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343

Gazing Into the Void
What You Can Do With Vantablack, the Darkest Material Ever Made
By LINDA LEENOV.

Ben Jensen of Surrey NanoSystems and a test sample of Vantablack, which the company says is the blackest black ever. Credit Surrey NanoSystems

Earlier this week, Donald Kaufman, an architectural color specialist, declared that the color for November is black. He may be on to something. Recently, Surrey NanoSystems, a high-tech company near Brighton, England, announced its new invention, Vantablack, which it claims is the blackest black ever seen, or, actually, not seen.

Vantablack, for Vertically Aligned NanoTube Array, is made by “growing” carbon nanotubes on a metal surface. (A nanotube is a billionth of a meter thick, or about the width of three gold atoms.) Light is trapped between the tubes and bounces around until it’s absorbed, so almost no light gets out.

Vantablack has enthralled not just the tech world but also artists and architects. Ben Jensen, 48, a founder and the chief technology officer of Surrey NanoSystems, spoke by telephone from his laboratory in Newhaven, England, about the material’s applications and why it might not be quite right for your home. (This interview has been edited and condensed.)

Q. Why are people so excited about Vantablack?

A. The coating reflects so little light, three dimensions seem to disappear. When you look at Vantablack on some wrinkled aluminum foil, it looks like a black, flat, featureless void, even with your eyes right up to it. That and the fact that it’s the darkest material ever created.

How did all this start?

Growing carbon nanotubes isn’t new. But typically they’ve been grown at a very high temperature: 750 degrees centigrade. That would destroy most underlying materials, so they grew them on things like silicon, diamond and sapphire, which can stand high temperatures. We’re building on work to grow nanotubes at a lower temperature for microelectronics.

What’s special about carbon nanotubes?

It’s almost like an alien material from “Star Trek.” Imagine a drinking straw, closed at one end, with a wall one-atom thick. This straw is one-ten-thousandth the diameter of a human hair, but it is 10 times stronger than steel, and 10 times better at conducting heat than copper. It’s been known to exhibit what is called “ballistic transport”; electrons travel through it with almost no resistance. Vantablack packs billions of these straws together.

What are some of its uses?

Ultrablack coatings, wiring in microchips, enhancing the strength of components in the aerospace industry, touch screens, ultralight wiring, to name a few.

But it’s captured people’s imaginations so much, everyone wants to use it: Architects want to create unique optical effects in a building, and to absorb heat and put it out.

It’s been announced that the artist Sir Anish Kapoor will be using Vantablack as well.

He has an amazing ability to see things that other people don’t, and he’s famous for his work in reflections and voids. We never imagined we would be involved with something like that, but his ideas are infectious, and my research scientists love that their work could be used this way. Right now we’re restricted to various sizes, but we’re planning on going large, room-size, even building-size.

So, if someone walked into a room completely lined in Vantablack, what would it be like?

If there was a light, it would be eerie, like seeing a bulb hanging in free space. You could see another person, but you couldn’t perceive the size, shape or depth of the space about you. You couldn’t see the floor. It would be totally disorienting. I’m sure you wouldn’t want to stay there.

If a Vantablack vase were filled with flowers?

You’d see the silhouette of the vase, but you couldn’t see anything in the third dimension, except the flowers, of course.

If you had a circle of Vantablack on your forehead?

You’d look like you had a hole in your head.

Some of the tech blogs have speculated about invisible airplanes.

When I read about making black ninja suits and black aircraft, I just laugh. It’s not a reasonable application.

So a middle-aged woman’s dream that a little Vantablack dress would make her disappear except for her head and hands is out of the question?

I think the question should be, why would she want a dress that makes her look two-dimensional?­

Correction: November 13, 2014
The introduction to the Q&A column last Thursday, about the development of a new material called Vantablack, referred incorrectly to the prefix “nano.” It means the billionth part; it is not one-billionth of a meter, which is a nanometer.

344
Gazing Into the Void What You Can Do With Vantablack, the Darkest Material Ever Made By LINDA LEENOV.

Ben Jensen of Surrey NanoSystems and a test sample of Vantablack, which the company says is the blackest black ever. Credit Surrey NanoSystems

Earlier this week, Donald Kaufman, an architectural color specialist, declared that the color for November is black. He may be on to something. Recently, Surrey NanoSystems, a high-tech company near Brighton, England, announced its new invention, Vantablack, which it claims is the blackest black ever seen, or, actually, not seen.

