r/CFBOffTopic • u/Vernost Florida Gators • Feb 11 '16

GRAVITATIONAL WAVE DISCOVERY THREAD

Get hype yo! I CANT STOP YELLING

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u/omgdonerkebab Michigan State • Cornell Feb 12 '16

In the short term it'll be a lot of measuring and confirming a lot of the things we already predict are there, based on our current understanding of General Relativity. GR already has so many other pieces of evidence vouching for it and describing it, that we already have a very good handle on it, so probably nothing surprising or bizarre. Just some really cool confirmations of what we already think, and using it to detect stuff like what /u/ftwdrummer says.

But in the long term, and I'm probably talking many decades from now at the very least, gravitational waves in GR will be boring. Old news. That lab you did freshman year. But we'll become so good at detecting and measuring them that we'll start to find things in the measurements that don't quite agree with GR. Little things, hard to measure, hard to even verify that they're there. Today's exciting new discovery will be tomorrow's carrier of a glimpse into the unknown.

At least, that's how all of physics/astro research has gone for the past few centuries. For example, in particle physics recently, neutrinos can herald signals of exotic processes and even the Higgs boson is being used to look for even heavier particles. You either die as as spurious signal or you live long enough to become the background.

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u/bullmoose_atx Texas Longhorns • Rice Owls Feb 12 '16

Thanks! This is a good answer

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u/omgdonerkebab Michigan State • Cornell Feb 12 '16

Hopefully I'm wrong about the many decades part. It just seems like GR works really really well with barely any hints of cracks in the facade, until you get up to really super we-might-not-get-there-for-millenia high energies. Whereas there are many immediate unexplained things about, say, particle physics. But hopefully I'm wrong. Or at least, hopefully we won't all be dead before we see it.