Gravitational Waves

no there is no indication that gravitational waves move faster than light.

this does prove that gravity does not act over a distance instantaneously, and it does travel.

this is bigger than i thought, this could become huge eventually. we can see gravity now.

  On 2/13/2016 at 12:18 AM, Squee said:

Can you dumb it down just a tiny bit? Let me see if I'm getting this...

So they've finally found proof that two black holes collided billions of years ago and that has caused gravitational waves to burst in all directions and they've just reached us. So now they're able, via the gravitational waves, to look way further back in time than before, right?

How on earth is that possible? That blows my mind.

The news is that a theoretical prediction now has finally been observed by an experiment. It being two black holes is happenstance.

Seeing further back in time is possible, that's what they thought they did a couple of years ago with the discovery of the polarized light from the early universe caused by early gravitational waves. But the discovery has since been rescinded since further analysis showed that the results was due to interstellar space dust.

However I am sure that the confirmation of the existence of gravitational waves and the science on how to build detectors will bring new discoveries and add to the knowledge of our universe some more.

Can anyone explain why gravity and light move at the same speed? Possibly a stupid question

  On 2/13/2016 at 12:09 PM, Amen Warrior said:

Can anyone explain why gravity and light move at the same speed? Possibly a stupid question

sent using magic space waves

  On 2/13/2016 at 12:09 PM, Amen Warrior said:

Can anyone explain why gravity and light move at the same speed? Possibly a stupid question

The speed of light isn't an intrinsic property of light itself, it's more fundamental than that. Not only can nothing in the universe travel faster than c (according to special relativity), c is also the minimum speed of any massless particle, a photon of light can do nothing other than travel at c, it can't slow down or speed up. Gravitons are the particle equivalent of photons, and the standard model requires that the graviton (if it were ever discovered) is also a massless particle, and so would travel at c (gluons are also massless, they mediate the force between quarks that keeps the nucleus of an atom stuck together, so they also travel at c).

btw, when someone says that the speed of light slows down in a material, or that the very early universe was opaque to light, that's not because light is actually moving slower than c at any point, all that's happening there is that once the density is sufficiently high a photon will be bound to interact with other particles, an electron or a quark say (any particle with an electric charge), and when it does it will temporarily be absorbed into that particle, and then emitted a moment later (because the absorption send the particle into a higher energy state, but such states are unstable according to quantum mechanics so it has to return to a lower energy state).

this process seems to slow the photon down but it's not really as every movement in between interactions occurs at the speed of light. photons will only usually be absorbed by electrons under normal conditions today (like in a transparent solid/liquid on Earth for example), but under conditions of sufficiently high energy/density they can be absorbed by quarks as well (and that's all that was around pretty much during this opaque period of the early universe, a plasma of quarks and gluons, with lots of very short lived particles, including photons, being created and destroyed in high energy interactions between the quarks).

once the expansion of the universe had increased enough that the density decreased sufficiently, the constant high energy interactions stop. the results of the interactions that did then happen were able to sustain themselves for longer and longer periods, eventually giving rise to stable electrons and atoms and and thus clouds of gas, and then stars and thus lots of light which we can still see today if we look far enough away (one of the first forms of this light that we can still detect today is the cosmic microwave background, which was the result of electrons and protons combining to form the first hydrogen atoms).

during the quark-gluon phase, and before that for a time, the gravitons would have been free to move about as they saw fit, because the energy wasn't high enough to make the quark-gluon plasma interact sufficiently with the gravitons/gravity waves, gravity waves would be produced as a consequence of the interactions, but then they'd propagate outwards on their own merry way. before this time though, when the energy was so high that all four forces were essentially the same force, gravity waves would have been unable to escape so there's a limit to how far back we can see by looking for them.

  On 2/13/2016 at 12:18 AM, Squee said:

Can you dumb it down just a tiny bit? Let me see if I'm getting this...

So they've finally found proof that two black holes collided billions of years ago and that has caused gravitational waves to burst in all directions and they've just reached us. So now they're able, via the gravitational waves, to look way further back in time than before, right?

How on earth is that possible? That blows my mind.