Vantablack, for Vertically Aligned NanoTube Array, is made by “growing” carbon nanotubes on a metal surface. (A nanotube is a billionth of a meter thick, or about the width of three gold atoms.) Light is trapped between the tubes and bounces around until it’s absorbed, so almost no light gets out.

Vantablack has enthralled not just the tech world but also artists and architects. Ben Jensen, 48, a founder and the chief technology officer of Surrey NanoSystems, spoke by telephone from his laboratory in Newhaven, England, about the material’s applications and why it might not be quite right for your home. (This interview has been edited and condensed.)

Q. Why are people so excited about Vantablack?

A. The coating reflects so little light, three dimensions seem to disappear. When you look at Vantablack on some wrinkled aluminum foil, it looks like a black, flat, featureless void, even with your eyes right up to it. That and the fact that it’s the darkest material ever created.

How did all this start?

Growing carbon nanotubes isn’t new. But typically they’ve been grown at a very high temperature: 750 degrees centigrade. That would destroy most underlying materials, so they grew them on things like silicon, diamond and sapphire, which can stand high temperatures. We’re building on work to grow nanotubes at a lower temperature for microelectronics.

What’s special about carbon nanotubes?

It’s almost like an alien material from “Star Trek.” Imagine a drinking straw, closed at one end, with a wall one-atom thick. This straw is one-ten-thousandth the diameter of a human hair, but it is 10 times stronger than steel, and 10 times better at conducting heat than copper. It’s been known to exhibit what is called “ballistic transport”; electrons travel through it with almost no resistance. Vantablack packs billions of these straws together.

What are some of its uses?

Ultrablack coatings, wiring in microchips, enhancing the strength of components in the aerospace industry, touch screens, ultralight wiring, to name a few.

But it’s captured people’s imaginations so much, everyone wants to use it: Architects want to create unique optical effects in a building, and to absorb heat and put it out.

It’s been announced that the artist Sir Anish Kapoor will be using Vantablack as well.

He has an amazing ability to see things that other people don’t, and he’s famous for his work in reflections and voids. We never imagined we would be involved with something like that, but his ideas are infectious, and my research scientists love that their work could be used this way. Right now we’re restricted to various sizes, but we’re planning on going large, room-size, even building-size.

So, if someone walked into a room completely lined in Vantablack, what would it be like?

If there was a light, it would be eerie, like seeing a bulb hanging in free space. You could see another person, but you couldn’t perceive the size, shape or depth of the space about you. You couldn’t see the floor. It would be totally disorienting. I’m sure you wouldn’t want to stay there.

If a Vantablack vase were filled with flowers?

You’d see the silhouette of the vase, but you couldn’t see anything in the third dimension, except the flowers, of course.

If you had a circle of Vantablack on your forehead?

You’d look like you had a hole in your head.

Some of the tech blogs have speculated about invisible airplanes.

When I read about making black ninja suits and black aircraft, I just laugh. It’s not a reasonable application.

So a middle-aged woman’s dream that a little Vantablack dress would make her disappear except for her head and hands is out of the question?

I think the question should be, why would she want a dress that makes her look two-dimensional?­

Correction: November 13, 2014
The introduction to the Q&A column last Thursday, about the development of a new material called Vantablack, referred incorrectly to the prefix “nano.” It means the billionth part; it is not one-billionth of a meter, which is a nanometer.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/06/garden/what-you-can-do-with-vantablack-the-darkest-material-ever-made.html

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Should make the sash ‘pop’ a bit more.

346

http://www.theonion.com/article/nation-figured-everything-would-run-some-kind-cube-51834

NEW YORK—Expressing their disappointment and frustration at the current state of technology, citizens across the nation reported Thursday that they figured everything would run on some sort of cubes of blue energy by now.

Americans of all ages and demographic groups explained to reporters that they thought the cubes would be “basically everywhere you looked at this point,” saying they could not understand why translucent, pulsating blue cubes of energy did not yet exist, and why they were not currently being used to power appliances, lighting, various modes of transportation, and all manner of personal electronics.

