AnonTechie points out an Arizona State University news article discussing why detecting gravitons (the basic unit or quanta of gravity) might prove to be impossible on Earth, and what could be done to overcome this limitation.
While there are deep theoretical reasons why gravitons should exist, detecting them may be physically impossible on Earth. For example, the conventional way of measuring gravitational forces by bouncing light off a set of mirrors to measure tiny shifts in their separation would be impossible in the case of gravitons. According to physicist Freeman Dyson, the sensitivity required to detect such a miniscule distance change caused by a graviton requires the mirrors to be so massive and heavy that they'd collapse and form a black hole.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by EvilJim on Thursday March 06 2014, @04:11AM
how do you weigh a glass of water under the ocean?
(Score: 4, Funny) by edIII on Thursday March 06 2014, @04:28AM
Crap. I know this one. Is it half full?
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Funny) by EvilJim on Thursday March 06 2014, @04:33AM
half full of gravitrons, yes, you win a bear, please swim to Canada to collect your prize.
(Score: 3, Funny) by davester666 on Thursday March 06 2014, @05:58AM
Hey, we don't want his kind.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday March 06 2014, @09:57AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2, Informative) by SlimmPickens on Thursday March 06 2014, @05:04AM
in a submarine
(Score: 2) by EvilJim on Thursday March 06 2014, @05:09AM
Well done, can you please now design a submarine which keeps gravitons out? then we can beat these scientists to the punch.
(Score: 3, Informative) by SlimmPickens on Thursday March 06 2014, @05:37AM
It's your analogy. Anyway TFA isn't about Earth's gravity. The problem is we can't build the impossibly large mirrors in the first place, hence the idea to use the early expansion of the universe as impossibly large mirrors.
(Score: 2) by EvilJim on Thursday March 06 2014, @09:15PM
my analogy was an experiment in 'outside the box thinking'... you went straight back in the box. surely there must be another way than supermassive blackhole mirrors or observation of the universe as a whole?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Barrabas on Thursday March 06 2014, @06:24AM
You take it out of the ocean and then weigh it.
What - do I have to think of everything around here?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 06 2014, @10:22AM
You measure the total force on the glass, and its volume, and also the total force on known masses and their volumes. That way you can determine which part of the force is due to gravity, and which part is due to buoyancy.
(Score: 2) by EvilJim on Friday March 07 2014, @02:32AM
ok, great, now how can we apply that to this problem? and please don't say 'supermassive black hole causing mirrors'
(Score: 5, Funny) by forsythe on Thursday March 06 2014, @04:17AM
This should be trivial. Just make a really thick wall that the gravitons can't go through, then lay it face down and stand on top of it. If gravity is caused by gravitons, you'll get antigravity!
(From Ralph 124C 41+, of course.)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by hatta on Thursday March 06 2014, @04:36AM
A standard analytical technique, also known as "cancelling". Also, what does it mean to be proportional to a constant?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by m on Thursday March 06 2014, @03:09PM
What it means to be "proportional to a constant" is that, in some alternate universe where Planck's constant had a different value, one result on physics would be more/less gravitational wave production proportional to the square of the change. We call things "constant" because they seem constant in the real world, but that doesn't mean you aren't allowed to speculatively vary them in mathematical formulae to ask "what if?" questions for how the world would be different if physical constants had some different value.
(Score: 2) by EvilJim on Thursday March 06 2014, @05:04AM
just as the electromagnetic force is carried by the photon.
Huh? I thought electrons were involved? is this article telling me that my camera phone can detect electromagnetic force?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Fluffeh on Thursday March 06 2014, @05:17AM
From the Wiki article on electromagnetism [wikipedia.org] - I couldn't be bothered re-writing it that well or nicely here:
(Score: 2) by EvilJim on Thursday March 06 2014, @05:50AM
interesting, so... yes it could if the ccd is able to pick up low enough frequency oscillation?
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday March 06 2014, @03:13PM
Hans Christian Ørsted made a surprising observation.
