[ExI] ants in the uwave, was: RE: Gravitational Waves Detected By LIGO!

spike spike66 at att.net
Thu Feb 11 21:37:11 UTC 2016


 

 

From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of John Clark
Sent: Thursday, February 11, 2016 12:36 PM
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Subject: Re: [ExI] Gravitational Waves Detected By LIGO!

 

 

 

On Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 2:29 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net <mailto:spike66 at att.net> > wrote:

>>… back in the early 90s, when Kip Thorne and Drever and those guys were setting up LIGO, there were good arguments at the time, some with pretty convincing-looking equations in refereed papers, that GWs would never be detected with that technology.  As I recall, the argument was that the interferometry techniques couldn’t get sufficient resolution to see GWs, which those same papers agreed are there.

 

​>…And the critics were correct, the old ​

​LIGO wasn't sensitive enough to detect gravitational waves unless you were unrealistically lucky and 2 black holes happened to merge very near to Earth , but after LEGO big upgrade  it could detect when the distance between 2 mirrors 2 and a half miles ​away changed by only 10^-18 meters (less than one thousandth the width of a proton) and that was good enough to get the job done.  John K Clark

 

 

Cool thanks John.  After struggling to grasp Thorne’s book I didn’t revisit the topic and didn’t realize they had upgraded those instruments.

 

Do you know of any reliable sources regarding what happens to biomes if gravity waves are formed nearby?  I had kinda envisioned it as like ants in the microwave: they don’t seem to notice.  

 

Here’s one for you, since I am drifting off the topic anyway: ants do die in the microwave, if you put them on the outside of a turntable.  You need to have them in something so they don’t just wander away.  I haven’t tried it with other beasts, but don’t bother contacting SPCA, they don’t care about bugs.  They might as well call it SPCM because they think anything that isn’t a mammal isn’t an animal.  Silly persons.

 

spike

 

 

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