Hello Friend,

My friend Vicky Fraser over in the UK, is a real genuine Science Geek ; She shared with me some of her
thoughts on the recent discovery of gravitational waves in a recent email.

I'm going to share them with you today:  Take it away Vicky!

"One of the most exciting fascinating breakthroughs of the last year or so was the discovery of gravitational waves. On September 14th, 2015, two black holes crashed into each other. The spiralling final orbits, over a billion light years away, lasted only milliseconds — but during that instant 5% of the mass of the two black holes transformed from matter into energy.

That’s three Sun’s worth of “stuff”.

The black hole merger produced enough gravitational radiation for us to detect it here, on Earth, at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. (Also known as LIGO).

When the gravitational wave hit the twin perpendicular laser detectors, it caused them to change their path length by 10^-19 metres — that’s a tiny, tiny, TINY amount — but enough to be significantly significant.

The clever folks at LIGO spent months analysing and checking their data — and eventually found it matched Einstein’s predictions exactly.

A few months later, in 2016, LIGO detected another gravitational wave from two more colliding black holes — further confirmation that gravitational waves are real.In nerd circles, there was extreme excitement because it's one of the biggest breakthroughs in physics so far this century.

Why? Because gravitational waves confirm a central feature of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity. Einstein proposed that massive objects distort the fabric of spacetime — you might have seen this compared to a heavy object bending a flexible surface. This alters the movement of other objects and light that pass close to the large object.

Einstein also suggested if sufficiently heavy objects accelerate, they’d cause ripples in spacetime  to propagate outwards.

But what’s the significance to science? To you and me?

Well, gravitational waves confirm a cornerstone theory of the standard picture of cosmology. Essentially, they’ll show the “inflation” theory of the Universe is true. This theory says during the first moments of the Universe’s existence, it expanded exponentially.

(Ray's two cents: Much like house prices in Toronto right now.)
 

During inflation, the Universe’s temperature — and the energy of its particles — was trillions of times higher than we can achieve in any lab, so we can’t test it.

The reason this is so exciting is because inflation is a quantum phenomenon — but gravitational waves are part of classical physics. So the waves establish a link between the two — and could be the first evidence that gravity has a quantum nature just like the other forces of nature."


Another thing that will also be expanding (or shall we say increasing) very soon is the price of this Celestron Tetra  Microscope (for discovering the inner worlds).

direct link: http://khanscope.com/collections/celestron/products/tetraview-lcd-digital-touch-screen-micro-44347\

Because it's touch screen, it's a joy to use.  This is not a toy, but a serious microscope you can do some
real science with.

Clear Skies,

Ray Khan

PS I will be sharing some more rant feedback from earlier this week, on this weekend. Be on the lookout.