Do You Have Time to Read This?

There was once a time when there was no time. Maybe the question you should be asking is not "What is the time?" but "What is time?"


Imagine you make a prediction today with absolutely no way of knowing if it's correct. And then hundred years later, can you believe it, a century later, it's proven to be true! That's essentially what happened to one of the most popular scientists of all time- Albert Einstein. His ideas about space and time continue to mesmerize us even today and will continue far into the future. Or maybe it already has!

Very recently, scientists discovered the existence of yet another thing that changes our perception of time entirely- gravitational waves- ripples in the fabric of space time. Einstein predicted this in 1915 and in 2016, the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) has confirmed its existence. I can relate to the confusion that many of you may be experiencing right about now. How can there be ripples and waves in space-time? What is space-time anyway? Doesn't make much sense, huh? That's how it felt to me and probably even many of the scientists when they first discovered it. To wrap our minds around it, we may have to change our view of time entirely. Time is simply, or not so simply :) a fourth dimension and can be messed with just like space. The image below might help you start to think about these wondrous things that are going to open to scientists more secrets of the universe than we ever thought.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/nsf-s-ligo-has-detected-gravitational-waves

Well, to first understand gravitational waves even a bit, we must know how they are formed. Those two balls may look small in the picture but in reality, they are very very super massive objects whose collision releases energy in the form of these waves. So, why haven't we observed these gravitational waves before? So, basically, the colliding objects have to be insanely big for the waves to be significant enough to be observable on Earth. And the objects that produced these waves we have now observed are two black holes about 30 times the mass of our Sun. And for me, I can't even began to comprehend how big that is. Black holes are so extraordinary that apart from changing the space around them, even time behaves differently near them. Anyway, these black holes collided about 1.3 billion years ago. That's right. That was NOT a typo. Yeah, we have finally mastered the science of time travel. Just kidding. Well, actually, those black holes are so far away that the light from their collision has taken so long to reach Earth. It's crazy, right? I think it's pretty cool that we can see something that happened several millennia ago. I can't even begin to think of all the other things we may possibly discover if we look back far enough. Right, so to get back to the topic, when these black holes collided, their mass got converted into tremendous amounts of energy as shown by Einstein's equation, which you have probably heard of: E = mc^2.

https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/news/ligo20160211

This immense amount of energy got emitted as gravitational waves. And look how far we've come with just electromagnetic radiation. What wonders will these new waves uncover? So how exactly were these gravitational waves observed? It's not like it was a tsunami and zooms towards Earth and we just saw it. Nope, not at all. It's not that complicated really. So remember at the beginning of our adventure into space and time, how I talked about LIGO? So, LIGO is a set of two different detectors- one in Hanford, Washington and one in Livingston, Louisiana. So first take a look at these images and see if you can understand what's going on.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/feb/11/gravitational-waves-discovery-hailed-as-breakthrough-of-the-century

If you're anything like me, you probably have no idea what just happened. That's how it looks at first glance but take a closer look and you'll see that it's a pretty basic idea. There are two tubes that laser beams pass through. If there are no disturbances, then the laser beams travel back through the tubes and cancel each other out, so nothing is seen. If something was to change this process, like gravitational waves, then the tubes actually change length (physics stuff so I'm not gonna bore you guys with the details) but the beams come back at different times, are out of sync and light is seen. And this is the story of how the gravitational waves were first seen. As for how Einstein predicted it all those years ago, that involves too much math and physics for my liking and probably some of yours too. He just had a lot of time on his hand (no pun intended!)

http://www.businessfinancenews.com/24487-einstein-promised-gravitational-waves-where-are-they/

Yep, that was a lot of information but gravitational waves are just the beginning- the tip of the iceberg if you will. Perhaps they could even solve one of the biggest cosmic mysteries ever- dark matter and dark energy. And yet again, maybe it already has. There's so much more out there taunting us humans, staying hidden, just out of our sight. And if anything, things like these just show us how truly small and insignificant we humans are in the grand scale of the universe- no matter how much control we give ourselves on this rocky blue and green sphere in a solar system in a galaxy in a universe that's literally in the middle of nothing!

POOOOF!!!

Now let me ask you a question: Does time truly mean something or is it just as meaningless as we are in a cosmos no one can fully understand?

https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/news/ligo20160211

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/feb/11/gravitational-waves-discovery-hailed-as-breakthrough-of-the-century

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/nsf-s-ligo-has-detected-gravitational-waves

My First Blog

1. One thing I know about the content in this course: Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise and Uranus is the only planet that orbits the sun on its side. These changes in rotational direction can probably be traced back to the origins of these planets when asteroids, meteors, or other objects may have crashed into them, resulting in the planets' orbits being switched. I thought this was really cool because  such small objects like asteroids (relative to Venus and Uranus) were able to create such big impacts (literally and figuratively!) :) and change the planets' science and history forever. It also makes me wonder how an asteroid could have hit a gas planet like Uranus and if there are solid components in the makeup of that planet? Perhaps we could even be wrong and clockwise rotation is the original- the other planets could have been the ones that are switched. There is just so much more to research and discover with this topic and that is why this fascinates me!                                                          
2. One thing I don't know/understand that is related to this course and what it is that confuses me about it: I am confused how the universe could have expanded from the size of a dot to its current size in a billionth of a billionth of a second (big bang theory) if the speed of light is the fastest anything can be. Does the universe follow the universal speed limit? This question has pondered me for so long due its connection to physics as well and was specifically on my mind when I was covering the special relativity unit. I hope this course will provide answers to this and more interesting questions as well. It's really interesting for me because I like making connections between the different sciences and asking questions related to one science by incorporating concepts from other sciences and subjects.