Gravitational waves are so hard to detect that it took two black holes wrestling to emit a detectable amount.

And don't let the "back in time" bit do your head in too much...the farther out into space you look, the farther back in time you are seeing.

P.S. The "speed of light" should really be called the "speed of massless particles"...just think of an object's mass as causing 'drag' that prevents it from moving at the speed of light

  On 2/13/2016 at 5:39 PM, xxx said:

caze you are a sharp atomic motherfucker. I saw you flex in a thread regarding nuclear energy and you make complex things readable. I still have trouble with lasers coming out of phase for a single blip in over 20 years of detecting and it's proof of gravity waves from a billion light years away. I am tempted by more mundane explanations like seismic activity, power fluctuations, the inadvertent creation of a fart chamber by a worker, etc. I also know that while people throw around "mind = blown", they don't actually realize that if your mind is sufficiently blown, you will not accept it and might even be hostile towards the revelation.

Yeah caze knows his shit

Holy shit, I accidentally looked at Delet's ramblings on the Higgs boson conspiracy

That is...wow, didn't know Higgs boson denialism was a thing...but of course it is, I guess

Lol. I chose not to address it.

Most would be wise to do the same, it won't get us anywhere.

  On 2/12/2016 at 11:40 PM, Braintree said:

So the mass of the entire universe is able to create a higgs field and force it outward faster than the speed of light?

The one 'exception' to the speed of light barrier is that things move faster than the speed of light in relation to each other when the points in space they occupy expand away from each other

  On 2/13/2016 at 6:00 PM, LimpyLoo said:

 

  On 2/12/2016 at 11:40 PM, Braintree said:

So the mass of the entire universe is able to create a higgs field and force it outward faster than the speed of light?

The one 'exception' to the speed of light barrier is that things move faster than the speed of light in relation to each other when the points in space they occupy expand away from each other

 

can you elaborate?

Are you referring to the epr paradox? I thought that was sorted out...

edit: Or quantum entanglement, is what I mean.

Edit: things already moving at speed of light, that is

The idea is that the speed of light pertains to how things move through space

But space itself is stretching like silly puddy

So something moving at speed of light *through space* will move even faster in relation to another point in space...if the two points are stretching away from each other (which they are)

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P.S. The "speed of light" should really be called the "speed of massless particles"...just think of an object's mass as causing 'drag' that prevents it from moving at the speed of light

yeah, the 'drag' you are talking about is just the massive particles interacting with the higgs field, all particles actually travel at the speed of light really, it's just that the ones with mass also interact with the higgs field (unlike gravitons, photons and gluons), and that interaction 'slows' them down in the same manner that a photon interacting with an electron is slowed down. the more mass a thing has the more it interacts with the higgs field, and thus the more energy needed to accelerate it, but the more energy you have the more massive you are (e=mc2), so if something has any rest mass at all (i.e. mass when it's not accelerating) it would require an infinite amount of energy to reach c, which is obviously impossible. photons and the like have no rest mass, they never need to accelerate as they are already moving at c. note this is slightly confusing, because if a photon is moving, then surely it has some energy, and by e=mc2 then surely it must have some mass? that's just a slight confusion of terms, because the strength of the interaction with the higgs field is just related to the rest mass (which is a constant value for each particle), not the total mass-energy.

  On 2/12/2016 at 6:25 PM, luke viia said:

 

  On 2/12/2016 at 6:17 PM, double uv said:

i think it's perfectly funny to say "we've found this and that and such and so" using limited human tools & knowledge.

it's all based on a unilinear conception, while every dunce knows that our current human perception (that is to say 3.5D) does not gravitate towards a singular understanding.

 

TIme? baha, time is everywhere & nowhere at once.

Mass? bahah, mass is based on gravity

Big Bang? bahahahahaha. there is no *one point of origin*. the universe was always there, and will always be there. we, with our puny brains and bodies were simply brought into this existence by something bigger than us. we will not find it, and the bigger our knowledge of the concept of the beginning of the universe will become, the more we have to acknowledge that we will never know the origin of the universe. we are passive bystanders in the process of creation. we can only bask in the light that creation is.

