Slashdot Mirror
BOINC Project to Search for Gravitational Waves
Buzz Skyline writes "Einstein@Home is a new, BOINC-based distributed computing project that will analyze data from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory (LIGO). The goal is to perform a whole-sky, gravitational wave survey of pulsars. Beta-test versions of the Einstein@Home screen saver should be available by the end of the summer, and final release is planned for early 2005."
This is great to hear because it is believed that an advanced civilization would communicate not with radio waves but with gravity waves. Think about it: gravity waves fly right through anything, whereas standard EM waves are blocked by things like planets and dust clouds in space. This is why SETI@Home is a waste of time in my opinion after five years of constant computing and 3,000+ packets.
Of course, an advanced civilization using gravity waves would eventually switch over to some sort of sub-space/zero-point field communication system that could facilitate instant point-to-point communication between two points anywhere in the galaxy. Guess we'll have to wait for Subspace@Home.
Yeah the jury is still out on the speed of gravity. I am worried that the speed of gravity is similar to that of light, or perhaps somewhat faster. But I am hoping that gravitational waves travel instantly throughout the galaxy. If so, then gravitational communication would be a highly desirable means of communicating between any two points in the galaxy.
The US Navy is right now studying using gravity waves to communicate to submarines underwater, although a URL with more information eludes me.
I am hoping someone resolves the issue of whether gravity travels at the speed of light or near it, or whether gravity travels instantly. The typical example is: if the sun disappeared right now, would Earth immediately hurl off into space, free of our orbit, or would it take 8.5 minutes for the loss of the gravitational field to be felt?
But perhaps the most interesting question of this entire thread could be: if gravity waves could be harnessed, could they be shielded too? I hope Podkletnov or Ning Li can find out! Anti-gravity here we come!
Desktop: Seti
Laptop: PrimeNet
This is one of many projects related to GriPhyN (Grid Physics Network), an organized effort by physicists to bring important data analysis tasks to the home user. Distributed data analysis for LIGO is just one of the many projects that comprise GriPhyN; others include data analysis for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and (I believe) the Large Hadron Collider, which is nearing completion at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. SETI@HOME definitely caught the eye of physicists who, until recently, had been stymied by the lack of funds for supercomputers. While Linux clusters have gone a long way in addressing their needs, they quickly realized that the really data intensive applications such as LIGO, LHC, and SDSS would require something more. I'm excited that I might finally be able to change my screensaver to something other than SETI@Home!
With the average home computer advancing to higher levels, how long will it be until you can rent out your computer? I can imagine that it would be extreemly profitable to credit say $1.50 per hour of time running in the background of a program. Actually, paying for time is bad, paying for packets is better. Now I am not a trained professional in any way or form (I'll be a senior in HS next year) but I believe that paying people to compute should be cheaper then doing your own processing - and alot faster.
:-)
Most office computers in offices that I have been working in have relativly decent power and word processing doesn't take up much of their resources. Offices could make extra cash by running software in the backgrounds on their computers, if not during the day, then at night or after hours. Hrm, interesting possibilities
In nature, there are neither rewards or punishments, there are only consequences.
LIGO Hanfod is a very cool facility. I got to go on a tour of it several years ago while they were in the calibration phase. At the time they were working on mapping the background vibration in the area. Trucks hitting a bump on a highway over 10 miles away left a consistent detectable spike. It was impressive the work that went into identifying every vibration they felt and then setting up monitoring and periodic average noise maps in order to help filter out the background noise to focus on the vibrations from space. LIGO is the king of siesmographs.
:P, got to love America's fear of nuclear power.
Its interesting that LIGO Livingston seems to be the more PR focused one. Go figure the one in a worse location for this work, but not on a nuclear site gets the PR
If I remember right, there are 5 other international LIGOs, all collaborating on this. It's amazing the expense getting put into verifying this prediction by Einstein. It's never been clear to me why peopel care enough to go to such great lengths to verify this prediction. Anyone have insite in this? Please no philosophical boiler-plate answers...real impact-on-physics answers are what I am looking for.
BOINC nuked my computer pretty good too. Very shoddy.
Just a data point, but I'm not going to be bothered to troubleshoot their software to donate to their project.
Maybe when it's out of beta I'll try again, but I've been having all sorts of weird problems ever since I tried that damn thing.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Fight AIDS at home is just such a project.