Many theorized that the blue cubes of energy would last between 50 years and forever, and that those in need of more cubes would simply be able to pick them up at a local “cube station.”
“All you’d have to do is pick up the cube and put it on a thing you want to have power, and that would give it power—why can’t I do that yet?” said Lawrence Faber of Tampa, FL, one of millions of Americans who was confused that he was currently unable to fully charge his iPhone battery “in, like, 10 seconds” simply by holding the device in the vicinity of a blue cube of energy. “They’d be these cubes and they’d just be there and make everything work, like computers and TVs and stuff.”

“You know, like blue energy cubes,” Faber added. “We should have those.”

Although the majority of people surveyed were unable to verbally describe the cubes beyond “blue” and “glowing,” many pantomimed box-like shapes with their hands to demonstrate their best guess as to the general appearance of the blue cubes of energy, often adding, “like this.”

“I figured there would be a real big cube that would sit in the middle of town that powered all the streetlights and things like that, and then a smaller cube in your house for your refrigerator and your heaters and everything else,” said Youngstown, OH resident Kendra Morgan. “And then you’d have some littler cubes that you could carry around with you in your pocket for whatever else you needed them for, like a blow dryer or a coffee machine, and the cubes would make all of them run.”

Many theorized that the blue cubes of energy would last between 50 years and forever, and that those in need of more cubes would simply be able to pick them up at a local “cube station.” Others speculated that the cubes would be far more powerful than today’s energy sources, including oil, coal, and natural gas, because “they would have so much energy inside of them.”

Most Americans agreed, however, that the cubes would be affordable, noting that every citizen would have “a bunch.”

“You wouldn’t have to plug them in—they would just sit there and make power,” said Stephen Garcia of Mesa, AZ, later adding that everyone would be able to make their car run by simply placing the cube in the automobile’s “cube holder.” “But they would be really quiet, too. And when you carried them around, they wouldn’t zap you or be too hot to hold or anything, even though all the energy would be whirling around inside.”

“The cubes wouldn’t hurt people; they would help people,” Garcia continued.

Additionally, many Americans surveyed said that the blue cubes of energy would be incredibly durable and would never break, even if they were dropped on the ground or a drink was accidentally spilled on them.

But by far the biggest recurrent complaint reportedly stemming from the lack of blue cubes of energy was that further technological advances—namely “even faster” blue cubes of energy—were being held back due to the cubes not yet having been invented.

“How are we all supposed to live in space if we don’t have the blue cubes of energy?” said David Reston of Batavia, NY, later adding that NASA would probably develop its own special “super” blue energy cubes. “We need those cubes for our spaceship boosters to get us around in space. And how are we going to live in our houses up on Mars without those cubes?”

“At this rate, we’ll never have the red, floating spheres that make you live forever,” Reston added.

347

VR gaming + touchable holograms = ■■■■ games?

Japanese scientists create touchable holograms

A group of Japanese scientists have created touchable holograms, three dimensional virtual objects that can be manipulated by human hand.

Using femtosecond laser technology the researchers developed 'Fairy Lights, a system that can fire high frequency laser pulses that last one millionth of one billionth of a second.

The pulses respond to human touch, so that - when interrupted - the hologram’s pixels can be manipulated in mid-air.

The touchable hologram, which is being experimented with at the Utsunomiya University Center for Optical Research and Education, uses a laser provided by the university to the researchers.

One of the leading researchers of the experiment, Dr Yoichi Ochiai of Tsukuba University, believes this technology could be used for purposes including entertainment, medicine, and architecture. He says that the current state of light technology doesn’t allow humans to proactively interact and feel light as matter, but the ‘touchable hologram’ has the potential to change that.

“You can’t actually feel the videos or pictures, and although you can project a video, you can’t interact with it by touching it. So, if we can project an image in a three dimensional form, and if you can touch it, then you can make something where you’ll think that there actually is something there,” Ochiai said.

“People’s daily lives would change if we use a bigger laser in a bigger space where people can interact with it, and to see how it can be used in situations where three dimensional communication is necessary such as a construction site or in the medical field,” he added.

