power a small toaster oven.

> If all of that energy could be harnessed; it would be sufficient to power a small toaster oven. Do you have a source? Sounds like an interesting calculation.

The earth going around the sun produces all the tides in all the oceans of our planet, excluding the lunar tides. The combined power of the tides is tremendous.

Re: Monster gravitational waves spotted for first time

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how comes they can't get this fusion thing to work? Fusion energy involves conjuring physics which don’t exist in that form in the known universe. (Stellar fusion happens at lower rates than what we’re targeting. The only reason it works is because stars are so huge.)

I think a useful fact to contextualize how much more intense we're hoping to make fusion, is that the volumetric power density (watts per cubic meter) of sol's core (276 watts/m^3) is on the scale of a well run compost pile (50~200)[0]. Since we don't want to make an object as big as the sun's core, we need to make something far, far, far more intense than the sun's core, which is understandably quite hard. [0] https…

Wow, I never thought of that. It makes perfect sense.

Re: Monster gravitational waves spotted for first time

#213
Thinking about how gravitational waves pass through us all the time stretching us out and squishing us and changing how time passes has for some reason been one of the most comforting realizations I've ever had. I still don't quite have the right words for why, but to me it kind of answers questions like if we are in a simulation (my hunch is no) and weird head trip questions that can be depersonalizing like that from my perspective last Tuesday I started hallucinating all of this including everything I think is my history. Not that I think that, just something about the foam of turbulent gravity washing over all of us invisibly. Yeah, comforting.

Re: Monster gravitational waves spotted for first time

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No because a single photon doesn't *experience" the whole universe but only the points where it's emitted and absorbed and you could say all the points in between along the geodesic between the emission and absorption events

So if it is never absorbed, flying on thru the vast emptiness of space, does it experience the sum total of the existence of the universe ? (along that geodesic, of course)

Ah yeah, along that geodesic, which is far from the total of the universe. But I think I now understand that meant "total duration of the existence of the universe".

I think an answer to that question depends of what you mean by total duration of the universe.

If the photon never gets absorbed by anything, then it goes in forever. If it exists then the universe still exists forever since at least one photon exists forever.

Re: Monster gravitational waves spotted for first time

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dumb, but earnest question: if space itself changes, how can the distance change? What is the distance a measure of, if not space itself? What's the yardstick, speed of light?

Yes, and light is actually how the LIGO and similar detectors can measure such small changes in distance. Light emitted from a laser is split into two beams traveling different paths, and then merged back together. When the light merges back together, if the two paths traveled took exactly the same distance (or an even multiple of the wavelength at least), then the beams add together constructively and you put back t…

Incredible. Thank you

Re: Monster gravitational waves spotted for first time

#216
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dumb, but earnest question: if space itself changes, how can the distance change? What is the distance a measure of, if not space itself? What's the yardstick, speed of light?

The yardstick is indeed the light-travel time. Gravitational waves really do change the time it takes for light to travel between two points. We use light travel-times to measure distances, thus we say that the distance between the points has changed. If it feels counterintuitive for spacetime to be changing, that's good. It is outside our human experience and perception. The strongest gravitational waves ever observ…

Thank you.

If the yardstick is light-speed, is there any meaningful distinction between saying that space itself changed and that there are local perturbations to the speed of light?

The thing I struggle with is that we normally think of things occupying space. If space itself gets distorted, then the size of those things should change, too. Or is that mental model a useful but ultimately incorrect way to think about the world?

Re: Monster gravitational waves spotted for first time

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. From the photons perspective, there is no concept of time. Phase speed, group speed, shadows going faster than the speed of light, etc.. will all complicate using the concepts used to teach diffraction Massless particles being required to travel at the speed of light is perhaps a lens to think about it.

There is a lot of confusion in this thread. One is the topic of photons vs proper time. tl;dr use affine time for things that move at c, and proper time for things that move at less than c, and remember that nobody's coordinate time is in any sense the time in relativity. Some quotes from this thread: > photons [have] no concept of time and earlier > Nothing that travels at light speed experiences time. For a photon,…

FWIW (I'm probably the only one ever likely to read this), in Ch. 7.0 Lightman, Press, Price, and Teukolsky's Problem Book in Relativity and Gravitation puts the previous comment in reverse (which I love and will steal). The entire brief section quoted below is glorious in its economy of English, too.

Forgive the lazy \latex anyone who actually sees this, including future me.

