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Gravitational waves from black holes detected

Fallenangel said:
Gravitational waves from black holes detected - BBC

Scientists are claiming a stunning discovery in their quest to fully understand gravity.
They have observed the warping of space-time generated by the collision of two black holes more than a billion light-years from Earth. The international team says the first detection of these gravitational waves will usher in a new era for astronomy. It is the culmination of decades of searching and could ultimately offer a window on the Big Bang.

The research, by the Ligo Collaboration, has been accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters. The collaboration operates a number of labs around the world that fire lasers through long tunnels, trying to sense ripples in the fabric of space-time. Expected signals are extremely subtle, and disturb the machines, known as interferometers, by just fractions of the width of an atom.But the black hole merger was picked up by two widely separated LIGO facilities in the US.

"We have detected gravitational waves," David Reitze, executive director of the Ligo project, told journalists at a news conference in Washington DC.
"It's the first time the Universe has spoken to us through gravitational waves. Up until now, we've been deaf."




Fallen.
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It was just a matter of time, good to see, good post.
 
Absentglare said:
I figured you could appreciate that i was criticizing the gaps in the standard model being filled by fudge factors. It sounds like you simply cannot stand to have your dogma criticized, another quality you seem to share with religious fundamentalists.
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Yes, I find it incomprehensible that a person cannot allow reasoning and evidence to impact their belief system, and I have no respect for criticisms that are based off of scientific misunderstandings. That makes me just like a religious fundamentalist, yes, the resemblance is uncanny.
 
FieldTheorist said:
Yes, I find it incomprehensible that a person cannot allow reasoning and evidence to impact their belief system, and I have no respect for criticisms that are based off of scientific misunderstandings. That makes me just like a religious fundamentalist, yes, the resemblance is uncanny.
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I fully understand why you would find that belief comforting.

However, by your "reasoning," the lack of an alternative to a given theory is proof of that theory. That's not evidence. That's the kind of "reasoning" that underscores religious beliefs.
 
Absentglare said:
I fully understand why you would find that belief comforting.

However, by your "reasoning," the lack of an alternative to a given theory is proof of that theory. That's not evidence. That's the kind of "reasoning" that underscores religious beliefs.
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It's pretty spectacular that after some 10 exchanges you still refuse to fairly or accurately describe what I said, and continue to introduce strawman arguments in place of what I actually said. As I said, we're done here. Go ahead. Take the last word now.
 
FieldTheorist said:
It's pretty spectacular that after some 10 exchanges you still refuse to fairly or accurately describe what I said, and continue to introduce strawman arguments in place of what I actually said. As I said, we're done here. Go ahead. Take the last word now.
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I do not consider my arguments to be strawmen. I can find evidence of them in your own words (edited, emphasis mine) :

FieldTheorist said:
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For most galactic physics, yes, dark matter is needed. With that said, the indirect experimental evidence for dark matter is not small, either, and extends far beyond the Big Bang. It can be seen through strong and weak gravitational lensing, BAO oscillations, it's effects are in the CMB, the velocity distributions, and so on. Additionally, the only counter proposal is modified theories of gravity at the galactic scale, all of which have failed pretty spectacularly at getting all of the data correct, unlike dark matter. This makes dark matter a pretty compelling picture, because it's a testably self-consistent fudge-factor.

With that said, yes, the inability to come up with compelling counter proposals also adds to the scientific confidence in verified theories.

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I do not agree that an inability to come up with alternatives is evidence. It may suggest that it is the best available theory, but i do believe you're overstating the case for the big bang :

FieldTheorist said:
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We don't need an alternative to explain human evolution, the current explanation works perfectly. Likewise, we don't need an alternative to the Big Bang, the current explanation works perfectly. If some experiment or reasoning shows these models to be wrong (possible but manifestly improbable), then and only then will they be seriously reconsidered.
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'Perfectly' is far too absolute to be appropriate in this context. Not only does it need further refinement, but it has notable issues.
 
