Making Waves with Gravitational Astronomy

gravitational waves at the Ligo facilities in September. Yes, and so in that last episode we talked about how the discovery happened, what gravitational waves are, and how they were eventually found. But in this episode, we wanted to talk about what it all means now that we have found

and confirmed the existence of gravitational waves in our universe. Yeah, so let's let's talk a little bit about some more specifics about Ligo and also what this is going to You know, how we see this unfolding doesn't have any practical impact on your life as a what I am assuming is a normal human being out there you might be a crawfish monster. You could be. We talked a

lot about those in their last episode two. I'm not going to judge either way, but I do either way want to tell you about some cool things about LIGO, and that's that well, and in the discovery process in general. So you know, even though like three dudes started this whole crazy ride back in the paper that announced the discovery, which is titled by the way, Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary black Hole Merger has over a thousand

authors scientific cooperation, y'all. Just that's so cool. It's very inspirational to see. And you know, like we mentioned before the fact that LIGO had to had to go through an upgrade process from fifteen and that was an international collaboration also really inspiring. Yeah. Yeah, And and now that LGO is is working in this way, researchers expected to make tens of observations every year. And usually when you say tens of tens of anything, you're kind of making

fun of it. But in this case, that's really cool because it will give us so much more data to work with. And again, you know, we're talking about events that are happening billions of years ago. So uh, it's it's stuff that like, you know, if if it happened a billion years ago, but the event was four billion light years away, there's no way for us to detect it because gravitational waves are limited, as is everything else by the speed of light. They can only travel as

fast as the speed of light. Maybe not everything else, Maybe not the expansion of space during inflation. Well that's different. That's different. That's that's the universe itself, not stuff within the universe. I admitted, I got you, Jonathan. I admit nothing except that I did accidentally say gravity waves in the last episode SI gravitational waves. I will admit that it's on tape. Okay, okay, But back to what it

all means. So we have discovered gravitational waves that with the Lego facility, we hope to discover many more and and learn more about them all the time. But what does this all mean for the state of physics today? Well, first, it is yet another piece of evidence that supports Einstein's theory of general relativity. So darn and I hate Einstein being right all the time. Props to you, Mr Einstein. I want him to crash and burn someday. Well he's dead,

so he got that going, I mean his theories. I want us to discover that in fact, Newton was right. I mean his brain was stolen for a while. So there's that too. Yeah, yeah, you're you're already two up on Einstein. Your brain is exactly where it's supposed to be in yours. It was his eyeballs too, wouldn't it, I think? So, yeah, yeah it was. That's a lacky story for another time at any rate. Uh So, it doesn't mean that the general theory of relativity is going

to become a scientific law, that's friend. But it does support yet more predictions that were made from general relativity. So if you say, if general relativity is correct, then we would expect X. This was one of those X things that we would expect, and in fact, we've now discovered it that we've we've found that the evidence of it, we can say, yes, this is definitely correct, which is phenomenal.

Right that that yet, again we've seen how general relativity matches up with reality as we see it, as we can observe it. Now, that doesn't mean that general relativity is going to be absolutely all encompassing. There's still big gaps for us to fill in. How about the quantum level exactly. But it is really an awesome display of Einstein's ability to suss things out to a level that is almost inhuman as far as I'm concerned, Like, it's so amazing to me that he can make these actions

that he had absolutely no way of testing. And then a hundred years later we get the news that, yeah, no, he was totally right about that. Well, they did eventually have ways of testing the predictions of general relativity. But yeah, what you're you're correct about is that Einstein didn't have a test that he used to come up with general relativity. You're correct. I was specifically thinking about the prediction of gravitational waves that there was no way for him to

test for that. There were certainly ways to test for other elements of general relativity, but the specific prediction of gravitational waves that was something that they could not easily test for. Back in nineteen sixteen when he published the theory, other things that were becoming more sure about as a result of this black holes, black holes. Yeah, so finally we're we've got, like I mentioned in the previous episode, the strongest evidence so far for the existence of black holes.