While I agree that there are factors that prevent this from being used by everyone constantly, large-scale projects can often have a marketing twist put on them, or offer incentives. Additionally, an especially cool geek project would certainly pull a few volunteers. The important part is getting the awareness of the project to the proper audience, as the internet expands, I cant imagine a worthy cause not being able to find volunteers.
Scrame: Sunglasses are for assholes.
Whats a photonic crystal then?
I can't believe you mentioned it and didn't then tell us. I would be happy to supply computer time for projects such as yours.
When I look for an DC project I look for one that fits the following criteria in this order of importance:
a)The results are published freely with no restriction on there use (so non-commercial basically - they can pay for computer time if they want it)
c)There is a linux version (preferably command line)
b)The software requires no user intervention (beyond maybe starting it)
d)The project looks like it is doing real science (this doesn't discount SETI@Home but I consider their chance of success low so I tend to steer clear of it)
You would be supprised how few projects fit all 4.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Right, but people were able to zap each other with electricity and make sparks and move compass needles and produce all sorts of other visible effects with electricity, even though they didn't understand the full nature of it. These new experiments are designed to try to detect gravity waves, because we haven't seen any evidence of their existence up until this point. (They've only be theorized.)
:-)
It's like saying the Navy is researching how to use the body of the Loch Ness Monster to power their aircraft carriers. Shouldn't the first step be to actually prove such a creature exists, and I don't know, maybe capture one too?? How far into your research can you really get when you haven't completed Step 1 yet?
GEO600 is a smaller version of the LIGO interferometer. It works in exactly the same way but where as LIGO has a huge budget, GEO600's building on site is actually a tin shed in a field in Hanover. For a while I was a research programmer for GEO600.
The signal to noise ratio is suprisingly not bad here in /. on this so people must have some interest in it.
4 25 186202/qid=1089891363/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-823243 2-3201747?v=glance&s=books
r av ity_waves_000727.html
There's a great book called "Einstein's Unifinished Symphony" that covers all this in great detail.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0
The most likely thing to actually catch one is the proposed space based interferometer:
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/missions/g
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
If A and B are simultaneous in your frame of reference, then A will be before B in frames of reference moving in one direction, and B will be before A in frames of reference moving in the opposite direction. So if you broadcast the result using an instantaneous communication device, then the recipient will get the result before the lottery is drawn - at least from some perspectives.
In your spaceship analogy that would be like having a ship blow up before the initial laser is even fired - that would seem impossible to me. I certainly see how order of events can be skewed by frame of reference, but I'm not sure that two events that occur in one order in one frame would appear out of order in another frame. I can see how their relative timing might differ - but not how they could pass each other.
The critical thing here is that the speed of light is the same in all reference frames.
So, in the frame of reference of the centre ship, beam A heads forwards at 300,000 km/s, and beam B heads backwards at 300,000 km/s. Since both ships are stationary, both ships are struck at the same time and explode simultaneously.
In the frame of reference of a stationary observer, in which the ships are cruising past at speed v, both beams are sent out at 300,000 km/s. The rear ship moves towards beam B at v and the front ship moves away, also at v, so the rear ship is struck first.
And in the frame of reference of a spy-ship flying at twice the speed of our warring convoy in the same direction, the three ships are moving backwards at speed v. Hence the front ship reverses onto the beam and the rear ship reverses away from it - and the front ship explodes first.
The wonderful part is that all three are correct. If two events are such that no signal travelling at lightspeed or slower can get from one to the other, then the order in which they take place is entirely dependent upon your point of view. That's why faster-than-light communication leads to madness...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
That said, looking at the LIGO facility , it seems like somewhat of a harsh scar on the Louisiana forest. Could they not have been a little 'greener' in their construction of the site? One of their daily secondary missions, after all, is educating students.
The term "gravity wave" is used in hydrodynamics to refer to large waves at fluid boundaries which are governed exclusively by inertia and gravity. For example, your typical ocean wave. This is as opposed to a "capillary wave" which is governed at least partially by the effects of surface tension and cohesion. In water, the transition from gravity to capillary wave behavior occurs somewhere around a wavelength of 5 cm.
It's quite possible the Navy is doing some kind of research with gravity waves, but whatever it is, it's probably not for long distance communication because the waves move so slowly and their long wavelengths make them hard to focus.