Although we care deeply. It’s just late, I’m a bit woozy as I write this, and so I’m stretching a bit for a good title. This post is about gravitational waves. More accurately, it is about a rather good BBC programme about gravitational waves: What they are, why they are important, why we care, and what we’re doing to detect them. It’s Melvin Bragg and some guests on the “In Our Time” prime time programme. I recommend it as a pleasant, unscripted chat which has quite a bit of good introductory information. Even if you’re a bit busy, you can listen to it while doing some other task. Go on. Also, even if you know this stuff, it’s always amusing to hear the host apparently getting terribly confused and hung up on some points while trying to get to grips with the material. I can never tell if he’s faking it because he has decided that he has to reinforce the cliché –it’s physics so it must be hard, especially at this time in the morning– or whether he’s for real at these points. Either way, it makes for a rough-and-tumble conversational feel to the programme which is not altogether disagreeable.
Anyway, the key thing is this (and you’ve probably not heard this here first): In the entire history of science, every time we’ve figured out a new way of looking up at the sky, we’ve revolutionized our understanding of the universe. We’ve every right to expect the same of gravitational waves, once the technology matures. It’s exciting just thinking about it!
I’ll end with some relevant things to look at. Above is part of the LIGO detector (photo from NASA’s website). Here’s a link to the LISA detector that everyone hopes will be built one day soon (if NASA does not hemorrhage too much money on pointless manned trips to Mars). Some movies of animations of objects we expect to produce 
gravitational wave signals: colliding neutron stars, here, two colliding black holes, here (with some information about the animation here). Two books: Kip Thorne’s wonderful Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy has some material on the topic (and so many others), and Marcia Bartusiak’s Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony: Listening to the Sounds of Spacetime is devoted entirely to the subject. (I have not read Harry Collins’ book Gravity’s Shadow: The Search for Gravitational Waves. Have you? If it’s a good source too, let us know.)
-cvj
You might also check out Einstein@Home ( http://www.einsteinathome.org/ ). It’s a distributed computing project looking for gravitational waves with LIGO and GEO…
Carl, Michele, thanks for the information about the book…..
Thanks for the link Nigel.
-cvj
I didn’t buy Collins’ book ($31 at Amazon) to learn about the social science of gravity physics. I picked it up beecause I knew the primary subject of the book, Joe Weber. I learned general relativity in a class he taught at U. Cal., Irvine.
But the fascinating part of the book is the sociology. If one wishes to understand how sturdy (or flimsy) the foundations of physics are, one must understand how scientific consensus comes about.
The book may be long, but it is easy reading. A minor complaint is that it lightly follows the academic tendency towards repitition. I found myself skimming some of the later chapters.
A gravity wave physicist would probably find the recent books by Smolin and Woit an interesting discussion of the sociology of particle physics, but would find this book by Collins to be too much tilted against whatever version of reality he believes. Similarly, because of the extra emotional distance, the Collins book is a good read for particle theorists interested in the sociology of physics.
Harry Collins’ “Gravity’s Shadow” is a good book IMHO, but light reading it is not… Weighing in at 864 pages (and $100), it is a report on Collins’ project studying the sociology of gravitational-wave science, from Weber’s early experiments (and claims) to the construction of LIGO.
Collins’ material is largely derived from interviews with scientists, and he does not refrain from chronicling disagreements and failures. I’ve come to gravitational waves relatively recently compared to the time scale covered in this book, but from what I’ve been able to learn from my own observations and by asking my more senior colleagues, it seems that Collins is mostly accurate, although he may be annoying to some at times; he also has a tendency to verbosity.
As Collins himself writes on his homepage, “[This book] is primarily designed to be read by scientists involved in the search for gravitational radiation who are curious about the outsider who spends so much time spying on them.” And indeed, it provided me with a very readable introduction to the social science of… science, as it is done on the field.
It’s interesting that they keep saying that Einstein came up with general relativity in 1916 and predicted gravitational waves, but they conveniently never mention that Einstein started off by predicting that there are no gravitational waves and only found and corrected his error after a big argument over peer review in 1936:
‘Einstein submitted this research to the Physical Review under the title “Do Gravitational Waves Exist?” with Rosen as coauthor. Although the original version of the paper no longer exists, Einstein’s answer to the title question, to judge from his letter to Born, was “No.” It is remarkable that at this stage in his career Einstein was prepared to believe that gravitational waves did not exist, but he also managed to convince his new assistant, Leopold Infeld, who replaced Rosen in 1936, that his argument was valid…
‘But not everyone was so easily convinced. The Physical Review received Einstein’s submission on 1 June 1936, according to the journal’s logbook. Tate returned the manuscript to Einstein on 23 July with a critical review and the mild request that he “would be glad to have [Einstein’s] reaction to the various comments and criticisms the referee has made.” Einstein wrote back on 27 July in high dudgeon, withdrawing the paper and dismissing out of hand the referee’s comments…’
– http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-58/iss-9/p43.html
It is very readable – hence the recommendation.
I should have guessed that you – a professional musician- would like the title!
-cvj
I enjoy ‘In Our Time’. It’s broadcast here on a Thursday morning when I’m commuting and makes a good antidote to the vicissitudes of driving on the A14 during rush hour! I agree with your assessment of Melvyn Bragg. How readable is Marcia Bartusiak’s book for the non-scientist? The title is fantastic!