According to science website Pulse Headlines, further development might eventually make it possible to create a computer keyboard made of light beamed onto a person’s lap or allow video chat users to experience the virtual touch of the person with whom they are communicating.

The website says that the technology to create touchable holograms has previously been demonstrated, but that laser beams used to generate them burned human skin.

Ochiai’s fellow researchers are Kota Kumagai, Satoshi Hasegawa, and Yoshio Hayasaki from Utsunomiya University, Takayuki Hoshi from the Nagoya Institute of Technology, and Jun Rekimoto from The University of Tokyo.

348
VR gaming + touchable holograms = ■■■■ games?
Japanese scientists create touchable holograms

A group of Japanese scientists have created touchable holograms, three dimensional virtual objects that can be manipulated by human hand.

Using femtosecond laser technology the researchers developed 'Fairy Lights, a system that can fire high frequency laser pulses that last one millionth of one billionth of a second.

The pulses respond to human touch, so that - when interrupted - the hologram’s pixels can be manipulated in mid-air.

The touchable hologram, which is being experimented with at the Utsunomiya University Center for Optical Research and Education, uses a laser provided by the university to the researchers.

One of the leading researchers of the experiment, Dr Yoichi Ochiai of Tsukuba University, believes this technology could be used for purposes including entertainment, medicine, and architecture. He says that the current state of light technology doesn’t allow humans to proactively interact and feel light as matter, but the ‘touchable hologram’ has the potential to change that.

“You can’t actually feel the videos or pictures, and although you can project a video, you can’t interact with it by touching it. So, if we can project an image in a three dimensional form, and if you can touch it, then you can make something where you’ll think that there actually is something there,” Ochiai said.

“People’s daily lives would change if we use a bigger laser in a bigger space where people can interact with it, and to see how it can be used in situations where three dimensional communication is necessary such as a construction site or in the medical field,” he added.

According to science website Pulse Headlines, further development might eventually make it possible to create a computer keyboard made of light beamed onto a person’s lap or allow video chat users to experience the virtual touch of the person with whom they are communicating.

The website says that the technology to create touchable holograms has previously been demonstrated, but that laser beams used to generate them burned human skin.

Ochiai’s fellow researchers are Kota Kumagai, Satoshi Hasegawa, and Yoshio Hayasaki from Utsunomiya University, Takayuki Hoshi from the Nagoya Institute of Technology, and Jun Rekimoto from The University of Tokyo.

A trivial, yet unfortunate side-effect.

349
VR gaming + touchable holograms = ■■■■ games?
Japanese scientists create touchable holograms

A group of Japanese scientists have created touchable holograms, three dimensional virtual objects that can be manipulated by human hand.

Using femtosecond laser technology the researchers developed 'Fairy Lights, a system that can fire high frequency laser pulses that last one millionth of one billionth of a second.

The pulses respond to human touch, so that - when interrupted - the hologram’s pixels can be manipulated in mid-air.

The touchable hologram, which is being experimented with at the Utsunomiya University Center for Optical Research and Education, uses a laser provided by the university to the researchers.

One of the leading researchers of the experiment, Dr Yoichi Ochiai of Tsukuba University, believes this technology could be used for purposes including entertainment, medicine, and architecture. He says that the current state of light technology doesn’t allow humans to proactively interact and feel light as matter, but the ‘touchable hologram’ has the potential to change that.

“You can’t actually feel the videos or pictures, and although you can project a video, you can’t interact with it by touching it. So, if we can project an image in a three dimensional form, and if you can touch it, then you can make something where you’ll think that there actually is something there,” Ochiai said.

“People’s daily lives would change if we use a bigger laser in a bigger space where people can interact with it, and to see how it can be used in situations where three dimensional communication is necessary such as a construction site or in the medical field,” he added.

According to science website Pulse Headlines, further development might eventually make it possible to create a computer keyboard made of light beamed onto a person’s lap or allow video chat users to experience the virtual touch of the person with whom they are communicating.

The website says that the technology to create touchable holograms has previously been demonstrated, but that laser beams used to generate them burned human skin.

