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Reflected Gravitational Waves
WSOGMM sends in an arXiv blog post about reflecting gravity waves. The speculation is that reflected gravity could go some ways toward explaining the odd readings being returned by Gravity Probe B. "In the couple of weeks since he introduced the idea that superconducting sheets can reflect gravity waves, Raymond Chiao from the University of California, Merced, has been busy with a couple of buddies working out how big this effect is... Chiao and co. ask how big the effect of a gravitational wave on a thin superconducting sheet is compared to the effect on an ordinary conducting sheet. The answer? 42 orders of magnitude bigger."
From the article:
"If there were an obvious interaction between a superconducting films and gravitational waves, wouldn't Gravity Probe B have picked them up somehow?.....As it turns out, the experiment has been throwing out anomalous results ever since it was launched......The team has puzzled over them for years now....."
I really do love those moments in science when something you have puzzled over for years may have an elegant answer after all.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines
Attention wannabe comedians:
There is a 42 reference in this story. This your cue...this is your chance..the spotlight is on you to bring humor to the world and make countless references to Douglas Adams. Because he mentioned the number 42 in a book!
I was thrilled, almost panicking when i read that, the amount of jokes i could make would be endless! Then i realized that none of them were actually good jokes.
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Doesn't this discovery also lead to the possibility of building super-sensitive gravitational wave detectors that really work....... Remember this - If you can't measure a phenomena, you have little hope of truly understanding it.
This is what's commonly referred to as "overthinking it".
You're given an analogy so you don't have to understand the entire ruleset. If you then attempt to apply the ruleset that the analogy was trying to keep you away from, well...
What a depressingly stupid machine.
If you can reflect it, you can make a curved "mirror" to concentrate it to a single point in space.
If you can concentrate it, you can amplify it.
And if you can amplify it, then maybe you could weaponise it
Fixed with the more likely path.
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
That's from people avoiding hurting their brains. It's also the cause of why people have this image of a black hole being this really deep funnel thingie rather than the actuality (which hurts the brain).
Think Flatland and curved space for a moment.
Mass bends space. The analogy is trying to get you to picture why going in what is to you a straight line is actually following that curve. An extreme example might be thinking about that flatlander finding themself in an extremely curved portion of space- deep within the above funnel for example- and what it would do to their "straight line path."
The hard part is moving that warping from two dimensions to three, and imagining it accurately. That's where the brain hurt comes in. That's why they resort to dragging out that rubber sheet and bowling ball example. There's no invisible gravity analogue making the ball "drop" into the well: it's the ball rolling along in what it thinks is a straight line, only the "floor" it's rolling on is warped, curving it's path.