I have just learned today that I am being crushed by a universal catastrophe. I have been pushed and pulled by two merging black holes 1.3 billion light years away in space. Before I panic, let’s get some facts. The amount of distortion of my body is proportional to size. So if I were 4 light-years in diameter which is about the distance to the nearest star (putting on some weight, but not quite that big), the change to my body would be about the width of a human hair. Phew, no wonder I didn’t feel it. The LIDO instrument had to measure changes in length a tiny fraction of the size of an atom. Such exquisite sensitivity and accuracy of measurement.
I am really excited about this. Perhaps you don’t understand why. For a full explanation, sign up to NERD for a modest fee. Go to my website NotEverReturnableDeposit.com. with your credit card handy. Thank you. This is really exciting stuff. Since the time of the Kaiser wearing a hat like a bowl with a little spear on top was the top dude, and a patent’s clerk with a lot of time on his hands deduced that space was flexible, this is experimental conformation. Yes, our 3 dimensions wobble like a jelly. Yes this result combined with Godel’s incompleteness theorem, multiplied by quantum uncertainty has conclusively proved that certainty doesn’t exist and and reality is under profound doubt. The logicians out there might have already detected that you can’t conclusively prove that certainty doesn’t exist. You have to be completely bonkers to understand any of this, which puts me in the box seat. On the macro scale the statistically averaged outcomes work all of the time and so we can have some order and laws of physics, on the atomic scale predictable outcomes work none of the time and we have capricious physics. I really like that. I always did have a problem with Descartes view of the clockwork universe. Soooo depressing.
It is such a privilege to have lived in a time of such prodigious advancement in the of discovery of the cosmos. I am still a bit miffed that we don’t know what 95% of the cosmos consists of, but let’s not quibble about details. Most of that is dark energy which is responsible for the accelerating expansion of the universe. The rest is dark matter which has mass and its distribution can be plotted by the rotation of galaxys including the milky way. So lets be clear. The universe we can detect seems to be the froth on top of a vat of fermenting ale.
When I was about 25 (1975 if you must know), I was of the opinion that cosmology had been pretty well sorted out and just a bit of refinement required. Oh how wrong I was. The questions exploded faster than the answers and now we know less than Newton thought he knew.
I have been waiting with breathless anticipation for TOE, the Theory of Everything. It has seemed on the horizon from time to time, but I now doubt I will see it in my lifetime. There is also the logical dilemma that any complete description of the universe cannot be less complex than the universe itself.
I’ve been waiting for TOE for my entire life (1987, if you must know). But I recently decided that I’d just make up my own cosmology, leaving ample room for mystery and discovery. 😉
Didn’t the patent clerk lump the three dimensions of space and the one (theorised) dimension of time together, so that would be four dimensions wobbling? Myself, I still don’t know why we arbitrarily assign vectors to space, invariably at 90 degrees, to give us 3 spatial dimensions. Perhaps I’m getting confused between a dimension, space, and an attribute, location, within that dimension. At the quantum level, it seems that particles either aren’t as fussy about their location, or if they are, they’re extremely relaxed about their destination and how long it’ll take to get there. I’m just glad I didn’t study quantum or particle physics or, increasingly, cosmology. It makes my brain hurt. But I wonder if things within, say, a light year of the hypothesised black hole merger that was detected, got a good shaking. And if they did, did they notice? If spacetime is compressed and stretched by a passing gravitational wave, then isn’t everything existing within spacetime also stretched and compressed, including rulers, and wavelengths and frequencies of everything (length being a feature of space and frequency a function of time?) How would this affect interferometry, which references both?
As for the logical dilemma, it is put in another way by someone famous, who said that we live on a small island of knowledge within a vast ocean of ignorance. The frustrating thing is that as we add to our island of knowledge and make its radius bigger, the coastline that gives visible confirmation of our ignorance gets bigger still.
Hi Peter, I think you are right that any measuring device, ruler or light, would be similarly affected which was the point of splitting the light into 2 paths at 90 degrees. The ideal signal direction would be parallel to one beam and transverse to the other for maximum difference. I got to see the actual data of the incident graphed for the two Ligo stations a couple of thousand kilometers apart. When I wrote the blog, I didn’t realise that the merger of the black holes was so quick at the bitter end. The detectable signal was about a tenth of a second and maybe 6 or 8 waves. Crikey, things happen quickly when you torture space like that. I had thought they would have a leisurely month or so as the the holes spiraled in, but no, the last tango was wham, bam, thank you mam, as in that short time about 5 solar masses disappeared from the universe or rather transformed into gravity waves.
You are right about the expansion of ignorance. I think that cosmologists are a tad peeved that they still don’t know what 95% of the universe is made of.