Ochiai’s fellow researchers are Kota Kumagai, Satoshi Hasegawa, and Yoshio Hayasaki from Utsunomiya University, Takayuki Hoshi from the Nagoya Institute of Technology, and Jun Rekimoto from The University of Tokyo.

A trivial, yet unfortunate side-effect.

Fetish worthy

350

This is great news. I’ll now have a practical way to indulge my laser-burn kink.

351
VR gaming + touchable holograms = ■■■■ games?
Japanese scientists create touchable holograms

A group of Japanese scientists have created touchable holograms, three dimensional virtual objects that can be manipulated by human hand.

Using femtosecond laser technology the researchers developed 'Fairy Lights, a system that can fire high frequency laser pulses that last one millionth of one billionth of a second.

The pulses respond to human touch, so that - when interrupted - the hologram’s pixels can be manipulated in mid-air.

The touchable hologram, which is being experimented with at the Utsunomiya University Center for Optical Research and Education, uses a laser provided by the university to the researchers.

One of the leading researchers of the experiment, Dr Yoichi Ochiai of Tsukuba University, believes this technology could be used for purposes including entertainment, medicine, and architecture. He says that the current state of light technology doesn’t allow humans to proactively interact and feel light as matter, but the ‘touchable hologram’ has the potential to change that.

“You can’t actually feel the videos or pictures, and although you can project a video, you can’t interact with it by touching it. So, if we can project an image in a three dimensional form, and if you can touch it, then you can make something where you’ll think that there actually is something there,” Ochiai said.

“People’s daily lives would change if we use a bigger laser in a bigger space where people can interact with it, and to see how it can be used in situations where three dimensional communication is necessary such as a construction site or in the medical field,” he added.

According to science website Pulse Headlines, further development might eventually make it possible to create a computer keyboard made of light beamed onto a person’s lap or allow video chat users to experience the virtual touch of the person with whom they are communicating.

The website says that the technology to create touchable holograms has previously been demonstrated, but that laser beams used to generate them burned human skin.

Ochiai’s fellow researchers are Kota Kumagai, Satoshi Hasegawa, and Yoshio Hayasaki from Utsunomiya University, Takayuki Hoshi from the Nagoya Institute of Technology, and Jun Rekimoto from The University of Tokyo.

A trivial, yet unfortunate side-effect.

Fetish worthy

“keep going…yes…”
“but it burns it BURNS!!!”
“i know …keep going keep going keep going ooohhhhhh…”

352

Who needs sex-bots when you’ve got sadistic sex-holograms.

353

NASA aerospace engineer with brilliant comb over answers the question “why go to Mars?”

https://youtu.be/j2Mu8qfVb5I

354

Zubrin isn’t NASA, though.

355
356
http://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/design/german-scientists-achieve-landmark-breakthrough-in-nuclear-fusion/news-story/032c1a173efdf99f599f9311923983fd

fantastic

this is much more likely to ‘change everything’

357

pls post text so we don’t provide more clicks for Rupert’s empire.

358
pls post text so we don't provide more clicks for Rupert's empire.

Here is a related article http://phys.org/news/2015-12-german-physicists-landmark-nuclear-fusion.html

German physicists see landmark in nuclear fusion quest December 10, 2015 Scientists on December 10, 2015 reported a landmark success at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Germany, where phy Scientists on December 10, 2015 reported a landmark success at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Germany, where physicists generated a superheated helium plasma in a vacuum vessel for one-tenth of a second

Scientists in Germany said Thursday they had reached a milestone in a quest to derive energy from nuclear fusion, billed as a potentially limitless, safe and cheap source.

Nuclear fusion entails fusing atoms together to generate energy—a process similar to that in the Sun—as opposed to nuclear fission, where atoms are split, which entails worries over safety and long-term waste.

After spending a billion euros ($1.1 billion) and nine years’ construction work, physicists working on a German project called the “stellarator” said they had briefly generated a super-heated helium plasma inside a vessel—a key point in the experimental process.

“We’re very satisfied,” said Hans-Stephan Bosch at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald.

“Everything went according to plan.”

For all its promise, nuclear fusion has proven elusive and highly costly to achieve.

The idea is to heat atoms to temperatures of more than 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit) so that their nuclei fuse.

