Anotherealm Forum - Print Page

Anotherealm Forum
http://anotherealm.net/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl
General Category >> General Board >> Pondering Gravitational Waves
http://anotherealm.net/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1455449694

Message started by Webbie on Feb 14^th, 2016, 6:34am

Title: Pondering Gravitational Waves
Post by Webbie on Feb 14^th, 2016, 6:34am

“Einstein would be beaming,” said National Science Foundation director France Córdova as she began this morning’s news conference announcing the discovery of gravitational waves. I can hardly disagree, because we have in this discovery yet another confirmation of the reality of General Relativity. Caltech’s Kip Thorne, who discussed black hole mergers way back in 1994 in his book Black Holes and Time Warps, said at the same news conference that Einstein must have been frustrated by the lack of available technologies to detect the gravitational waves his theory predicted, a lack that it took a century to remedy with the LIGO collaboration.

Thorne believes that if he had been armed with the right tools, Einstein himself would have made the detection. But of course the tools weren’t there. Somehow that thought produced an odd echo of the very decade of General Relativity’s emergence, one that shows how much GR changed the nature of our view of the universe. It was in 1911, just four years before Einstein published GR, that Hugo Gernsback started talking about gravitational waves. The future editor of Amazing Stories, the first true science fiction magazine, Gernsback published his novel Ralph 124C 41+ in 1911, in a magazine called Modern Electrics.

More here, fascinating stuff!
http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=35042

Title: Re: Pondering Gravitational Waves
Post by ente per ente on Feb 16^th, 2016, 7:30am

Actually, this is really a very interesting detection...though I think that the real find would be finally detecting the gravitons, that are the - at the moment...- hypothetical elementary particles that mediate the force of gravitation in the framework of quantum field theory...as if in the far future men can see and comprehend those, they might also be able to influence the way the gravitons work, and create - or undo...- ( think of anti-G machines...of course just in Sci-Fi, or in possible alien technology...so far) gravitation itself..who knows... ;)