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New Distributed Project Seeks Gravity Waves
fenimor writes "Much like the popular SETI@Home distributed computing project that searches radio telescope data for signs of extraterrestrial life, the new Einstein@Home will search for gravitational waves in data collected by U.S. and European gravitational wave detectors. Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity predicted the existence of gravitational waves in 1916, but only now has technology reached the point that scientists hope to detect them directly."
What do gravity waves tell us that EM radiation doesn't? Will these measurements allow us to image distant objects that are otherwise invisible?
Even though it's one of the most popular philisophical astronomy books ever, A Brief History Of Time (Stephen Hawking) really happened to open up my eyes, and I sought extra reading. After all this time, even beforeward, I knew about gravitational waves considering the 4th dimension. The thought of actual waves though seems hard to imagine, considering gravity comes from mass, not anything non-particle. The idea that a massive supernova could propel gravitational waves at us in such a way as it does micro gamma and cosmic waves sounds absolutely rediculous unless, of course, the actual mass encounters us too (That would take a while).
http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/
Posting as AC to avoid karma whoring.
Can this project lead to an anti-gravity engine? Obviously, the first engine will not be powerful enough for a spaceship to escape the gravity of earth, but maybe it will lead to maglev cars that don't require special tracks like the train.
Not to push this down, but isn't Folding@Home a little more important for humanity overall?
I used to run seti@home 24/7 until i realized that half of my electricity bill was from keeping my computers on all the time. I still run it when i'm using my computer (like right now) but turn off the comp when i go to bed and when i'm at work.
The $randomwisdom at the bottom of slashdot currently reads "When things go well, expect something to explode, erode, collapse or just disappear." I sort of deep down hope they don't find them now.
I read in some books, that gravitational waves were observed in the 70s years in one of the first built detectors. The source of the waves was the centre of our galaxy.
Unfortunately the experiment was not confirmed in a latter one, and it is believed, that something else was observed in this moment.
Did someone knows something else about this first experiment?
Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory from Caltech is working on same subject. LIGO will search for gravitational waves created in supernova collapses of stellar cores (which form neutron stars and black holes), collisions and coalescences of neutron stars or black holes, rotations of neutron stars with deformed crusts and the remnants of gravitational radiation created by the birth of the universe. LIGO is a joint project between scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF).
The kickass OpenGL screensaver it gives you!
The BOINC versions of Seti@Home and Climateprediction are similar.
You can attach to all of them and have the client devide your CPU time any way you want.
BOINC also has a folding client (predictor@home), but there's no eye candy.
Detecting gravitational waves isn't the same as detecting the pull of gravity (that we've been doing for a long time). There is an analogy to electromagnetism - the attractive or repulsive force between electric charges is like gravity's pull, but light (electromagnetic waves) are analogous to gravity waves. General relativity predicts that accelerating mass can generate ripples in spacetime (gravity waves) that can carry away energy. There's a good bit of evidence that says the ripples are there (for instance, binary pulsars seem to spiral toward one another at just the rate that would be explained by the loss of energy to gravity waves), but the waves themselves have never been detected. Detecting gravity waves would be an excellent test of general relativity, for one. It could also give us new ways of looking at events in the cosmos, similar to the way in which radio astronomy revolutionized the study of the universe.
1) Any theory in contention with either of these would probably only be an alternative to one or the other, considering that GR and QM make predictions on completely different scales and are generally not unified.
2) GR does not make any prediction such as "in the far field, gravity waves should look like the result of dipole excitations" or quadrupole. In the far field, in a linearized patch of spacetime (a small patch of it, in which special relativity can be applied) gravity waves should obey a linear wave equation. Therefore, both binary inspiral sources such as coalescing black holes or other massive objects and any other gravity wave source are superimposable and can therefore be predicted by GR.
3) Be careful with the usage of the words dipole and quadrupole: a binary inspiral system is not actually a dipole, since both bodies have the same "sign" - the gravitational force only cares about energy density. Two massive bodies both have positive energy density.
-Leo
Why are so many people participating in seti@home when both the goal and the expected result are kind of weak? It seems that an ideologic goal seems to attractive power of an ideologic goal is higher than the repelling power of a low chance of success. I would rate this as a goal irrelevant to most people and an undefined chance of success, so why join? In my opinion, biology projects with protein folding to find cancer/AIDS cures seem to have the best chance of success/utility product.
