Science Daily is reporting on work from Cardiff University researchers to pick up the faint ripples of black hole collisions millions of years ago, known as gravitational waves
When two detectors are switched on in the US next year, the Cardiff team hope their research will help scientists pick up the faint ripples of black hole collisions millions of years ago, known as gravitational waves.
The Cardiff team, which includes postdoctoral researchers, PhD students, and collaborators from universities in Europe and the United States, will work with scientists across the world as they attempt to unravel the origins of the Universe.
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Mission to Discover Hundreds of Black Holes Could Unlock Secrets of the Universe
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @10:17PM
Are we just getting sucked into another financial black hole with projects like this?
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Friday November 14 2014, @10:55PM
Looking for black holes is the astrophysical analogy to locating "centrifugal force". Look! It exists! I can measure and predict it!
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by boristhespider on Friday November 14 2014, @11:22PM
That's a lousy analogy. You experience centrifugal force each day and our weather systems are driven in a not insignificant part by coriolis forces. Just because a force is fictional doesn't mean it isn't actually real - you just have to understand what "fictional" actually means. Genuinely no offense meant, but I do get a bit narked when people state "There's no such thing as fictional force!" and buff their fingernails on their shirt. Yes, there is such a thing. It happens to be fictional, but put yourself in a rotating frame of reference and try and tell me it doesn't exist.
On the other hand, that's an excellent analogy, because centrifugal force provides the most familiar example of a fictional force, and demonstrates very rapidly why gravity is itself a fictional force. Put a kilogram weight and a biro on the dashboard of your car and then go sharply around a corner. They go skittering across in front of you at the same speed (and then you risk chattering your windscreen with the kilogram weight, of course). This is the hallmark of a fictional force: all objects, regardless of mass, experience the same acceleration. This is natural and obvious when you move outside of the rotating frame. The frame itself is then accelerating inwards towards the centre of the arc, and so objects at rest in that frame will appear to be accelerating outwards. All very straightforward. The genesis of general relativity is to note that objects of varying masses experiencing the same acceleration reveals a fictional force in action, one in which changing the reference frame will remove it. This is then where Einstein's lift thought-experiment enters the argument. If I stand in a lift, in deep space, that's accelerating upwards at 9.8m/s/s I will never be able, via a local experiment, to distinguish between this and a lift standing at rest on Earth. (This is obviously just rephrasing the previous statements.) Further, if I get in a lift on the surface of the Earth and then go shooting up at 9.8m/s/s I'll experience weightlessness -- gravity is cancelled; I'm now in a reference frame that makes it clear that gravity is not real. However, if the lift is the size of Russia, then the absurdity of this argument becomes obvious. Gravity is only cancelled along the line drawn to the Earth's centre, and as you move away you find that gravity *isn't* cancelled. Therefore, we've got small, localised reference frames in which there's no gravity. In general relativity, these are known as locally-Minkowski or locally-flat coordinates, and in differential geometry they're more normally known as Riemannian coordinates. GR connects all these together via the "affine connections" or "Christoffel symbols" (which in GR are the same thing) which are defined via the metric. From these arguments you then reasonably rapidly go towards the left-hand, geometrical, side of the Einstein equations of general relativity. If you put your system in vacuum, you've already got enough information to derive black hole solutions. (An interesting, and important, consequence is that black hole solutions are actually a result of metric-based theories of gravity in particular, and can be seen as a result of the weak equivalence principle. They do *not* rely on the actual field equations of general relativity.) It's not an exaggeration to say that one can follow a concrete, logical chain from linking gravity with a fictional force such as centrifugal force, all the way to black holes, without even needing to invoke the slightly more specious Einstein equations.
So it's both a lousy analogy and actually very apposite... :)
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Saturday November 15 2014, @01:00AM
I am always pleased when someone has insight into the nature of my shorthand. :-)
Now, with the pleasantries out of the way, just how do we propose harnessing this force in a module that is small enough to fix on the rear-compartment of a DeLorean?
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Saturday November 15 2014, @01:09AM
just how do we propose harnessing this force in a module that is small enough to fix on the rear-compartment of a DeLorean?
Just a minute! First we need a brand name! . . . . . Mr., yeah, Mr. something. . . . Mr. Fusion? No, been done. Mr. Blackhole? Naw, too trite. Mr. Event Horizon!!! That's the ticket! But please tell me, what are we proposing to do with this module on the back of a Delorean? (And I hope your realize that DeLoreans are just about antiques! If their exteriors weren't made of stainless steel, they mostly would have rusted away by now, but even stainless steel can weaken with age. Will we have enough structural integrity for whatever you have planned?)
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Saturday November 15 2014, @01:50AM
Always one or two around. Yesterday's car of the future... TODAY!
http://www.ebay.com/itm/DeLorean-DMC12-DMC-1982-delorean-dmc-12-/291294556616?forcerrptr=true&hash=item43d28231c8&item=291294556616&pt=US_Cars_Trucks [ebay.com]
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 15 2014, @05:10AM
The DMC-12s would likely be only worth the weight of metal in them today if John Z. DeLorean had not gotten in trouble with the law and Michael J. Fox and Robert Zemeckis had not filmed the BACK TO THE FUTURE trilogy (1985, 1989, 1990) which showcased the DMC-12 as likely the 'coolest' fictional time machine ever created--only the one from THE TIME MACHINE (2002) comes close but its design was inspired by the one from THE TIME MACHINE (1960). The runners-up would be the ones from TIME AFTER TIME (1979) and THE TIME MACHINE (1978).
I am not bitter or saying 'sour grapes', just making an observation: Anything mass-produced becomes more valuable in the eyes of the public when somebody (in)famous is connected to/with it or (usually) autographs it or it is featured in some hit form of mass-media entertainment.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday November 15 2014, @05:30AM
Paragraphs son. There's no shortage, feel free to toss a few of them in there.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday November 15 2014, @12:13AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford