You gotta love the intelligent minds of the 21st Century

[Kamal]

While the entire world is focused on what unearthly event the LHC might eventually create, scientists elsewhere are looking at cracking some of the older well-founded principals of Physics. I've seen this a while before on the History Channels "The Universe" series but reading it again really tickled my mind. To those interested...

Relativity To Be Tested With Three Spaceships and Lasers

55 years after Albert Einstein's death, physicists will be testing something he scribed in his theory of general relativity report. Three spacecraft flying 3million miles apart will fire lasers at each other, overseen by Nasa and the European Space Agency.

It sounds bonkers (and like a terrible waste of money), but once and for all we'll discover if gravitational waves are actually possible. The laser beams won't harm the spacecraft, which will be carrying floating cubes of gold platinum, instead they'll be used to measure the changes. It's said to be the largest scientific apparatus to ever be built—and sounds like one of the more expensive, too.

[demonAfro]

Re: You gotta love the intelligent minds of the 21st Century

Science is properly awesome and I get pretty humbled by the really big brains. Not quite the 21st century but Newton had it right in his famous quote quote about building on the research of others. But this; to be able to postulate something so groundbreaking yet still making testable predictions long after you have passed on must be amazing.

[Dhar_2]

Re: You gotta love the intelligent minds of the 21st Century

i'm not a science nut, but what the hell do lasers have to do with gravitational waves?

[ganjamo]

Re: You gotta love the intelligent minds of the 21st Century

supposedly lasers are attracted by the gravitational waves and dont travel in a linear form, thats why they shouldnt hit the spaceships
hope i got it correctly

sick experiment, those are the kinds of things we need in order to evolve

[Kamal]

Re: You gotta love the intelligent minds of the 21st Century

actually, I reread that description and it's partially different what I remember in the tv show. They are firing lasers at mirrors placed at angles in a way such that the original laser returns back to the source point at a measured point. They figure that gravitational "tremors" from the original big bang and super massive black holes will cause the mirrors to subtly vibrate in the vacuum of space and cause laser beam to judder. Once they measure the judder, they figure they can detect the existence of such gravitational tremors.

[Kamal]

Re: You gotta love the intelligent minds of the 21st Century

From Nasa's website

Gravity is talking. LISA will listen.
The Cosmos sings with many strong gravitational voices, causing ripples in the fabric of space and time that carry the message of tremendous astronomical events: the rapid dances of closely orbiting stellar remnants, the mergers of massive black holes millions of times heavier than the Sun, the aftermath of the Big Bang. These ripples are the gravitational waves predicted by Albert Einstein's 1915 general relativity; nearly one century later, it is now possible to detect them. Gravitational waves will give us an entirely new way to observe and understand the Universe, enhancing and complementing the insights of conventional astronomy.

LISA, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, is a joint NASA–ESA mission to observe astrophysical and cosmological sources of gravitational waves of low frequencies (0.03 mHz to 0.1 Hz, corresponding to oscillation periods of about 10 hours to 10 seconds). This frequency band contains the emission from massive black-hole binaries that form after galactic mergers; the song of compact stellar remnants as they slowly spiral to their final fate in the black holes at the centers of galaxies; the chorus of millions of compact binaries in our own Galaxy; and possibly the faint whispers of waves generated shortly after the Big Bang.

LISA consists of three identical spacecraft flying in a triangular constellation, with equal arms of 5 million kilometers each. As gravitational waves from distant sources reach LISA, they warp space-time, stretching and compressing the triangle. Thus, by precisely monitoring the separation between the spacecraft, we can measure the waves; and by studying the shape and timing of the waves we can learn about the nature and evolution of the systems that emitted them.

[i!!ustrious]

Re: You gotta love the intelligent minds of the 21st Century

i saw some wierd craft in the sky not to long ago. was awesome btw.