And that's where you'll fiind what SETI is looking for. Radio is a thing of the distant past for civilizations who have lived long enough to learn how to not kill each other off. Gravity waves are not blocked or obscured by anything, and the only source of emissions at GHz frequencies are alien-made.
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
No thanks. I don't donate to people who claim to own data.
They also make no mention of license terms or client source availability.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
even bigger breakthrough would be finding a gravatron to verify string theory. Fermilab has the technology and is currently searching another machine is being built and when it is complete it will blow Fermilab's technology out of the water. Ed Whitton is the man!!! combining 5 theories into one (M theory) was a regular saterday night event for him! Yes! -Ro
GL HF!
- because unlike EM waves which get deflected by just about everything they pass by, gravitational waves pass through pretty much anything unaffected, and so retain a lot of information about the object(s) that created them
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they give us information about some objects we otherwise know very little about
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they tell us more about how and why gravity works, and we know REALLY very little about that
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lastly, if found, they would be yet another proof of general relativity
And to all those saying that Folding@Home is a much worthier cause, I would say that improving the life of individual humans is super, but to improve the state of humanity as a whole, we need more research into basic physics rather than basic biochem. I mean I'd love to live forever, but I would sacrifice the possibility instantly if I could actually go and see the universe out there before I died.If anyone cares, we have a team Slashdot.
m id=584
http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/team_display.php?tea
If you run einstein@home, get yer arse on it.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
The blurb correctly says that they are looking for gravitational waves. The title incorrectly calls these gravity waves.
Gravity waves are waves where displacement from equilibrium in a medium is counteracted by the force of gravity. For example, the waves on the surface of a pond are due to regions that are higher getting pulled down by gravity.
Gravitational waves are a phenomenon in general relativity where accelerating dense masses cause waves in the space-time metric that propogate at the speed of light.
[TMB]
At Leiden University in The Netherlands a project called MiniGrail tries to detect gravitational wave produced by neutron stars.
Unfortunately, BECAUSE it's more relevant and important, I find myself less willing to be taken advantage of. These people end up in control of resources created in conjunction with public effort, and they end up in total control.
It wouldn't bother me if what they ended up with was publication priority, but they stand to end up with patents that mean they can deny benefits to the very people who helped them. I find this undesireable.
OTOH, Einsein@home and Seti@Home don't appear to have the commercial motivation, so I don't mind contributing to them. I don't feel like they're trying to take advantage of me, because it's not obvious that there's any unfair advantage available.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
This pisses me off. I saw Kip Thorne lecture on LIGO project. They are spending lots of $, a few billion, on detectors, but they presumptuously PRESUME they will be able to use the free cycles of a distributed project to wade through their "data". (The gravity wave detectors are supremely sensitive motion detectors, and the gravity waves they hope to detect are expected to cause motion fluctuations MANY TIMES SMALLER THAN A SINGLE NEUCLEUS. On top of this "signal" with be noise of all vibrations around, cars on the street, slamming doors. etc. From the data they hope to extract signal by analysing and canceling noise; this is what the distributed project is supposed to do.) What pisses me off is they aren't budgeting for their own computer resources, they are leeching off the donation-net. Which takes away from other projects that really have no budget , and/or really are more important, and/or more likely to have a positive outcome. Example: SETI at home is low budget, they are piggybacking data acquisition from device built for other purpose (Aricebo), so the donations make sense; they allow something to happen that otherwise not. Folding@home, actually could help health. Mersenne primes, brute-forcing ciphers, a nice hobby, kinda boring and pointless to me, but no budget; each to his/her own. BUT LIGO is BIG SCIENCE, ($billions) yet they don't budget their own computational needs. In a way it's fraudulent to set up experiment on that basis; without the computations, you don't have an experiment, yet you ASSUME people will give you computer time, BUT that computer time is being drawn from a finite pool of well-wishing volunteers, and thus causing a loss to those other projects who really have to budget.
Thanks for giving me this opportunity to vent.
Slashdot, please make your text entry box a little wider.
That is very negative. Remember your superior attitude at the end, when the last thing you hear is: "Your' planet has been scheduled for demolition to make way for a galactic..." etc....
this einstein-project is IMHO a little bit more worth to support than SETI, but those cancer-project is the one everybody should support (sorry, got no url right now)
I have been doing seti for nearly since it started, currently standing at 99.339% in overall rankings.