I think by and large the astronomy and astrophysics community was convinced of the existence of black holes already, but this is another really good piece of evidence for them. Well, they were also convinced of the existence of gravitational waves. But again it's one of those things where you say, this evidence is yet more support for this thing that we cannot directly observe, right so uh. And and furthermore,

that that black holes can exist in binary systems. Yes, that you can get two black holes orbiting one another and then coalescing into a a single black hole while vaporizing three solar masses worth of material, which again still

blows my mind. Um. Beyond that, we also are are now able to track celestial objects that don't emit visible light or any electromagnetic radiation at all, as long as they are massive enough, if the event that they are undergoing is violent enough to generate gravitational waves, clearly, if they're if they're small, if the gravitational waves are very tiny and weak and really far away so that by the time they get here, they're they're so weak as to be under textable, that's not gonna the Lego is

not gonna make any difference in that. But for stuff that we cannot see but does create significant gravitational waves, now we have a way of detecting that, and that that means that we're going to get information about stuff that we know about but haven't been able to directly observe, and potentially find out about stuff we didn't even know existed, Like we literally had no clue because there was no way to observe it. Now we've got a new way

to Yeah. I've read quotes from a couple of different scientists involved with this project who have compared the ligo method to essentially gaining a new sense for a person. One example I want to quote is from Miriam Kramer's piece on mash Double about gravitational waves, where she interviewed the LEGO scientists Subull Schmarka who explained it this way quote, Imagine that you have all of your senses, but you can't year and the first day you gain hearing, you

get a new life. Imagine how your life would change if you can actually observe since your surroundings in a very different way. This is what we actually gain with gravitational waves. And another one along the same lines was David Rights to Physics World. He said, we have been deaf, but now we can hear them. We now expect to hear things we never expected as we opened a new window of astronomy. This was a scientific moon shot, and

we did it. We landed on the moon. Yeah. And I've seen that analogy of being able to listen to the universe and hear what was going on in the universe. I've seen that over and over from multiple people who worked on this project and other physicists who didn't work directly on the project but are obviously very much interested and invested in its outcome. And that particular phrase, you know, listening or hearing what is going on, has been used multiple times, and I think it is a very elegant

way of putting it. This side. Yeah, and again it kind of uh compares gravitational waves to sound waves. This idea of this thing propagating out through the universe, but at the speed of light and passing through everything it encounters. It's not blocked by other bodies, so it will eventually make its way throughout the universe, maybe not strong enough for us to detect, but it will come to us

at some point. Uh. And it means that we're gonna be able to study lots of stuff much more um intricately than we could before, things like supernova explosions and neutron stars and more information about black holes and learn you know, all there is to learn that we can

so far. Uh, it expands that that possibility. Like if you think about the things that um that we could potentially learn before we had observatories like Lego, there was a limit, right, there was there was a hard limit to what we could learn just because of the limitations on our instrument taition our knowledge. Now we've got a brand new way to observe, so who knows what we will learn. It is probably one of the most exciting things about astronomy right now, in fact, maybe the most

exciting thing about astronomy at the moment. And it's already changing some of what we thought we knew about about black holes specifically, Yeah, it's changing what we know about

black holes. For example. One of the things that was kind of interesting was they said they were looking at the angular momentum, essentially the spin of the black holes, so not the orbits of the black holes, but the actual individual spins and they said that it ended up the spin of the whole collision ended up being different from what they had expected. Uh, and they're not sure why. They don't know why. They they have no idea this.

This is really exciting because now we have to ask ourselves why we're the black holes spinning at a different rate than what we had anticipated. Was it perhaps that the two angular momentums of the individual black holes interfered with one another and therefore that's what caused the the issue? Or is it something totally new, some some kind of physics we don't even know. Is there is there variable out there that we've totally missed before. Yeah, and it

could be something well, and it could be called crawfish. Okay, let's not go down that dark road yet again. But but it could be something that isn't predicted by general relativity. It could be something totally new, which again really exciting. UM. This also could lead to us having a greater understanding of how our universe is expanding and why it's expanding

at the rate that it is. Um. It also could end up giving us a very precise look at how much dark energy is in the universe, much more precise than any estimation that we have ever made before. Uh, And it could open new doors to all sorts of new disciplines that we can't anticipate right now. There's a term being used called gravitational toronomy. That's really all about taking the data from these gravitational waves that we detect and then finding out what we can learn from that information.