The fusion would take place in a special vacuum chamber where the atoms, in a hot ionised gas called a plasma, are held floating in place by superconducting magnets so that they do not touch the vessel’s cold sides.

The German experiment, using a machine called Wendelstein 7-X, was aimed at seeing whether it was possible to heat helium atoms with a microwave laser and to briefly contain the plasma within the vessel.

The first plasma in the 16-metre-wide (52-foot-wide) machine, from one milligram of helium gas heated by a 1.8-megawatt laser pulse, lasted one-tenth of a second and reached a temperature of around one million Celsius, the institute said in a press release.

The fusion reactor race

The team will next try to extend the duration of the plasma and to find out the best way of producing it. Next year, it hopes to switch over to hydrogen, the actual target of the study, as opposed to helium.

Several countries are in the race to build a fusion reactor, including a multinational effort called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER).

Headquartered in southern France, ITER is building a doughnut-shaped containment vessel called a tokamak.

But plagued by technical problems and cost issues, it has yet to carry out its first experiment almost a decade after the project began.

Other far smaller experimental reactors are also being developed in the United States, but funding has been a problem.

The Wendelstein 7-X will not produce energy.

Instead it hopes to sustain a plasma for 30 minutes, deemed to be proof that its technology can operate continuously, whereas a tokamak can only run in pulses without auxiliary equipment.

359

■■■■■■ Murdoch is kidding himself if he reckons the Sun generates energy. It’s called the Herald-Sun now anyway.

Unless he’s talking about the British tabloid with the Page 3 girls. That does provide some energy, mainly by friction.

360

Space X Falcon 9 - takes off, and successfully lands booster. Finally.

361
Gravitational waves: breakthrough discovery after two centuries of expectation

Scientists announce discovery of clear gravitational wave signal, ripples in spacetime first predicted by Albert Einstein

Tim Radford

Friday 12 February 2016 04.27 AEDT
Last modified on Friday 12 February 2016 06.33 AEDT

Physicists have announced the discovery of gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of spacetime that were first anticipated by Albert Einstein a century ago.

“We have detected gravitational waves. We did it,” said David Reitze, executive director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Ligo), at a press conference in Washington.

The announcement is the climax of a century of speculation, 50 years of trial and error, and 25 years perfecting a set of instruments so sensitive they could identify a distortion in spacetime a thousandth the diameter of one atomic nucleus across a 4km strip of laserbeam and mirror.

The phenomenon detected was the collision of two black holes. Using the world’s most sophisticated detector, the scientists listened for 20 thousandths of a second as the two giant black holes, one 35 times the mass of the sun, the other slightly smaller, circled around each other.

Why discovering gravitational waves changes everything

At the beginning of the signal, their calculations told them how stars perish: the two objects had begun by circling each other 30 times a second. By the end of the 20 millisecond ■■■■■■ of data, the two had accelerated to 250 times a second before the final collision and a dark, violent merger.

The observation signals the opening of a new window on to the universe.

“This is transformational,” said Prof Alberto Vecchio, of the University of Birmingham, and one of the researchers at Ligo. “We have observed the universe through light so far. But we can only see part of what happens in the universe. Gravitational waves carry completely different information about phenomena in the universe. So we have opened a new way of listening to a broadcasting channel which will allow us to discover phenomena we have never seen before,” he said.

“This observation is truly incredible science and marks three milestones for physics: the direct detection of gravitational waves, the first detection of a binary black hole, and the most convincing evidence to date that nature’s black holes are the objects predicted by Einstein’s theory.”

The scientists detected their cataclysmic event using an instrument so sensitive it could detect a change in the distance between the solar system and the nearest star four light years away to the thickness of a human hair.

And they did so within weeks of turning on their new, upgraded instrument: it took just 20 milliseconds to catch the merger of two black holes, at a distance of 1.3 billion light years, somewhere beyond the Large Magellanic Cloud in the southern hemisphere sky, but it then took months of meticulous checking of the signal against all the complex computer simulations of black hole collision to make sure the evidence matched the theoretical template.

The detector was switched off in January for a further upgrade: astronomers still have to decipher months of material collected in the interval. But – given half a century of frustration in the search for gravitational waves – what they found exceeded expectation: suddenly, in the mutual collapse of two black holes, they could eavesdrop on the violence of the universe.