I do this mainly because my sci-fi reading goes all the way back to E.E. (Doc) Smith, which some of you might consider as the McGuffies Readers of the day and which is circa 60+ years back up the log now. One always hopes that his machine might be the one to raise its hand and holler, Hey Teach, I hear something.
But realisticly, after 5+ years, and the results of nearly 6 million people, coupled with the limited sky view of Aricebo, does tend to tell you after a while that the chances are someplace between point double ought zip and absolutely nothing. The data, I think, has been analysed several times by now, with no really outstanding candidate signals haveing been detected. Going over that same limited band of the sky, at the same limited band of frequencies, is beginning to grow old.
This gravity wave project is intrigueing, but I don't seem to be able to dl the BOINC client, mime type error I think at the BOINC site.
As far as the parent posters suggestion that we should be working on the cancer project, sorry but I'm enough of an open source advocate that my cycles will not be used for such a project wherein the output data is owned by some commercial entity, who if they get lucky will profit immensely from any discoveries so made. Likewise for the folding@home project. If the results are not to be public knowledge, able to benefit all manner of life, then screw 'em just like they'll screw me at the prescription counter for the product that may result.
There is, I would hope, a new way of doing such research that will meet these ideas, doing it openly, with the results being unencumbered by patents, and the products so developed then sold on the open market (but regulated by the FDA of course) by the time honored tradition of he who can do it the best, or cheapest, being the marketplace winner, with open competition between the makers for our dollars. The FDA's job then is like the agriculture dept folks, to make sure the process is being done by the proper methods, that being by way of testing the efficiency, and safety of the product at doing what it is being sold for.
But to bring that about, you are all I trust, aware that we will have to declare a Bill Shakespear day as an annual holiday.
The chances of that actually happening are also somewhere between point double ought zip and nothing in our present society.
Then, and only then, would I personally be interested in doing what amounts to free data processing for a commercially profitable entity.
Now, if they want to buy my cpu time at a rate that helps me pay the energy bill to run these machines, and a piece of the action (no RIAA bookkeeping to be allowed here folks, its a piece of the gross sales only, the internal expenses for that Lamborgini and the sexytary who wants a quarter of a mill just to have your baby are yours to control) then I might consider learning a different tune.
But I sure wouldn't sleep any better.
Now, if they would fix the mime type on the linux binary of BOINC, I'd dl it and take a look.
Cheers, Gene
They should have written an actual Mac OS X application before advertising their project to the public. Even within the constraints of users who don't mind using the Terminal for manipulating and launching processes it is inadequate. In the terminal the first thing it did after using chmod +x to make it executable was come back and request the URL for the project. Say what? There is nothing in the documentation that I could find indicating something like this would be asked. Then after proceeding a bit further it indicated it could not find the choices I had made to the parameters it uses to govern how it will run so it set them to defaults!
I'm supposed to trust these amateurs with my Mac? If they don't have the needed programming knowledge they need to get it and do so before inflicting unnecessary havoc on unsuspecting voluteers. Take a look at Folding@Home or SETI to get an idea of what you need to have done before you ask the public to trust your work.
It's a holdover. People used to post relevant but obvious information in an attempt to get their karma number as high as possible.
Stuff like how Einstein@ home is running on BOINC, which also runs SETI@home
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/
so it should be pretty stable. Anyone who read the articles or attempted to sign up would know that, but most of the mods didn't do either.
They were playing the Karma game, back when karma was permanently accrued and displayed. People got their Karma numbers up into the tens of thousands at the height of the out-of-controllness. The pinnacle of Karma Whoring was re-posting the article text from the linked article. It was useful if one person did it, but the text would be reposted hundreds of times for every story, with everyone trying to be the first to repost.
Playing this game eventually became socially unacceptable. It became good mojo to post certain things annonymously, like direct download links or article texts, to reassure everyone around you that you weren't just being a jerk, that you really did post the information because you wanted to help.
Then they instituted a Karma cap at 50, which helped a lot. Still, people complained that a single post with +4 informative, -1 overrated could cause your Karma to go from 50 to 49. And other people were still playing the Karma game, just with multiple accounts. So they expunged even that amount of resolution, to the current good / great / bad system. And now many people don't even know what Karma Whoring is, or why one would do it.
I respect the grandparent poster for posting annonymously. He's clinging to antiquated morals, which is kind of heartening.
The ______ Agenda
http://folding.stanford.edu/faq.html#project.own