As I said well before (successfully) convincing a creationist christian friend, it is literally impossible that the following two conditions are true: (1) your microwave oven, which you just used, works/"is true", (2) radio-carbon dating is false.
 


Briane Greene gives a nice little explanation of the discovery on the Colbert Report.
 
Fallenangel said:
Gravitational waves from black holes detected - BBC

Scientists are claiming a stunning discovery in their quest to fully understand gravity.
They have observed the warping of space-time generated by the collision of two black holes more than a billion light-years from Earth. The international team says the first detection of these gravitational waves will usher in a new era for astronomy. It is the culmination of decades of searching and could ultimately offer a window on the Big Bang......
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A Billion Year-Old Postcard - WSJ
The collision of two black holes produced more than a Trillion times the power of a Billion Suns.
By JOHN GRIBBIN
March 25, 2016

BLACK HOLE BLUES
By Janna Levin
Knopf, 241 pages, $26.95​

In February, scientists announced the detection of a burst of gravitational waves from space. The waves, predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, came from a pair of colliding black holes, each with about 30 times the mass of our sun, in a galaxy more than a billion light years away. The ripple they produced jiggled the Earth by much less than the diameter of an atom.

The astonishing story of how science was able to measure such a tiny effect, at a cost of a few hundred million dollars (which seems modest given the achievement), is told by Janna Levin in her superb “Black Hole Blues.” Ms. Levin is able to tell the tale so soon, and so well, because she has had privileged access to the experiment conducted with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, known as LIGO. She also has known the experimenters for several years, and she knew that the first results were due in September 2015. What neither she nor anyone else in the scientific community could have known, however, was how fast LIGO would produce results. Fortunately, Ms. Levin was able to squeeze in a brief mention of the news in an epilogue.

What LIGO actually measured on Sept. 14, 2015, was a minute change of length—amounting to 1/10,000th of the width of a proton—in the four-kilometer long detector arms that bounce light back and forth between suspended mirrors. To scale that up: For us to “see” a change in length as great as the width of a human hair, we would need a detector as long as a hundred billion times the circumference of the Earth. It is worth sitting back and letting that sink in. If human beings are capable of measuring that, they are capable of almost anything, given the will to do it. And if you want to know how they did it, in spite of all the trials and tribulations, you will have to read the book.
[........]
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BN-NG217_bkrvbl_M_20160324123702.jpg

A visualization of gravitational waves produced by the merger of two black holes. PHOTO: NASA
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I'm a little late to this thread, but this plus discovery of the Higgs Boson..... awesome.





Heinrich said:
You are not the only one. No one has a clue what these scientists are talking about only themselves. It is a type of universe they inhabit all by themselves.
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Some of them are really good at translating the mind-bending mathematics into something at least partially understandable in verbal language. I love reading explanations of physics even though I know that verbal language does not really explain it.
 
mbig said:
The collision of two black holes produced more than a Trillion times the power of a Billion Suns.
By JOHN GRIBBIN
March 25, 2016
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I don't want to turn this into dumping on religion, but I do have to say: when one attempts (and necessarily fails) to consider the vastness of existence, and the infinity of universes predicted by some theories, one has to simply laugh at the spectacle of sports players praying to a deity about the outcome of a game played for entertainment.

Hell, one has to laugh at the spectacle of praying for one's own life. As comedy sci-fi genius Douglass Adams accurately predicted, if it were possible for a mortal being to intuit the full set of creation, then one would assuredly be driven insane.
 
Mr Person said:
I don't want to turn this into dumping on religion, but I do have to say: when one attempts (and necessarily fails) to consider the vastness of existence, and the infinity of universes predicted by some theories, one has to simply laugh at the spectacle of sports players praying to a deity about the outcome of a game played for entertainment.

Hell, one has to laugh at the spectacle of praying for one's own life. As comedy sci-fi genius Douglass Adams accurately predicted, if it were possible for a mortal being to intuit the full set of creation, then one would assuredly be driven insane.
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No doubt "It's in the Koran!"
Only the mildly famous (Oppenheimer) passage+ of the Bhagavad Gita comes to mind here.

"If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one.
Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
 
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