Physicists Gear Up To Catch a Gravitational Wave

sciencehabit writes: A patch of woodland just north of Livingston, Louisiana, population 1893, isn't the first place you'd go looking for a breakthrough in physics. Yet it is here that physicists may fulfill perhaps the most spectacular prediction of Albert Einstein's theory of gravity, or general relativity. Structures here house the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), an ultrasensitive instrument that may soon detect ripples in space and time set off when neutron stars or black holes merge. Einstein himself predicted the existence of such gravitational waves nearly a century ago. But only now is the quest to detect them coming to a culmination. Physicists are finishing a $205 million rebuild of the detectors, known as Advanced LIGO, which should make them 10 times more sensitive and, they say, virtually ensure a detection.

Comments

Cheaper method

[ArcadeMan]

Physicists are finishing a $205 million rebuild of the detectors, known as Advanced LIGO, which should make them 10 times more sensitive and, they say, virtually ensure a detection.

A cheaper way of virtually ensuring detection is to do the experiment in a simulation.

Re:Cheaper method

[Dimwit]

Little do they know, they ARE doing the experiment in a simulation.

Re:Where is the joke?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yo momma's so fat, she emits Hawking radiation.