Hot Soup, Gold and the Kiss of Creation
Hi folks,
Let's start with Einstein, smartest guy I never met. In 1916, he surmised that since space time was bendy, ("relative" is the term he liked) then there could be waves, like surf. Ripples in space time. Exactly 100 years later, in February of 2016, the LIGO, Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, detected a ripple caused by the merger of two black holes. The LIGO has two "light storage" arms set at right angles that are each 2.5 miles long. These are not like my "light storage"--a kitchen drawer with flashlights, bulbs and batteries. These are beams of a laser in a vacuum tube that through mirror trickery increase the effective length of the light beams to 696 miles. In essence, these brilliant scientists have a rod that long and they are looking for it to stretch the distance of 10 to the negative 18 meters, or roughly the size of one thousandth of the diameter of a proton. (Pretty weensy change, methinks. There is some serious math at work there). If they see that, and they did, this proves that Einstein was again correct and there is such a thing as a gravitational wave. Space time is indeed flexible. Things can go boom with enough force that a billion miles away space time ripples get to Earth. Imagine what is happening in that neighborhood! To imagine we need a DRFPMI. (Look it up). (Or not, if you are not into Noisebudget, Squeezed Film Dampening, Substrate Brownian, Parametric Instabilities or FINESSE. These are the poetics of quantum physics AND excellent band names....)
Last week scientists had a bonanza. LIGO and a sister instrument detected a ripple and told all the astronomers where to look. A gamma ray detector in orbit pinged confirmation two seconds later and all the major telescopes, around 70, on earth pointed at the same tiny spot of the cosmos. Even Hubble dialed in.
When black holes merge there is nothing to see--all radiation, gamma rays, X-rays, all light frequencies are eaten up by the all powerful gravity. KA BOOM with no evidence excepting the teeniest stretch of the LIGO beam.
Neutron stars are old suns that run out of fuel and collapse into the densest stuff we can still see--a teaspoon full has the mass of Mt Everest. Our sun would turn into a ball of magnetic flux 12 miles in diameter. (You guys all know it is around 864,300 miles in diameter. Right. Check.) Only 130 million light years away from us, (also check, a light year is 5.88 trillion miles) two neutron stars that were locked into a gravitational twirl finally got close enough for their first and last cataclysmic kiss. The resulting "kilonova," (new word y'all, spread that around), mashed protons and neutrons in a furious bath of radiation creating ALL the primordial elements heavier than iron. The debris field from these two 12 mile balls colliding is the size of our solar system. 40 to 100 times the mass of the earth of gold was created instantly. 10 to 30 times the earth's mass of platinum and uranium just appeared out of the atomic stew to be strewn across millions of miles of space.
I highly recommend checking out the animated renderings of all this that you can find on the interwebs. Cataclysmic events are best when you have a cartoon to go by. Once again the tiniest and the most massively unfathomable things are linked, and human beings with insanely sophisticated quantitative tools are marveling at our natural surroundings. There is poetry in the science, and metaphor too. What are children but the golden offspring of two super dense objects getting too close? If we are anything, we are precious and know it. If we are anything, it is a pair of eyes looking for nuance. Tiny ripples that prove we are here and watching. Tiny wavelets across the emptiness... light wiggling, sparks...
Surf the waves everyday, my friends. As my buddy Larry says, "Everyday is a gift. That is why we call it the present."
Come visit the latest playing with light and shapes at SOFA Chicago 2017 this weekend, November 2-5, at Navy Pier.
We are stretching and bending and refracting and reflecting and hanging about looking for the next kaboom...