And we don't know yet. It's so new that we don't even know what to expect. We know that it will allow us to look into supernova and neutron stars and black holes, but who knows what else will learn? But let's let's skip past all of this boring human curiosity. I want I want to practical application for this stuff. How is it going to work for me? Um? All right, well, I want key line pie, but I'm not getting it. So what I'm saying is that you want to why

aren't you getting it? There's a Kroger right next, because I'm recording a podcast right now. Uh No. My point here is that wanting a practical application of gravitational waves is sort of being a little premature. I would argue that we don't have any practical application for gravitational waves. Uh right now, apart from the fact that it is expanding our knowledge to a degree that that we otherwise would you know, I would have no access to where's

my warp drive? Okay, so warp drive. That's an excellent that's an excellent way of looking at Well, could gravitational waves lead to warp drive? Who knows, maybe centuries from now. So gravitational waves do show that spacetime is folding in these little ripples, and you could argue that, you know, the whole idea behind warp drive or warp systems is that you could warp space to decrease the distance between

you and your destination. So by decreasing that space, you decrease the amount of time it takes for you to get to where you're going. It's kind of cheating that that fact that you cannot travel faster than the speed of light. Well, you don't need to trouble faster than the speed of light if you can make your destination

closer to your departure. Right, Yes, But hold on a second. Now, what was that figure we had earlier that uh So, a gravitational wave of the kind we sensed with lego, uh it would take the distance of a kilometer and shorten that by one the width of a proton something like that. Yeah, so that's not going to be shaving

a whole lot, maybe if you're a hyper miler in space. Yeah, and especially considering that you have to like like vaporize three sons in order to do it, not to make an omelet without destroying a few star systems, Okay, at least not a warp omelet um. So yeah, here's here's the thing is that one, we have no practical means of warping space time at the moment, apart from like some some very experimental science that is of uh questionable uh authenticity. And I use that not meaning that I

personally questioned. I just know that there's a lot of argument within the space itself and physics about various engines that are at least intended to be a war drive

of some sort. Well, I mean, I think we're inherently talking about a gigantic scale problem, a mass energy scale problem, because once you're talking about the kinds of events that cause these big gravitational waves, these large perturbations in size and distance in space time, you're talking about things on the order of the mass of stars and or even yeah, in that case, you're talking about like a stellar engineering level of technology. Anyway, that we wed have to be

like a Cardassiev level two system or something. I I I am extremely skeptical we will ever create a system capable of warping space on any meaningful scale any time in the foreseeable future without destroying everything around it in the process. If you put that limitation on it, then even more so. Yes, okay, alright, warp drives out. But what about warping time? Okay, so yeah, we're talking about space times. Time travel is clearly going to come up.

Here's the secret, guys. We can all time travel. You're doing it right now. Just it's just called waiting around, and you travel through time forward at a scale that is remarkably consistent dependent upon your speed relative to an independent observer. Though another thing we've talked about on the podcast before is that it is just an inherent consequence of Einstein's theories that travel into the future based on your initial reference frame is entirely possible, like accelerating beyond

the reference frame from which you originated. So if you get into a space ship and you travel near the speed of light and take a round trip and come back to planet Earth. You will have you will have aged slower than you would have if you just stayed

on Earth. Right relative to the people who were back on Earth, you would have experienced less time, like you would have felt the passage that there have been a smaller amount of time passed on the ship than people who were still on Earth had felt, because you were traveling at this much faster speed. Yeah, you know. And it's not just by traveling near the speed of light. You could also do this by being next to an extremely massive object, and you could hang out next to

a black hole or something for a while. Yeah. These these are both things that will warp time so effectively it would be like traveling into the future. It looks like from everything we've ever seen that traveling into the past is essentially a no go um. There's nothing that we've seen that has suggested that that would be that would be a possibility based upon uh, these particular theories.

