Hurrah! Fantastic! It’s being called the biggest discovery in science in the last 100 years. On February 11th 2016 exactly 100 years (coincidentally?) after Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves, scientists announced they had detected such waves in the USA in September. They could have detected a tremor from an earth tremor in Christchurch for all I know. What I do know is that in science, research results to have validity and reliability, they need to be repeated.
This may prove to be a little difficult although the scientists, think they will be able to detect waves regularly once they have calibrated the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave thingamajig. Apparently the detected waves took 1.3 billion light years to get to us. According to the scientists, two massive black holes (an oxymoron to start with) which are invisible because they have consumed their own light, collided causing these waves. There you go, two invisible holes doing their thing have caused the biggest sensation in cosmology in the last hundred years. The mind boggles! The scientists will now be able to create a new science using a gravitational wave spectrum to measure past events that happened out there in the ever-expanding universe trillions of years ago.
My mind doesn’t compute an ever expanding universe to start with. I can cope with nothing going on forever (only just mind you) but that this nothingness is getting bigger is beyond me. Scientists are forever seeking knowledge to explain how this universe began. To my mind this is an impossibility so why bother. I am never going to get to first base with any of this cosmology, astrophysics or whatever it is, because the mathematics behind it are so complicated only Stephen Hawking and his ilk of mathematicians can understand it. So how do I know any of what they are doing is actually reality or is it just a big (I hate to use the word) wank to keep these scientists in work?
Makes you think that science could be better employed for the benefit of mankind rather than spending billions of dollars on research with no positive benefits. The starving people on the Horn of Africa or the decimated people of Syria won’t give a monkey’s uncle about gravitational waves. They would like to see a world with sufficient food and no wars.
A lot of the good things in life have come out of science but so has the bad. Our ability to kill and decimate is a direct result of scientific advances in warfare.
The discovery of gravitational waves may be big in the cosmology world it is of little consequence to us mere mortals.
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