Imagine some Roman legionnaires who have survived the ages and are walking around London today. With a temporary imbalance of this caliber, the scientific popularizer Marcus Chown invites us to reflect on the gravitational waves intercepted on September 14, 2015, a date that will be marked for the remains in the memory of the scientific community.
Because these gravitational waves were the result of the merger of two black holes, vestiges of the first stars that formed after the Big Bang. In this way, a journey of 1,300 million years was intercepted thanks to the detector network of the LIGO project, where laser interferometers are going to determine wavelengths and speeds of waves by measuring tiny changes in the path of light, according to what Chown tells us in his book titled The magical moment (Blackie, 2021). A very instructive work where he breaks down the ten discoveries that changed the history of science; a journey that takes us from European laboratories to a bunker built under a nuclear power plant, passing through an underground tunnel dug under the French-Swiss border. Einstein, Pauli, Dostoevsky, Arthur Clarke and Charles Dickens also appear alongside scientists who celebrate their discoveries by toasting with Coca-Cola in cardboard cups.
The thing does not end here, because, as if it were a science fiction series, in the last chapter Chown tells us about the discovery of gravitational waves that occurred in September 2015. Until then, the existence of gravitational waves was a mere hypothesis. Einstein doubted a lot about them to finally ensure that gravitational waves had to exist. The jolts of space-time create ripples that propagate at the speed of light, Einstein was sure of that, but he wasn’t so sure they could be detected.
For this reason, as Chown tells us, the detection of gravitational waves was the “most significant advance in the field of astronomy since Galileo pointed his telescope at the firmament in 1609.” However, it was not a scientific publication that first broke the news, but a tweet from Lawrence Krauss, former cosmologist at Arizona State University and that he did not belong to the LIGO project even though he was aware of the discovery. A few days after the signals were detected, on September 25, Krauss revealed the secret by the social network of the little blue bird. What came to confirm the rumor was the article in the February 11, 2016 in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters.
That day science took a turn, in the same way that our lives would take a turn if we found out that some Roman legionnaires from the time of the empire survive in today’s London through the ages. It would be as amazing as knowing that the gravitational waves that shook the Earth on September 14, 2015 were the remains of two stars that collapsed millions of years ago, when the most complex organism on Earth was a bacterium.
Undoubtedly, something had to happen since then for two black holes to merge to the beat of a cosmic symphony and turn all that time into a magical moment.
the stone ax It is a section where Montero Glez, with a desire for prose, exerts his particular siege on scientific reality to show that science and art are complementary forms of knowledge.
You can follow SUBJECT in Facebook, Twitter and instagramor sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.
#turn #millions #years #magical #moment #clock