Week in Geek - Ripples in spacetime
My weekly post for The Rachel Maddow Show.
Week in Geek - Ripples in spacetime edition.
Can you think back to what you were doing on September 14, 2015 at around 4:50am EST? No? Okay, me neither. But I’m guessing every scientist involved in the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) knows exactly where they were. That was the day and time of the first detection of gravitational waves.
Gravitational waves are one of the many predictions of how the Universe behaves according to Einstein’s theory of general relativity. If you’re like me, you hear the words “theory of general relativity” and thoughts of complex equations and math beyond your wildest nightmares come to mind. But really, you can just think of it as Einstein’s idea of how gravity works. In high school physics, gravity is taught as an invisible attractive force between any two bodies of mass. General relativity actually “visualizes” this force as the deformation of spacetime around these bodies - the more massive the body, the larger the deformation. Gravity is just how bodies moving through spacetime are affected by this deformation (or warping).
Read the full article here.
An artist's impression of gravitational waves generated by binary neutron stars. Credit: R. Hurt/Caltech-JPL
