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Gravitational waves: have US scientists heard echoes of the big bang?

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Finn Hammer

Tue Mar 18 2014, 10:23PM

Registered Member #205 Joined: Sat Feb 18 2006, 11:59AM
Location: SkÃ¸rping, Denmark
Posts: 741

Confined in the dark, narrow cage of our own making that we take for the whole universe, very few of us can even begin to imagine another dimension of mind. Patrul Rinpoche tells the story of an old frog who had lived all his life in a dark well. One day a frog from the sea paid him a visit.
â€œWhere do you come from?â€ asked the frog in the well.
â€œFrom the great ocean,â€ he replied.
â€œHow big is your ocean?â€
â€œItâ€™s gigantic.â€
â€œYou mean about a quarter of the size of my well here?â€
â€œBigger.â€
â€œBigger? You mean half as big?â€
â€œNo, even bigger.â€
â€œIs it . . . as big as this well?â€
â€œThereâ€™s no comparison.â€
â€œThatâ€™s impossible! Iâ€™ve got to see this for myself.â€
They set off together. When the frog from the well saw the ocean, it was such a shock that his head just exploded into pieces.
------------------------------------------ -------
Something similar may happen to humans, if the true nature of the universe is revealed.

Cheers, Finn Hammer

Shrad

Wed Mar 19 2014, 08:20AM

Registered Member #3215 Joined: Sun Sept 19 2010, 08:42PM
Location:
Posts: 780

one should read Vellum and Ink, the two volumes of The Book of All Hours from Hal Duncan

this is a bit related, I think, and many of you would love the style and verve of the author...

beware, though, as it is one of the most complex things to read I ever saw in terms of complexity and subtlety...

Conundrum

Fri Apr 25 2014, 08:26AM

Registered Member #96 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:37PM
Location: CI, Earth
Posts: 4059

Interesting,
Here's hoping someone invents a gravity wave detector that isn't fifty miles in diameter.

Proud Mary

Fri Apr 25 2014, 11:53AM

Registered Member #543 Joined: Tue Feb 20 2007, 04:26PM
Location: UK
Posts: 4992

I have thought for some time that we are quite blind to the likely existence of Super Low Frequency waves - waves of less than 300 mHz.

It is not hard to imagine some colossal stellar galactic process whereby a ribbon of gas plasma 3 million km long - rotating gas spirals perhaps - is excited to resonance and thereby sets up a train of 100 mHz waves, but how could we detect them?

Our minds are perhaps trapped within the scale of our own frame of reference, so that we would consider a 100 mHz wave to be 'slowly varying DC' and therefor not think about the information that such waves might carry about the nature and structure of vast astronomical phenomena that might generate waves at such a frequency.

Ash Small

Fri Apr 25 2014, 01:39PM

Registered Member #3414 Joined: Sun Nov 14 2010, 05:05PM
Location: UK
Posts: 4245

There's something I'm not clear about here. The gravitational waves supposedly detected are electromagnetic by nature, yet gravity isn't electromagnetic by nature, as I understand it. What does this electromagnetic radiation have to do with gravity? how are they 'caused' by gravity? I understand that gravity supposedly 'bends' space, thus 'focussing' EM radiation, but the article suggests that these waves are 'caused' by gravity.

What am I missing here?

Proud Mary

Fri Apr 25 2014, 02:11PM

Registered Member #543 Joined: Tue Feb 20 2007, 04:26PM
Location: UK
Posts: 4992

Ash Small wrote ...

There's something I'm not clear about here. The gravitational waves supposedly detected are electromagnetic by nature, yet gravity isn't electromagnetic by nature, as I understand it. What does this electromagnetic radiation have to do with gravity? how are they 'caused' by gravity? I understand that gravity supposedly 'bends' space, thus 'focussing' EM radiation, but the article suggests that these waves are 'caused' by gravity.

What am I missing here?

I should have made myself clearer, Ash. I didn't mean to suggest that gravity waves (about which I know very little) were identical with EM waves, but tried to show how our scale of reference could interfere with our understanding and interpretation of natural phenomena.

