Technology and Inference
One can only be astounded by humanity’s ever-accelerating advances
in technology … although I’m sure most of them have always taken place out of
sight of the general populace. But every once in a while something hits the
airwaves, and this latest leaves me feeling there are no limits whatever.
Quoting one report
(with my emphases) on the achievement:
On September 14,
2015, the two LIGO sites, in Louisiana and Washington State,
independently detected a gravitational wave by measuring a
discrepancy in the time the light rays took to reach a sensor at the ends of
the tunnels. The precision of the measurement is simply astonishing. The difference
in length that each light wave traveled corresponds to
1/1000th of the radius of a proton, a subatomic particle that is itself
minuscule, with a size of about 10-12 meters.
But
I am also astounded … and very pleased … that the real payoff of this
technological feat must have come about by means of good ol’ rational inference
and theory construction. For here (according to the same article) is what that
blippiest of blips has revealed to us:
The
signal captured precise details about the two
black holes that, within a fraction of a second, collided,
coalesced, and produced the gravitational wave. Scientists determined that they
were thirty-six and twenty-nine times the mass of our sun, with event horizons
approximately ninety-three miles wide. They produced a single black
hole sixty-two times the mass of the sun. The difference in mass of
the black holes before and after the collision was converted into energy in
the form of gravitational waves. This is an enormous amount of energy, more
than that in the visible light of all the stars in the universe combined. Scientists
were also able to conclude that the black holes merged about 1.3 billion years
ago, and that these ripples that stretched and
compressed space traveled unimpeded to earth.
Quotations from:
After Einstein: The Dark Mysteries
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