Renewed Gravity Research Could Soon Yield Results

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.""

Comments

Maligning Einstein??

[WTFmonkey]

Right, because it was Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, published in 1916, that proposed the existence of gravity waves -- ripples in the fabric of space-time that LIGO scientists hope to measure for the first time.

Wrong, because even the greatest genius of the 20th century never dreamed that humans would build something sensitive enough to actually detect a passing gravity wave.

Did Einstein ever actually say "We can never build a machine to detect these?" If not, then that's like saying that Plato was wrong because he never wrote about moon colonies. It just doesn't make sense. If he actually said, "We can never detect these things" then he's wrong. Otherwise he just didn't get around to thinking about it. Bad journalism.

And another thing

[WTFmonkey]

At those levels, scientists say they should be able to detect gravitational radiation from the first moments of the universe -- relic signals from the first second of the Big Bang.

I must be physics challenged. If there were waves created by the big bang, wouldn't they have moved away from the center much faster than the stuff that makes up our planet? Like 2 (3-d) ripples in a pond, one moving faster than the other? Or is this one of those "The universe is infinite and everything is moving away from everything else so there was no 'central location of the universe' because at the time of big bang the universe was only as big as the stuff was expanding" things. But.. but... if it's expanding, how is it infinite? If it's infinite, how is it expanding?

I wish I could wrap my mind around these things, because it's fascinating as hell, I just can't quite fit it.

Re:And another thing

[Yokaze]

Space is finite, but has not borders and is expanding.

The best likening I've heard of is the surface (2D) of a baloon.

The surface of the baloon has no borders, you can go around it like you want. Still, its space is finite. And if you pump it up, the space is expanding.

The mistake most people make in imagining the Big Bang is taking it literally. An explosion of material in space.
The point is there was no space in which the explosion happened and neither was material. Space happened. Material came even later.