So What's Up w/ Gravitational Waves

[matchewed]

So if there are any armchair physicists who know enough to know they have no clue about particle physics (/waves hands wildly), Sean Carroll has a great article outlining the implication of the first confirmation of evidence of gravitational waves.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/when-nature-looks-unnatural/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

Good read for those of us who pretend to understand it. ;)

[arebelspy]

Thanks!

I sometimes pretend to pretend to understand it*.


*And by it, I mean life.

[amha]

Thanks!!!

[DrTesla]

"Nothing makes scientists happier than an experimental result that completely contradicts a widely accepted theory."

So please tell others to stop saying things are impossible. That puts a wall of limiting beliefs up. Everything is possible when you make effort! Yes we could go faster then the speed of light. If space-time can do it, then we can find a way to do it too. Just like the Wrightbrother's when they were watching a bird. They said to themselves, "If a bird can fly, then we can find a way to do it too."
;-)

[Christiana]

(physics major)  I dismiss all new "discoveries" by cosmologists as being mathematically-plausible shit that they made up over beers--because they can't do anything in the way of experiments, any observational data that they do get is very imprecise, and also they have to keep telling interesting stories to keep the research money coming in.

So I really enjoyed the part of the article where he went out of his way to say, "This is not just some shit that we made up over beers."

[BlueMR2]

"Nothing makes scientists happier than an experimental result that completely contradicts a widely accepted theory."

Well, I hear similar statements when results come for that people *want*, such as when an accepted theory is ugly.

However, if results come forth that contradict an elegant looking theory, scientists seem to act more like petulant children.  :-)

I don't think there's any way of separating the human desires from the actions.  As much as we struggle to claim we can do so, I know I can't, and I've yet to see anyone else do so consistently either.

[DoubleDown]

I love this stuff. And I love how someone characterized this most recent discovery about gravitation and the Big Bang the other day in an editorial to the paper.

From Wikipedia:

[In] the earliest phases of the Big Bang .... the universe was filled homogeneously and isotropically with an incredibly high energy density and huge temperatures and pressures and was very rapidly expanding and cooling. Approximately 10−37 seconds into the expansion, a phase transition caused a cosmic inflation, during which the universe grew exponentially.[26] After inflation stopped, the universe consisted of a quark–gluon plasma, as well as all other elementary particles.[27] Temperatures were so high that the random motions of particles were at relativistic speeds, and particle–antiparticle pairs of all kinds were being continuously created and destroyed in collisions. At some point an unknown reaction called baryogenesis violated the conservation of baryon number, leading to a very small excess of quarks and leptons over antiquarks and antileptons—of the order of one part in 30 million. This resulted in the predominance of matter over antimatter in the present universe.[28]

A Hebrew prophet, describing this event under divine revelation 6,000 years ago, might have summed it up in the language of the day as, "And God said, 'Let there be light', and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness."

[arebelspy]

Last Week's Announcement About Gravitational Waves and Inflation May Be Wrong

SCIENCE!

[matchewed]

Obligatory -

One of the things I like about the pursuit of science the self correcting nature of it.

[jba302]

Thanks!

I sometimes pretend to pretend to understand it*.

*And by it, I mean life.

This reminded me of something. My chemistry teacher in college was a guy named Zumdahl, who actually wrote my high school chem book along with seeming to be a pretty smart guy overall. One lesson was about electron field interactions or some damn thing and he stopped midway through and goes - "just keep in mind, this is not actually correct. We're using these words so we can talk about the same thing and convey similar thoughts, so it can be written on a napkin during lunch. Really it's much much more complicated than this and you don't care anyway."

I try to keep that thought in mind whenever a true expert talks about their field.

[acroy]

A Hebrew prophet, describing this event under divine revelation 6,000 years ago, might have summed it up in the language of the day as, "And God said, 'Let there be light', and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness."

NICE :)

[arebelspy]

Thanks!

I sometimes pretend to pretend to understand it*.

*And by it, I mean life.

This reminded me of something. My chemistry teacher in college was a guy named Zumdahl, who actually wrote my high school chem book along with seeming to be a pretty smart guy overall. One lesson was about electron field interactions or some damn thing and he stopped midway through and goes - "just keep in mind, this is not actually correct. We're using these words so we can talk about the same thing and convey similar thoughts, so it can be written on a napkin during lunch. Really it's much much more complicated than this and you don't care anyway."

I try to keep that thought in mind whenever a true expert talks about their field.

I totally understand that.

[Jamesqf]

A Hebrew prophet, describing this event under divine revelation 6,000 years ago, might have summed it up in the language of the day as, "And God said, 'Let there be light', and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness."

Somehow managing to skip over the intervening 13 billion years or so :-)