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What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse

arxiv.org

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Re: What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse

#41

Post by powersnail »

perihelions wrote: post #10

Huh, so you can hear things explode in space, after all. If you're close enough to a warp field doing funny things, the gravitational wave strain would create audible-frequency artifacts, as it wiggles your eardrums at frequencies close enough to the audible. They derive an equation for estimated strain as a function of distance from the warp bubble collapse. How does strain translate to sound intensity, in the situa…

This is stretching my imagination to a point where I don't have any practical understanding of the physics behind it.

Would the eardrum be "wiggled" in the same way as a normal mechanical wave? Does the gravitational wave apply force on the eardrum?

Can I touch a gravitational wave and feel it?

Re: What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse

#42

Post by thriftwy »

perihelions wrote: post #10

Huh, so you can hear things explode in space, after all. If you're close enough to a warp field doing funny things, the gravitational wave strain would create audible-frequency artifacts, as it wiggles your eardrums at frequencies close enough to the audible. They derive an equation for estimated strain as a function of distance from the warp bubble collapse. How does strain translate to sound intensity, in the situa…

Imagine how much ridicule would a SF author in the XX century will get for suggesting his characters "hearing" FTL ships arriving into their solar system.

Re: What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse

#44

Post by xg15 »

thriftwy wrote: post #42
perihelions wrote: post #10

Huh, so you can hear things explode in space, after all. If you're close enough to a warp field doing funny things, the gravitational wave strain would create audible-frequency artifacts, as it wiggles your eardrums at frequencies close enough to the audible. They derive an equation for estimated strain as a function of distance from the warp bubble collapse. How does strain translate to sound intensity, in the situa…

Imagine how much ridicule would a SF author in the XX century will get for suggesting his characters "hearing" FTL ships arriving into their solar system.

Only if the characters take it for granted.

That's one of the few situations where some good expospeak can make things better. If it's established the FTL travel is specifically audible in that universe because of some gravitational eardrum-wiggling snenanigans, it would just be a perfectly valid, probably quite interesting mechanic in that universe.

Re: What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse

#45

Post by [deleted] »

xg15 wrote: post #44
thriftwy wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine how much ridicule would a SF author in the XX century will get for suggesting his characters "hearing" FTL ships arriving into their solar system.

Only if the characters take it for granted. That's one of the few situations where some good expospeak can make things better. If it's established the FTL travel is specifically audible in that universe because of some gravitational eardrum-wiggling snenanigans, it would just be a perfectly valid, probably quite interesting mechanic in that universe.

[deleted]

Re: What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse

#46

Post by spankalee »

ben_w wrote: post #28
perihelions wrote: post #10

Huh, so you can hear things explode in space, after all. If you're close enough to a warp field doing funny things, the gravitational wave strain would create audible-frequency artifacts, as it wiggles your eardrums at frequencies close enough to the audible. They derive an equation for estimated strain as a function of distance from the warp bubble collapse. How does strain translate to sound intensity, in the situa…

One of the reasons I no longer ask questions on Physics stack exchange: 1. I asked "how powerful" such waves would have to be to be audible. 2. I directly linked to another question whose accepted answer said "these waves can wiggle your ear drum" 3. Got my question closed as a duplicate but the link was to different question that only asked "is it possible" (and accepted the answer "yes") without there being any ans…

Why would you ever consider asking an LLM a question like this though? They just make plausible-sounding things up, even if sometimes they're correct.

Re: What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse

#47

Post by bongodongobob »

spankalee wrote: post #46
ben_w wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the reasons I no longer ask questions on Physics stack exchange: 1. I asked "how powerful" such waves would have to be to be audible. 2. I directly linked to another question whose accepted answer said "these waves can wiggle your ear drum" 3. Got my question closed as a duplicate but the link was to different question that only asked "is it possible" (and accepted the answer "yes") without there being any ans…

Why would you ever consider asking an LLM a question like this though? They just make plausible-sounding things up, even if sometimes they're correct.

If you tell it to use wolframalpha it could probably do some ballpark spherical cow physics.

Re: What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse

#48

Post by colanderman »

rachofsunshine wrote: post #39
ben_w wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the reasons I no longer ask questions on Physics stack exchange: 1. I asked "how powerful" such waves would have to be to be audible. 2. I directly linked to another question whose accepted answer said "these waves can wiggle your ear drum" 3. Got my question closed as a duplicate but the link was to different question that only asked "is it possible" (and accepted the answer "yes") without there being any ans…

I worked this out once! Gravitational waves obey the inverse-square law much like most radiation does (and subject to some constraints about weird spatial geometry, but most of their propagation is going on in open flat-ish space, so we can ignore that). GW150914, the first gravitational wave observed, had an amplitude of about 4 times 10^-22 [1], i.e., differences changed by a factor of about that. Typical sound dis…

4 times 10^-17 doesn't sound right... 2.5 times 10^14 I think?

Re: What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse

#49

Post by Filligree »

chownie wrote: post #37
jvanderbot wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moderation on SE is abysmal, but it's the best moderation around for such a large, universally accessible, user-submitted knowledge store.

A better form of moderation exists in the form of whatever they were doing before, when you could ask a question and get an answer. At one point SE was my most used resource. As of now I haven't used SE at all for I think four years. Why would you, when so much of the site's content is outdated and the moderators enforce that situation?

That's for sure. It's been... five, six years? Since last time I visited any of those sites and found relevant information. Not for lack of trying, but it's all outdated or incomplete.

Re: What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse

#50

Post by kelseyfrog »

kragen wrote: post #34
kelseyfrog wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except now the dark forest hypothesis precludes the development and use of warp drives with detectable collapse signatures.

so if we detect them we know it's false; that's very significant

It would be, but we still have to keep in mind that P(ETs|warp signatures) != P(warp signatures|ETs) and there's also the issue of the Schelling point of never being the first.
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