Gravitational waves and listening to Coldplay.
21:49
Yes, internet, it is indeed true that Einstein has been proven right. And thank you once again, for stopping right there, rather than finding out what he is right about. I, right here, am going to answer the most persistent questions of humanity.
Einstein wrote 2 papers, one on the theory of special relativity, in the year 1905, about relativity for non-accelerating objects and one on the theory of general relativity, in 1916, that applies to everything.
The reason why it took him 11 years to figure what may look like an extension to his previous paper was because things get weird when things start accelerating. What you need to know to understand gravitational waves, is that spacetime is a rubber sheet, and placing heavy objects on it causes it to bend. This bend causes things to fall in on that object. This works fine for things that are still or moving at a constant speed, but, when things start accelerating, space does weird stuff.
Much like running your finger through water, ripples begin forming. Or that's what Einstein said some 100 years ago. This weird ripple thing that space was predicted to do seemed far-fetched, until 2011, when the LIGO discovered something insane.
The LIGO is, in its essence, a flashlight on one end, and a photodiode on the other. While the flashlight did its 'light-up' routine, several billion light-years away, two black holes bumped into each other in the fateful week of valentines. This set of a huge ripple, that travelled faster than light, because its space moving, and not matter, which made it's way to this flashlight system, and bent a little bit of space in the path of the light. By little, I mean a thousandth of the width of a proton. This space crunch changed the amount of time that the light took to hit the photodiode, as space changed, and created a tiny spike on the graph. For the next 5 years, LIGO, CalTech and MIT went on a quest to find out if there is true substance in this observation. And in a press conference yesterday, they confirmed it.
On to the most important side of things, I listened to the new Coldplay album, 'A Head Full Of Dreams'. It's some of the most brilliant music I've ever heard. Definitely worth a buy.
I'm Daksh Gupta, and as always, never stop asking questions.
Einstein wrote 2 papers, one on the theory of special relativity, in the year 1905, about relativity for non-accelerating objects and one on the theory of general relativity, in 1916, that applies to everything.
The reason why it took him 11 years to figure what may look like an extension to his previous paper was because things get weird when things start accelerating. What you need to know to understand gravitational waves, is that spacetime is a rubber sheet, and placing heavy objects on it causes it to bend. This bend causes things to fall in on that object. This works fine for things that are still or moving at a constant speed, but, when things start accelerating, space does weird stuff.
Much like running your finger through water, ripples begin forming. Or that's what Einstein said some 100 years ago. This weird ripple thing that space was predicted to do seemed far-fetched, until 2011, when the LIGO discovered something insane.
The LIGO is, in its essence, a flashlight on one end, and a photodiode on the other. While the flashlight did its 'light-up' routine, several billion light-years away, two black holes bumped into each other in the fateful week of valentines. This set of a huge ripple, that travelled faster than light, because its space moving, and not matter, which made it's way to this flashlight system, and bent a little bit of space in the path of the light. By little, I mean a thousandth of the width of a proton. This space crunch changed the amount of time that the light took to hit the photodiode, as space changed, and created a tiny spike on the graph. For the next 5 years, LIGO, CalTech and MIT went on a quest to find out if there is true substance in this observation. And in a press conference yesterday, they confirmed it.
On to the most important side of things, I listened to the new Coldplay album, 'A Head Full Of Dreams'. It's some of the most brilliant music I've ever heard. Definitely worth a buy.
I'm Daksh Gupta, and as always, never stop asking questions.
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