Ash Small

Fri Apr 25 2014, 03:15PM

Registered Member #3414 Joined: Sun Nov 14 2010, 05:05PM
Location: UK
Posts: 4245

It's not just what you said, PM, BICEP measures polarization of microwaves, from what I can make out

"BICEP (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) is an experiment designed to measure the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) to unprecedented precision, and in turn answer crucial questions about the beginnings of the Universe. BICEP operates at 100 GHz and 150 GHz at angular resolutions of 1.0Â° and 0.7Â°, respectively, with an array of 98 polarization-sensitive detectors, mapping a large region of the sky around the South Celestial Pole."

I'm just wondering how polarization of microwaves (EM radiation) can be interpreted as 'proof' (or evidence) of gravitational waves, which presumably aren't electromagnetic by nature. I assume the polarization must have something to do with space being 'bent' by gravity, either that, or the source of the EM radiation is affected by gravitational waves. None of the sources quoted above seem to mention any of the suspected mechanism involved.

Proud Mary

Fri Apr 25 2014, 05:08PM

Registered Member #543 Joined: Tue Feb 20 2007, 04:26PM
Location: UK
Posts: 4992

I don't know anythying about it, Ash, and so haven't really got anything to contribute, thought I did find this on the UK STFC website, which touched upon my ideas about scale:

"Detection of a second polarisation mode, B-mode, is now a high priority. The interest stems from the possibility of using the entire universe as a gravity wave detector. Gravity waves present in the universe at the time of decoupling of radiation from matter will have left an imprint in the CMB. This imprint would be in the form of B-mode polarisation, a distinctive pattern of polarisation vectors on the sky with magnetic field-like negative parity.

"The candidate sources of gravity waves in the early universe are events such as breaking of fundamental symmetries (e.g. electroweak, GUT), processes that spawn distortions in space-time known as 'topological defects', or violent cosmological events such as inflation and reheating. Detecting any of these cosmological gravity waves would have a very high scientific impact and is one of the 'holy grails' of gravitational wave experiments. The CMB polarisation signal is expected to be strongest on the largest angular scales. Therefore the gravity waves probed correspond to wave periods on the order of the Hubble time. These frequencies are much lower and the distance scales much larger than those probed by gravity wave interferometers such as LIGO and LISA (km scales). CMB polarisation experiments are the only known way to detect these phenomena. An additional advantage is that there are, by definition, no events in the post-recombination universe that can generate gravity waves on the scales probed by the CMB, so any detected signal has to be of primordial origin."

Andy

Sat Apr 26 2014, 03:35AM

Registered Member #4266 Joined: Fri Dec 16 2011, 03:15AM
Location:
Posts: 874

I'm just wondering how polarization of microwaves (EM radiation) can be interpreted as 'proof' (or evidence) of gravitational waves, which presumably aren't electromagnetic by nature. I assume the polarization must have something to do with space being 'bent' by gravity, either that, or the source of the EM radiation is affected by gravitational waves. None of the sources quoted above seem to mention any of the suspected mechanism involved.

I think its not so much that EM waves are gravity, but that you can use EM fields to workout the area that objects occupied in space, less area they occupied with the ratio not changing much from mass from atoms down, like 100 fold, compared to million> fold for area, that objects that occupied smaller areas in space are EM sources(electrons/protons/neutrons(in a around about way have EM, as we know the mass/size/speed in areas etc)), more squashed they become more gravity distortion happens, and more amplification of EM.
Atoms of hydrogen and lead would occupier the same area in space at the default levels, changing so hydrogen takes up less room in space will allow other hydrogen atoms to move closer increasing the gravity, to allow hydrogen to have a smaller area you need EM sources, say to speed up the electron orbit, but keep other variables the same, like mass,distance eg, but it doesn't need to be a circle orbit as a straight line is just a larger circle, so particle accelerators would lower the space that what it fired to occupied.
Gravity isn't so much mass, as hydrogen in a small space can be heavier than lead, and isn't really speed ether.
The volume that some thing has like atoms or the sun, occupier pretty much the same area in space, even thought the sun is larger than a atom, the area is about the same, unless the sun can change the structure of atoms, to allow the individual parts to get closer and smaller area then the gravity of the sun, and gravity of a electron, the electron would have more gravity/per volume, if you got the same number of electrons as atoms in the sun and put the electrons into the same volume the electron sun would have more gravity, if you keeped the same number, but squashed the volume, it would still have the same gravity, but if the electrons then took up less area in space, the gravity would increase and random chances the electron sun would have some of it as smaller area occupied, if that makes sense

Just a opinion,how i think it works.

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