now this blows me away
 

Einstein's gravitational waves 'seen' from black holes - BBC News
Warp drive next?

General Relativity proven should be front page news in an ideal world.

He was a genius. One of the few thaw use brain power to the max...

I saw this yesterday - it's an amazing amazing story and validates a lot. Proving this opens up a lot of doors for previously-fanciful research. This is exactly the kind of thing that leads to science fiction becoming (eventually) new inventions and technologies.

Einstein is one of my all-time top heroes (up there with Carl Sagan, Ghandi, Thomas Jefferson and a few others). If more people were like him we as a species would be SO much better off. He was brilliant beyond most of our understanding of what that word really means. One of those people that figured out exactly what he or she ought to do in life and excelled at it.

The LIGO inferometer itself is a pretty amazing creation as well - the level of precision it has is almost incomprehensible. And it was "only" $1.2 billion dollars - far less than we spend on nonsense like bombs and aid to terrorist nations and the like. If we truly had our priorities straight as a nation or as a civilization we could be SO far based on the brilliance of people like Einstein.

I'm curious to see where this leads - there's going to be some really cool research coming out of places like MIT, Caltech, etc. in the coming years...

I dont think he was from here, like Tesla .
Perhaps time travelers .
It is amazing what some people know !

Fascinating! I wonder how scientists will 'read' the information contained in the waves? Its not visible or radio... possibly a whole new science will arise.

the paper is at . https://dcc.ligo.org/LIGO-P1500213/public

click on the PDF for the whole report

I understand the concept, but I'm having trouble fully grasping it.
Does gravity still only act on mass?

the wave is in space/time

That "news" has been covered on slashdot since early this week.

I want to know how they determined the black wholes collided >1 BILLION years ago....

Well sort of. I'm a chemist not a physicist so....gravity is the result of mass and impacts the fabric of space time. IOW it causes a deformation in space time, a gravity well which impacts other masses. A moon falls into a planets gravity well and stays captured there.

I'm thinking that a 'gravity wave" is a propagation of such a disturbance in space time but of very very small magnitude. At least that is how I think of it.

I'd like to hear Dr Tyson explain it.

I've been thinking abut this which always gets me in trouble. My confusion arises from the description of space-time as being a 'fabric'. The image of a fabric automatically leads me to the error that space-time is of only two dimensions.

What helps me is to eject the notion of 'fabric' entirely. Space-time seems to be more of a noncompressible gel. The 'time' dimension being the expansion of the gel itself. The gel is continually expanding as time goes forward. If the gel contracts, time goes backwards.

In simple terms, the noncompressibility characteristic explains the effect that an event can have on the gel itself and the objects within the gel and is analogous to displacement in water. In addition, however, the gel is very very weakly conductive. Not conductive in an electromagnetical way but rather in a gravitational way. Gravity being the 'weak force' to begin with, rapidly loses its effect the further back in space-time the object (or event) occurs but never goes away completely.

That's my interpretation anyway and I'm sticking with it.

A gel? Interesting. I could talk about this stuff all day long. I know...I'm a nerd but there it is.

That's exciting news. Crowbob's explanation of how to perceive it is much improved over the "fabric" notion. As an aside, I'm wondering if this may contribute to our furure understanding of dark matter and energy.

This discovery is probably the most important thing in physics in the last 100 years, maybe 200 years. Nearly as important as Maxwell's equations linking electro-magnetism.

We now have the last kink taken out of the road to a Unified Theory of Forces (Theory of Everything). Now that the wave nature of gravity has been verified, we can search for the graviton, and compare it to the force carriers of the other 3 Forces of Nature (photon, gluon and meson). This puts Gravity on equal footing to the nuclear and electro-magnetic forces, and will allow us to search for force unification (which was modulated by the Higg's Boson, which we recently discovered).

It also will allow someone to *calculate* the requirements to create a micro black hole and move it, which means we can place it in front of a space ship and have the ship continuously "fall" into the black hole, thereby propelling it with little to no energy.

And we might finally destroy the Earth, since the LHC has failed miserably at that.

Sure, but can we make a hoverboard using this new found technology?

No, that's ANTI-gravity. This is all about normal gravity.

Sheesh! Some people and their complete lack of knowledge!!

yes but now that we have a shot at the graviton we also have an opportunity to find the anti-graviton.

I was reading the article, and for the first time today, I was able to extrapolate this concept (gel) from the "billiard ball on a thin sheet of rubber" that I had been hearing about all my life.

Suddenly, I was able to understand what Einstein was talking about.

AND THEN I COME HERE TO READ THE COMMENTS AND SOMEONE HAS SPELLED IT OUT, IN EXACTLY THE WAY I JUST FIGURED IT OUT ON MY OWN!

(OR DID I?)

wooooooooooo, spooky! SmileWavy

Best demonstration ever in this video:

https://www.rt.com/news/332168-okgo-zero-gravity-video/