Prof B S Sathyaprakash, from Cardiff University’s school of physics and astronomy, said: “The shock would have released more energy than the light from all the stars in the universe for that brief instant. The fusion of two black holes which created this event had been predicted but never observed.”

The finding completed the scientific arc of prediction, discovery and confirmation: first they calculated what they should be able to detect, then decided what the evidence should look like, and then devised the experiment that clinched the matter. Which is why on Thursday scientists around the world were able to hail the announcement as yet another confirmation of their “standard model” of the cosmos, and the beginning of a new era of discovery.

Astronomers have already exploited visible light, the infrared and ultraviolet, radio waves, x-rays and even gamma-rays in their attempt to understand the mechanics of stars, the evolution of the galaxies and the expansion of the universe from an initial big bang 13.8bn years ago.
Unequivocal

Thursday’s announcement was the unequivocal first detection ever of gravity waves. The hope is that gravity wave astronomy could start to answer questions not just about the life of stars but their deaths as well: death by collision, death in a black hole, death in some rare stellar catastrophe so fierce that, for a few thousandths of a second, the blast is the brightest thing in the universe.

Even before the Ligo detectors in two US states reopened for business late last year, researchers were confident that a detection would follow swiftly. The announcement came after months of speculation, and decades of theoretical and practical work by an international network of more than a thousand scientists and engineers in Britain, Europe, the US and around the world.

Professor Kip Thorne, of the California Institute of Technology, and one of the founding fathers of Ligo, said that until now, astronomers had looked at the universe as if on a calm sea. All of that had changed.

“The colliding black holes that produced these gravitational waves created a violent storm in the fabric of space and time, a storm in which time speeded up and slowed down, and speeded up again, a storm in which the shape of space was bent in this way and that way,” he said.

Prof Neil Turok, director the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics at Waterloo in Canada, and a former research colleague of Prof Stephen Hawking, called the discovery “the real deal, one of those breakthrough moments in science”.
Ligio co-founder Rainer Weiss, left, and Kip Thorne, right, hug on stage during a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington.
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Ligo co-founder Rainer Weiss, left, and Kip Thorne, right, hug on stage during a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington. Photograph: Andrew Harnik/AP

Not only had the detector picked up the collision of two enormous black holes across a distance of almost a billion light years of space, it recorded the distinctive “chirp” as the two spiralled towards each other.

The discovery, he said, completes a scientific arc of wonder that began 200 years ago, when the great British scientist Michael Faraday began to puzzle about how action was transmitted across the distance of space; how the sun pulled the Earth around. If the sun moved 10 yards, very suddenly, would the Earth feel the difference?

He reasoned that something must cross space to transmit the force of gravity. Faraday’s reasoning inspired the great British mathematician James Clerk Maxwell to think about how an electric force travelled, and arrive at an understanding of light and a prediction of radio waves.

“Einstein, when he came to write down his theory of gravity, his two heroes were Faraday and Maxwell,” said Turok. “He tried to write down laws of the gravitational field and he wasn’t in the least surprised to discover that his predictions had waves, gravitational waves.”

The Ligo discovery signals a new era in astronomy, he said.

“Just think of radio waves, when radio waves were discovered we learned to communicate with them. Mobile communication is entirely reliant on radio waves. For astronomy, radio observations have probably told us more than anything else about the structure of the universe. Now we have gravitational waves we are going to have a whole new picture of the universe, of the stuff that doesn’t emit light – dark matter, black holes,” he said.

“For me the most exciting thing is we will literally be able to see the big bang. Using electromagnetic waves we cannot see further back than 400,000 years after the big bang. The early universe was opaque to light. It is not opaque to gravitational waves. It is completely transparent.

“So literally, by gathering gravitational waves we will be able to see exactly what happened at the initial singularity. The most weird and wonderful prediction of Einstein’s theory was that everything came out of a single event: the big bang singularity. And we will be able to see what happened.”


https://theguardian.com/science/2016/feb/11/gravitational-waves-discovery-hailed-as-breakthrough-of-the-century
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“Actually, sorry we were wrong. Frank just bumped the machine.”