 

it is the same as the origin of yourself. you will never know your conception.

/end pseudoscience rant

 

i just hope we will become more humble, but im afraid we'll just become more arrogant since.. god.. we are so close to finding the answer! finally science can prove the beginning of the universe! scientists will be blinded by their arrogance & will bring a whole lot of havoc and despair to the rest of humans, of that i am sure.

I fear you've just doomed us all to 4 pages of LimpyLoo posts

1) This meme about science and scientists being arrogant is pretty hilarious...unlike what you are doing, science doesn't assert things without evidence

Time is everywhere and nowhere? Citation needed

The universe has always been here? Please explain how you came to know that

2) eat my booby, Luke

i thought c is constant, like a motorcycle moving at the speed of light that turns on its headlight would not be sending light out in front of it. which is why it reduces everything to relativity, turning space into origami

to worsen the situation, isnt there now evidence that entanglement violates the speed limit?

  On 2/13/2016 at 6:00 PM, LimpyLoo said:

 

The one 'exception' to the speed of light barrier is that things move faster than the speed of light in relation to each other when the points in space they occupy expand away from each other

 

i thought this was actually not true

like over here the guy says two spaceship traveling in opposite directions at .5c would actually be going .8c relative to eachother, not c. idfk

Again, that is true BUT FOR the actual fabric of space stretching

  On 2/13/2016 at 6:07 PM, LimpyLoo said:

The idea is that the speed of light pertains to how things move through space

But space itself is stretching like silly puddy

So something moving at speed of light *through space* will move even faster in relation to another point in space...if the two points are stretching away from each other (which they are)

you don't need to stretch space for that, if space wasn't expanding then if two particles moved away from each other at speeds of v1 and v2, then relative to the 1st particle the 2nd particle would be moving away from it at a speed of v1 + v2. and if they were two photons that would mean the 2nd would would appear to be moving at twice the speed of light, but from the point of view of that photon it would just be moving at c, and the 1st one would be moving at 2c.

there are other things that can propagate faster than light as well, like the wave front of an electromagnetic or gravitational field, but you can't use these methods to accelerate matter for travel or communication, it's basically a kind of illusion.

general relativity does allow for a few weird possibilities though, not that there's any reason to believe they're actually true. one is a tachyon, which also has zero rest mass, but travels faster than c at all times (like a photon it cannot accelerate or decelerate), it can be used to travel backwards in time in theory, but only in certain limited ways (without violating general relativity at least). the others are warp drives and wormholes, but neither seem particularly plausible either, we'll probably find theoretical reasons to disprove them.

___

it's a lot easier to get your head around the standard model than it is general relativity, which is as confusing and unintuitive as quantum weirdness. it's possible to understand the standard model interactions, forces and fields in a pretty general way with various mental models pretty much in line with what are brains are intuitively capable of.

Yeah, Relativity is hard

I think the idea that first helped me understand it was the idea that light (or anything moving at c) doesn't age...if you could somehow put a clock on a photon back at the Big Bang...after all these billions of years, not even a second would've passed on that clock.

Also, if you were able to travel at c, you would get to see the entire history of the universe play out before you....you would get to witness the actual heat death of the universe.

Sixty Symbols has some good stuff on Relativity

https://youtube.com/watch?v=kGsbBw1I0Rg

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i thought c is constant, like a motorcycle moving at the speed of light that turns on its headlight would not be sending light out in front of it. which is why it reduces everything to relativity, turning space into origami

well a motorcycle couldn't travel at c, so it couldn't send out a beam of light at > c, and photons can't spontaneously create new photons. if a spaceship was travelling at 99.9999% c, and switched on it's lights, then the photons would still just travel at c.

  On 2/13/2016 at 6:32 PM, very honest said:

to worsen the situation, isnt there now evidence that entanglement violates the speed limit?

no, entanglement proves that particles are linked together in some weird way, probably down to non-local properties of space (where, for all intents and purposes, an entangled particle is in two places at the same time), but you can't actually use this property to transmit information faster than light.

^ ok why is that? If you have one part of the entangled particle and I have the other, and you act upon yours, doesn't mine instantly change state with it...? me so dumb