Gravitational Waves, Fearfully and Wonderfully Made
“A long time ago in a galaxy far far away” two black holes merged into one. To be more precise, this event happened approximately 1.3 billion years ago in a galaxy in the direction of the Magellanic clouds. We know this because scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravity-Wave Observatories (LIGO) in Hanford, Washington and Livingston,…
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Gravity and Skiing
Nobel Prize Laureate Peter Higgs in Stockholm, December 2013 I “went down a rabbit hole” in Wikipedia today. I wanted to better understand gravity. On the face of the matter, it seems like a simple enough question: “What is gravity and how is it mediated?” I went cross-country skiing on Saturday and felt its effects;…
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“I have no reason to believe that the human intellect is able to weave a system of physics out of its own resources without experimental labour. Whenever the attempt has been made it has resulted in an unnatural and self-contradictory mass of rubbish.”James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879)
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I admit that my “nerd quotient”1 may be higher than the average found in the general population and so this post may go beyond concepts you have thought about or wish to think about. (I have at least saved you from reading the formulas that I considered writing into this blog.) Yet, even those who…
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