I mean, there are other alternative theories that have nothing to do with what we're talking about, where people have positive the possibility. But based upon what we're chatting about right now, especially with gravitational waves, not so much. You're not gonna be able to go back and have an excellent adventure or a bogus journey. Okay, I'm willing to scale back my expectations. If I don't to use a warp drive or write a t rex, what about what

about just reconciling quantum physics with classical physics. I have heard people say that the did you hear it through a grapevine? I did not, not much longer. Will you be mine? Joe? I don't think you ever were, honestly, when I look at you at all? This took a turn. Do you guys want to be alone? Not anymore? Okay?

So yeah, alright, So so I have I have read at least a couple of different accounts that have suggested that perhaps the information we learned from gravitational waves could help us bridge some gaps between quantum physics and classical physics. When I tried to find out what they meant, like, how would this bridge any gaps? I started coming up empty.

So I don't know precisely if the person who was saying that was just kind of yeah, just just like maybe, or if they were saying it from a place of expertise and they just didn't verbalize how they meant it um. I on the face of it, I don't know how it would bridge gaps. But then I'm not a quantum physicist. I have a very very basic grasp of some elementary some some some basic elements I should say, of quantum physics, and beyond that it is completely uh mystery to me.

And so I'm not sure if gravitational waves, if our our study of them, will lead to this, the bridging of gaps. But if it does, that would be great. Yeah, I mean, I I think it's easy for people to lose sight of the extent in some ways to which gravity is still mysterious to us, Like we understand gravity

very well. Einstein's theories give us an extremely accurate model of gravity that we can use to predict the behavior of objects in the universe, and it were is great, So it's not like Einstein was wrong with general relativity. But yeah, there are these lingering questions like how come gravity does not reign at the quantum level? Uh, what effect,

if any, does gravity have on various quantum processes? Well, I remember hearing the problem is wise gravity so relatively weak compared to the other fundamental forces of the universe, right, Yeah, the strong and weak nuclear force, that kind of thing. Yeah, that's a These are all questions that we're still looking,

you know, to try and find those answers. Gravity for the longest time has been kind of the big like where do we fit this in with our other or other models, And maybe through gravitational waves and through studying them, will be able to answer some of those questions and come up with a more complete model of the universe, which means we understand reality a little bit better and

that is phenomenal. Uh. One thing I would say about all this, while I I've been kind of you know, dismissing these practical application ideas, is that we can never anticipate what sort of practical applications may come of scientific discovery, and in fact, there may be some awesome practical applications that we cannot even guess at right now that in twenty years time will just be a part of everyday lives.

And it's hard for us to imagine that. This is one of those times where when people make predictions about the future, they hit that stumbling block because it's something you could not possibly have anticipated unless you were you know, some brilliant madman like Einstein and you had really considered this to a point where you had reached that logical progression and said, if this is true, then we could do this. Um. But I am certainly not at that point.

I'm not nearly an expert on the subject. So I think that we probably will end up seeing some practical applications as a result of this. You're saying gravity bombs, aren't you. Uh, who knows? Maybe, you know, maybe it'll be one of those things where you know, everyone will have that extra you know, that one switch in your house that doesn't seem to control anything. Maybe in the future that's just gravity, and like everything just starts floating,

and like, oh, that's what that one does. You know, you flip it in the and the TV remote is width of a proton closer to your hand. Right, Well, that saves me that that much effort of getting up and picking it up, so now I can finally switch it to America's funny film videos. Alright, So that wraps up this quick discussion about the future implications of our discovery. Gravitational waves are our our actual uh you know, measurement of them, the analysis of them, what that might lead to.

The best part about this the reason why it's so short is because there's so little that we can know right now. But that's the exciting part because we will will fill those gaps in in our knowledge. Like you know, ten years from now, think of all the things that we know if we were to still be doing this, which would amaze me. But here's from now. If we were still doing this, we could revisit this topic and talk about here's all the stuff we didn't anticipate when

we recorded that episode back in and that's really exciting. Guys. If you have any suggestions for future episodes beforeward Thinking, whether it is about science, technology, culture, anything. Really, if you just want to know how is X what's that going to be like in the future, you should write us and let us know Our email addresses f W Thinking at how stop works dot com, or you can

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