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The Absurdity of Detecting Gravitational Waves

submitted by RFlagg

7 years 10 months 3 weeks ago

Just how incredibly difficult the discovery of gravitational waves was.

From YT: A head-vaporizing laser with a perfect wavelength detecting sub-proton space-time ripples.
Huge thanks to Prof Rana Adhikari and LIGO: http://ligo.org
Here's how he felt when he learned about the first ever detection: https://youtu.be/ViMnGgn87dg

Thanks to Patreon supporters:
Nathan Hansen, Donal Botkin, Tony Fadell, Saeed Alghamdi, Zach Mueller, Ron Neal
Support Veritasium on Patreon: http://bit.ly/VePatreon

A lot of videos have covered the general overview of the discovery of gravitational waves, what they are, the history of the search, when they were found but I wanted to delve into the absurd science that made the detection possible.

When scientists want one megawatt of laser power, it's not just for fun (though I'm sure it's that too), it's because the fluctuations in the number of photons is proportional to their square root, making more powerful beams less noisy (as a fraction of their total). The smoothest mirrors were created not for aesthetic joy but because when you're trying to measure wiggles that are a fraction the width of a proton, a rough mirror surface simply won't do.

Filmed by Daniel Joseph Files

Music by Kevin MacLeod, http://www.incompetech.com "Black Vortex" (appropriately named)

Music licensed from Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com "Observations 2" (also appropriately named)

9 Comments

jokingly says...

Maybe they are just picking up the hum from the power supply on the computer that is running the sim of our universe?

*promote

Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Thursday, January 5th, 2017 4:08pm PST - promote requested by kulpims.

dag

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

cool stuff

I wonder if they then verified the existence of one big black hole somewhere 1.3 billion LY away. Y'know, with standard telescopes. Do we know where these formerly-binary black holes are?

ooh... I think I felt that.

or not

That sound he made of the sound of the event that they measured sends shivers down my spine. When I brokethrough to the "other side" that was the sound I heard and it felt like being sucked through a blackhole with an unimaginable force that broke reality completely apart and into a new one.

I thought you could easily watch gravity waves by looking at the ocean tides.

Looked into it. LIGO can listen to the whole sky, by design. As a result, we don't know exactly where in the sky the "sound" came from. We just know a general direction "over there somewhere," on account of the signal arrived at Louisiana site about 7 milliseconds before the Washington site. There is a third LIGO site in Italy that could have helped triangulate the origin better, but it wasn't turned on at at the time.

I wonder if they then verified the existence of one big black hole somewhere 1.3 billion LY away. Y'know, with standard telescopes. Do we know where these formerly-binary black holes are?

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