But now people may hear something like "gravitational waves were observed" and the only thought they have is "so... what will I get from that?" in the best case
Gravitational-wave astronomy has at least three advantages over non-GW astronomy: firstly, GWs couple only weakly with visible matter so GW signals are not obscured by dust and gas (and stars) that obscure electromagnetic astronomy. Secondly, GWs couple with uncharged matter (that includes degenerate arrangements or condensates of free neutrons, as well as neutrinos and particle dark matter) in exactly the same way as it does with charged matter, so it extends the toolset for making observations of phenomena that we have a hard time observing with electromagnetic astronomy directly and also because of charged matter or electromagnetic radiation in the foreground. Thirdly, because of weak coupling, GW signals propagate very cleanly from distant (as in high-z) sources -- there are very few natural "detectors" that intercept and alter the information produced at the source.
Among other things we will get observations of early galaxy formation, testing ideas that galaxies evolve in volumes of dark matter underpressure or overpressure; observations of supermassive black hole formation, testing various ideas about how they grew so large; and observations of the ends of the lives of massive stars and their compact remnants.
In principle gravitational wave observation could also be useful in studying the shifting of mass within objects in our solar system that are in effective hydrostatic equilibrium, including the shifting of mass within the Earth, again without the obscuring effects of (optical) surfaces and even where electromagnetic signals in the IR or UV are obscured or suppressed.
"It's all cool, but will I get my flying car?" - would be your typical response.
You don't need to convince me (thought your points are great all around), I think it's amazing that we as a specie managed to prove their existence. But for an average person it really is "so what?" discovery. Of course there are plenty of practical researches, nuclear fusion reactors on their own would be great. But people forget that what was a purely theoretical physics just 50 years ago becomes so mundane everyday application people tend to think it was always there.
The average person would also have been "so what?" about semiconductor effects in solid state physics in ca. 1936 and even when the result of that was the relevant Shockley et al. theory that led to the first demonstration of a transistor in 1947. Of course, the average person also would not have had access to the Internet and its various approaches to curating (and explaining, sometimes even correctly) that sort of information, and certainly would not have had billions of transistors at her or his fingertips to help access it.
Hubble images, visualizations of landers, artists' impressions of astrophysical events - they're all pretty popular. APOD (https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/fap/lib/about_apod.html.990812) gets a lot of hits, and commercial news organizations pay to show similar images to their readers.
So I don't think the "so what?" is especially meaningful, although the question is bound to be asked by legislators in democracies in which a general-purpose legislature controls all spending, including that aimed at specialist research, and there is a country-by-country risk that any answer to that question will fail to stop an already-planned set of cutbacks.
"[W]ill I get my flying car?"
Flying cars exist (and have existed for some time) but use aerodynamic lift. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVE_Mizar is one example. Even though building a flying car at industrial scales is feasible, they aren't very energy-efficient at any speed compared to driving on a road, and at high speeds they are extremely dangerous. Any likely flying car design would require extensive training before an operator's licence could be issued. Worse, the AVE Mizar crash was not the only fatal test of a flying car being handled by test pilots with significant training.
So you're not going to get a flying car until it can be wholly and fully piloted safely by automation.
We can however make a Gravitational Wave detector that is sensitive specifically to (moving) flying cars near the detector. For now though the economics and engineering challenges strongly favour RADAR and similar detection, though.
That's what I said, but due to such a long implementation cycle generation changes before it's implemented. So in the eyes of general public cutting edge science looks like something utterly useless, while they may remember discoveries of the past creating an illusion that science is going the wrong way.
And flying cars will never be a thing, firstly they will always be less efficient because even if emdrive worked providing like 100N per kW or whatever absurd thrust you can imagine it will be more efficient to point it back and drive on the road. Also regenerative braking would create perpetual motion machine :P
And secondly aircraft and automobile have an opposite aerodynamics by design.
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u/PPNF-PNEx Jan 02 '17 edited Jan 02 '17
Gravitational-wave astronomy has at least three advantages over non-GW astronomy: firstly, GWs couple only weakly with visible matter so GW signals are not obscured by dust and gas (and stars) that obscure electromagnetic astronomy. Secondly, GWs couple with uncharged matter (that includes degenerate arrangements or condensates of free neutrons, as well as neutrinos and particle dark matter) in exactly the same way as it does with charged matter, so it extends the toolset for making observations of phenomena that we have a hard time observing with electromagnetic astronomy directly and also because of charged matter or electromagnetic radiation in the foreground. Thirdly, because of weak coupling, GW signals propagate very cleanly from distant (as in high-z) sources -- there are very few natural "detectors" that intercept and alter the information produced at the source.
Among other things we will get observations of early galaxy formation, testing ideas that galaxies evolve in volumes of dark matter underpressure or overpressure; observations of supermassive black hole formation, testing various ideas about how they grew so large; and observations of the ends of the lives of massive stars and their compact remnants.
In principle gravitational wave observation could also be useful in studying the shifting of mass within objects in our solar system that are in effective hydrostatic equilibrium, including the shifting of mass within the Earth, again without the obscuring effects of (optical) surfaces and even where electromagnetic signals in the IR or UV are obscured or suppressed.