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Renewed Gravity Research Could Soon Yield Results

Posted by timothy on from the but-gravity-is-everywhere dept.

t482 writes "Dr. Michelle Thaller has a nice article describing the current thoughts on gravity. Why is it so weak? Detecting gravity waves has turned into a bit of a cottage industry. "We are close," says MIT physicist Rainer Weiss, a pioneer in gravity wave research for more than 30 years. "I think sometime in the next two or three years we will see something.""

2 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Maligning Einstein?? by TRACK-YOUR-POSITION · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Heh, do you know the kind of things Plato said? Plato, like perhaps all great philosophers, is judged to be great by the originality of his ideas and arguments rather than how well such arguments correspond to either today's thinking or reality. Unless you think that everything is made of earth, air, fire, and water, or that slavery and fascism are good.

    Not that I'm arguing with the point your making, (I might not go so far as Bad journalism, though), but Plato struct me as a really humorous example, since he spent an awful lot of time saying things we now judge to be false.

  2. Re:And another thing by edgar_is_good · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The point is that the big bang happened everywhere at once - at least insofar as we're causally aware right now. The entire universe was incredibly hot, and then the space itself expands, so the universe becomes dilute, cools, galaxies form, etc. There was a recent result - the WMAP experiment - which sees the relic radiation from the big bang. But the light we see was emitted from 14 billion light years aware (14 billion years being the age of the universe) and is just getting here now. In another billion years, we'll still be seeing this radiation, but it will be sourced 15 billion light years away, but just getting here then. The fact that this radiation is isotropic to one part in 100000 is the best evidence that the _whole_ universe was hot and expanded. The gravity waves travel just like the light - we'll see the waves produced 14 billion light years away now. But the big bang wasn't a point in space, in which case you would have been right. This is a common misinterpretation (even among people who ought to know better)