Recently we noted a major scientific event: the detection of gravitational waves by the LIGO experiment.
The other day, the physicist and cosmologist Brian Greene visited Stephen Colbert (yes, I’m linking to Stephen Colbert) to give an explanation and demonstration of the experiment. Watch it here.
The big payoff: the actual “sound” of two black holes colliding. Wait for it!
h/t: my boy Nick.
18 Comments
That was an odd sound indeed. Almost a double sound with the two tones involved. Also, it was interesting to meet a scientist with a sense of humor. Not the stereotype. Colbert managed pretty well himself.
I have met a few scientists in my day, Robert, and virtually all of them have had a sense of humor. Sometimes a bizarre sense, but a sense nevertheless.
Albert Einstein, whom, regrettably, I never had the honor to meet, is well known for having a terrific sense of humor. My favorite of his witticisms was, “Two things are infinite — the universe and human stupidity. And I’m not sure about the universe.” And I’m not sure he was joking :)
The universe: Starts with a bang, ends with a whimper.
Jeffery Hodges
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Henry, I must have only been exposed to the dull ones. However, one course I took in college- Earth Geology- was taught by a real nut. He was funny acting and looking. Turned out, that was the only science course I took that actually interested me. Even today, I notice features on mountain sides when I drive through that never would have occurred to me before. Same at the coast.
I was raised by two scientists, my father having grown up in London as an Anglican, and my mother in Scotland, the daughter of a Congregationalist minister.
When I was born they had me baptized. When my brother came along five years later, though, they didn’t. They told us later that they had decided to keep him as a control.
Well, Robert, acting and looking is a whole ‘nother ball of wax (present company excluded, of course).
“They told us later that they had decided to keep him as a control.” Well, if he has any of his Mother’s Congregationalist leanings, baptism is still an option and will be figured as proper. And with a “control” like that, who says science and religion can’t mix?
A couple of other famous examples:
Niels Bohr:
Wolfgang Pauli:
‘It is not even wrong’.” Wow! Can you imagine the emotional damage that statement can do on any American campus? Every “safe space”, “trigger” tripper known and unknown will be at risk.
Asimov: The Relativity of Wrong
Isaac Asimov, of course, is a much more knowledgeable scientist than his English Lit correspondent, John. What the latter’s criticism of Asimov revealed (so thoroughly by Asimov himself) was John’s complete lack of a sense of nuance, which Asimov identified as the confusion/conflation of the concept of “wrong” with the concept of “incomplete”.
Even the great General Theory of Relativity (arguably, the greatest single accomplishment of the human intellect in the world of science) is incomplete, or, as John would call it, “wrong”, because its efficacy breaks down (i.e., mathematically diabolical infinities intrude) in the tiny domain of quantum mechanics. This is what string theorists are striving mightily to resolve — a theory that would unify GR and QM, the so-called “theory of everything”.
[img]http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_3QqO8EXd-II/S-pvw4qVxZI/AAAAAAAAzcU/yzYrkPhjnS4/s1600/einstein-2dquote-2d3.jpg[/img]
P.S.: Even the theory of everything, if and when it is completed to the level of satisfaction that would be demanded of it by the scientific community at large, will most likely be incomplete, IMHO. Some future John will come along to point out that it does not account for some aspect of nature, and is therefore “wrong”.
With some people, you know, you just don’t know, you know?
Well, I know that I know what I know and I know that I don’t know what I don’t know.
Rumsfeldian Epistomology:
“Well, I know that I know what I know and I know that I don’t know what I don’t know.”
Jeffery Hodges
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Thanks, HJH. I didn’t know that I didn’t know that. But now I know that I do.
BTW, I was riffing on Jim Belushi’s line in the movie “About Last Night“, namely:
“With some women, you know, you just don’t know, you know?”
Sorry but didn’t this already happen in 2014? Do they count on us having very short memories?
http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/17/tech/innovation/big-bang-gravitational-waves/index.html
No, Mark, they don’t count on us having very short memories (though my own memory is not as good as it used to be).
The article you link to mentions that some latent evidence of what is thought to have been an effect that could have been caused by gravity waves was imprinted on the cosmic microwave background. That is a beast of an entirely different color than the direct detection of gravity waves emitted at the time that two black holes coalesced and (the waves) reaching our earth and the detectors on it just a short time ago.
Do you really think that “they” could get away with trying to fool “us” (including all the astrophysicists in the world at large)?