"If u is the tangent vector to a curve, a tensor Q is said to be parallel propagated along the curve if \nabla_u Q = 0. If the tangent vector is itself parallel propagated, \nabla_u u = 0 (tangent vector "covariantly constant") the curve is a geodesic, the generalization of a straight line in flat space. If x^\alpha(\lambda) is the geodesic (with u^\alpha = dx^\alpha / d\lambda) then the components of the geodesic equation are

0 = (\nabla_u u)^\mu = \frac{du^\mu}{d\lambda} + u^\alpha u^\beta \Gamma^\mu_{\alpha\beta}.

"Here \lambda must be an affine parameter along the curve; for non-null curves this means \lambda must be proportional to the proper length.

"If a curve is timelike, u is its tangent vector, and a := \nabla_u u = Du/d\tau, then a vector V is said to be Fermi-Walker transported along u if \nabla_u V = (u \otimes a - a \otimes u) \cdot V."

See also problem 7.11 and its solution.

Also of interest is Matthias Blau et al. 2006, "Fermi coordinates and Penrose limits". doi:10.1088/0264-9381/23/11/020 hep-th/0603109 which adapts Fermi coordinates to null geodesics. (abs. "(Fermi coordinates are direct measures of geodesic distance in space-time)... We describe in some detail the construction of Fermi coordinates" §4, "We now come to the general construction of Fermi coordinates associated to a null geodesic \gamma in a space-time with Lorentzian metric g_munu. Along \gamma we introduce a parallel transported pseudo-orthonormal frame ... Fermi coordinate are uniquely determined by a choice of pseudo-orthonormal frame along the null geodesic \gamma" "For many (in particular more advanced) purposes it is useful to rephrase the above construction of Fermi coordinates in terms of the Synge world function").

Re: Monster gravitational waves spotted for first time

#218
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"However, spacetime is incredibly stiff, and I think all the known real-world sources produce pretty smooth waves." In English, why does stiffness correlate to smooth waves? What does stiff spacetime mean? I'd have thought a square wave would be "stiff" as it's quite the opposite of smooth.

In order for a square wave to travel through a material, it would need to allow for infinitely high frequencies (see the animation on wikipedia[0] for a visual demonstation). The lower the maximum frequency possible, the more every wave will resemble a sine wave because it's the most basic shape: any non-smooth wave has higher-frequency components to give it its shape. Filter out those higher frequencies, and you're…

> A stiff material tends to dampen high frequencies

All materials roll off their frequency response. But this is backwards - stiffer materials have higher resonant frequencies given equal density. It’s basically a word to describe a high spring constant.

Re: Monster gravitational waves spotted for first time

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The formula for the power of gravitational radiation for two orbiting objects is: W = 32 * G^4 / (5*c^5*r^5) * (M1*M2)^2 * (M1 + M2). "r" is the orbital radius, "G" is the Newton's constant, "M1" and "M2" are the masses of the orbiting objects. It's actually kinda amazing that once you substitute in all the values and do the math, all the scary large powers just somehow cancel out to leave a small macroscopic number…

Can I ask how you got there? G^4/c^5 makes sense, but the rest loses me. (Eventually after all the typing below I think that I traced the 32/5 and (M1*M2)^2 * (M1 + M2) to (eqn 16) in Peters & Matthews 1963 maybe? (e=0, a->r) https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRev.131.435 (stick sci-hub.se in front of that if you need to). The authors take an approach comparable to the textbooks below.) Super-quick textbook review. Practica…

I used a paper from 1968 ( https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.1968.0004 ), and treating the centripetal acceleration due to orbital motion as uniform acceleration. It's good enough for the Earth-Sun system, but it'll fail in the case of something like close orbiting pulsars.

Re: Monster gravitational waves spotted for first time

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The Higgs mechanism affects electrons, not quarks It effects both. The LHC produces Higgs particles through the annihilation of top-antitop pairs, which works because the top quark couples strongly to the Higgs field.

Thank you, that sent me down a Wikipedia crawl which connects the Higgs field to superconductivity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_mechanism#Simple_explana... This is a terrible analogy, I apologize in advance because I don't fully understand it yet, but: We think of empty space as empty because its symmetry isn't broken, so it looks transparent to our matter as we move through it. Similarly to how electrons pai…

I'm kind of cringing today reading what I wrote. The ideas I'm talking about are more like leads than answers, probably following a logical fallacy down the rabbit hole at each decision point. If I could ask an AI, then I could avoid the pitfalls and come up with something plausible. I also wish we could cross out and edit any sentences which are wrong. It might be better to invent a warp drive on Stack Overflow.
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