So I guess SoylentNews doesn't support Unicode either. :-(
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 06 2014, @06:43PM
Actually it does if you use HTML entities: Ørsted.
Interestingly your browser seems to already have incorrectly encoded the character:
When intering directly, you should get Ø (and indeed I get that: This -> Ø <- is Ø entered directly), from interpretation of the UTF8-bytes as latin1. However what your post contains is Ø which actually is a bit surprising: While the first two letters are the latin1 interpretation of the utf8 encoding of Ã, the latter two characters cannot be interpreted that way (indeed, the œ isn't even in latin1).
However, the behaviour is consistent with what I've seen on Slashdot: For those Unicode characters Slashdot didn't filter out, I got correct encodings, while some other people did get what looked like utf8 reinterpreted as latin1 (and then complained about the Unicode support).
I've come to suspect the wrong encoding is generated by Chrome, because that's the most popular browser these times, and when I once tried to copy/paste some text from Chromium (which I don't normally use), I got the very same problem (and for copy/paste, it cannot be any web page's fault). I normally use Firefox, which gives me no encoding problem for Slashdot (and a single layer of misinterpretation for SoylentNews), and also handles copy/paste just fine. I never tried to post to Slashdot or SoylentNews with Chrome or Chromium, though.
Therefore, to satisfy my curiosity: Do you happen to use Chrome or Chromium?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 06 2014, @08:49PM
This is posted using Chromium.
Ø gives Ø.
Only two characters. I'd say that theory is busted.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hubie on Thursday March 06 2014, @04:36PM
It is a bit more subtle than this. From the standpoint of quantum field theories, with every force field like electromagnetism, the force is carried by some kind of particle. The particle comes out when you go through a mathematical process and "quantize" the field, and when you do this for the electromagnetic field you find that your force carriers are photons. This was done for the electromagnetic field and resulted in the Quantum Electro-Dynamics (QED) model. This was hugely successful because it allowed extremely precise calculations to be done for all sorts of stuff, and this is still probably the most successful theory ever put together (and got the Nobel for Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga). So, if it worked so well once, lets keep doing it....
The QED approach was tried for other force fields and Weinberg, Glashow, and Salam found that they could only successfully quantize the weak force, if they also brought in the electromagnetic force. So, not only did they quantize it and find those force particles (the Z and W particles), but they also unified the weak force with the electromagnetic force.
Now we're cookin' with gas. The same QED-like approach was applied to the strong force (the one that holds atoms together) and it resulted in Quantum Chromodynamics, out of which we get things like "gluons" and "quarks" and such. The next major unification came with the "standard model" which combined the electroweak with quantum chromodynamics. This predicted all sorts of particles, which were found in accelerator experiments (the Higgs particle being the latest), and allowed all sorts of accurate predictions to be made.
All of this has left out the last force, gravity. Quantizing the gravitational field is problematic, and you can't just throw the QED approach at it. When you quantize the gravitational field, you come up with gravitons. The (overly used phrase) "Holy Grail" of particle physics is unifying the standard model with gravity. We strongly suspect gravitons exist for a number of reasons (some philosophical, some observational), but as this story is about, detecting them "in the wild" is not easy.
This is about the extent of my understanding. As Feynman used to say, "you don't really understand something unless you can put it on a t-shirt", and I certainly can't do that. However, I can recommend some books. Feynman's QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter is very good, and Weinberg has a number of ones that I can't recall off the top of my head. I'm sure there are other very good ones that have come out in the last 20 years, which is when I last read up on that topic.
(Score: 2) by EvilJim on Thursday March 06 2014, @09:02PM
interesting thanks, I'll keep my eyes open for those books, I did 1 year of EE but it didn't cover anything along these lines.
(Score: 1) by kiffer on Thursday March 06 2014, @10:55AM
No Jim, you are the demons...
Sorry, of course I mean:
No Jim, they are telling you that your eyes can detect the carrier of the electromagnetic force.
Your eyes Jim... just yours.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by neagix on Thursday March 06 2014, @06:56AM
...the bad habit of selling it before even testing it
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 06 2014, @08:07AM
I don't think they exist.