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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.
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.
Because Gravity Waves are going to be a proof of Einstein's theories - which, correct me if I'm wrong, have been mostly proven anyways. Personally, I think the way the human body works, with all it's quirks and complexities, is much more interesting than gravity waves and such. And more important, seeing how Folding@Home has the theoretical possibility of curing things like ALS, etc. You're allowed to ask all the questions you want, I'm just saying Folding is a much better way to spend your extra cpu cycles.
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.
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.
By that logic, a significant portion of pure science wouldn't be considered worthwhile (most of astronomy, large portions of mathematics and physics, small portions of biology). And why should we even bother expending human resources on the arts, when there are lives to save?
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.
Some people want to live forever, some people just want to understand the universe. Its really a matter of personal preference.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
The "something else" that was observed was most likely to be big ordinary vibrations which the experiments were trying to subtract to leave a small signal.
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.
At Leiden University in The Netherlands a project called MiniGrail tries to detect gravitational wave produced by neutron stars.
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.
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