beecee

Bloody fantastic!!! Great follow up on the previous Spirit, Opportunity, Phoenix, Curiosity and Viking landers! Indeed, go NASA!

As an old Star Trek fan, I prefer the more mundane warp drive technology

You really don't have any points of the nature you describe, and as adequately explained by Strange. It was awarded the Nobel because it is a great discovery and could potentially open up a whole new field for cosmological studies. Actually, the only possible doubts are whether the discoveries of these gravitational waves fit the GR description better then other gravity models, and that "small doubt" I believe will in time be eliminated as further discoveries are made, and even more technologically advanced instruments and probes dictate.

DE could well be described as anti-gravity, as it is acting against gravity that wants to collapse/attract all the matter/energy in the universe, against the DE that is acting to expand the spacetime between galaxies but only having success over large scales. Certainly not though any envisaging of all of us floating off the planet along with everything else not tied down. We have many scientific papers based purely on hypotheticals or science that we are as yet unable to actually experiment with or observe. Jordan's paper is one such hypothetical. Einstein if you recall did not get his Nobel for relativity....why you may ask? "Einstein's failure to win a Nobel until 1921, and that prize's not being awarded for his work on relativity, is generally ascribed to these factors: Lack of sufficient experimental proof for the theories at the time (some distrust in the early results on the precession of Mercury, and the Eddington starlight observations). Failure by some members of the committee to understand relativity anti-Semitism skepticism generally about the utility of relativity, and whether it was physics at all. If these factors were in fact the reason that the relativity work did not garner a prize in 1921, why didn't the relativity work merit a second Nobel prize after, say 1945? Surely the work on cyclotrons and the bomb provided firm experimental support for the validity of the theory, and by then the overall utility would have been understood as well". https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/6106/why-didnt-einstein-win-a-second-nobel-prize-for-relativity

Not sure about nailing it shut, I'm only an amateur, and in time one of our professionals could give a more astute answer. Simply, we have no reason to believe it isn't constant and plenty of reasons to accept that it is constant. It is the maximum speed at which any energy or mass is able to achieve. Light having no rest mass, therefor must always travel at "c" in a vacuum, and again we also have no reason to believe that has or will change depending on the age of the universe. Bingo!!!Spot on! Our Milky Way galaxy for example, the local group of galaxies and even beyond, has mass energy densities so that effectively the space in those regions is decoupled from the overall large scale expansion that we do see.eg: M31 or Andromeda is moving towards us, and us towards them, as is the case with all members of the local group. At a slower rate where there is more mass energy and faster rate where there is less. Mass warps, curves twists spacetime: Light follows the exact path of the curvature, warping or twisting. This is why we see gravitational lensing of distant objects. We can only model what we observe...the rest is speculation.

Not at all. The discovery of gravitational radiation has been a long held prediction of GR since its inception, and obviously re-enforces GR even further. It achieved the Physics Nobel for its prime discoverers. Gravitational waves also are a new window in the research activity that cosmologists can and will be able to study the universe with. Why theoretically speaking, we could very well discover gravitational waves from the BB itself, with the potential to possibly answer the why and how that have been asked for so long. https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/news/ligo20181017 LIGO Scientists Awarded New Horizons in Physics Prize News Release • October 17, 2018 Today, three LIGO scientists were awarded the 2019 New Horizons in Physics prize “for research on present and future ground-based detectors of gravitational waves.” Lisa Barsotti (Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Kavli Institute), Matthew Evans (Associate Professor of Physics at MIT), and Rana Adhikari (Professor of Physics at Caltech) will share this year’s prize. All three are key members LIGO’s collaboration. This is the seventh year that Breakthrough Prizes have been awarded. According to their website, “The Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was founded in 2012 by Yuri Milner to recognize those individuals who have made profound contributions to human knowledge. The … Prize aims to celebrate the best scientific work and inspire the next generation of scientists.” Given the discoveries that LIGO has already made, and the promise of many more to come, the award was well deserved. All of LIGO and its collaborators congratulate their colleagues on this exciting recognition.

The advantage I have my friend, is that I am able to sort the wheat from the chaff and tell when someone is posting in terrible angst. Take it easy my friend. The problem I have is all these first timers, inevitably post in the sciences, when it is painfully obvious where they should be posting. And of course referencing the bible is surely conducive then to someone having or posting with an agenda afoot? But you being a respected member here, I will try and chose my words more carefully and post in less haste in future.

The speed of light is "c" or 299,792,458 kms/sec. It is not contingent on spacetime but follows geodesics in spacetime. Three spatial dimensions in reality, length, breadth and height, and the fourth time DE affects all of space uniformally, and we have no reason to suspect that "c" is any different here then over there. DE in effect acts against the gravity of the mass energy in space...5 billion years ago, that was at a density that saw the expansion slowing down...as that density lessened with expansion, the expansion started accelerating which is now what we observe. No, not really. It doesn't stand up to observational scrutiny at all.

I believe its time someone took an Aspirin and had a good lie down before he/she blows a valve!!!

Firstly thanks mods for shifting this nonsense to the appropriate section. No, it is actually a factual albeit basically simple notion. The important question re time, is is it fundamental. I already agreed time travel to the past is impossible as one would need to exceed "c". Future time travel is not necessarily confined to any 24 hr period. Unless you have some reputable link to support that. Time had its beginning at the BB along with space. We have no indication that the universe will ever stand still, only the matter within to decay to its most basic fundamental parts. Well that's an improvement on saying that time will stop. Sorry, wrong...If the earth survives the giant red phase of the Sun, in around 5 billion years, the Earth's rotation period will be equal to its orbital period and have one side facing the Sun. Nonsense. The BB evolved space and time and later matter and energy including light/photons. Would you like to supply a reputable link to support any of what you have claimed? Or did you simply dream it all up. No, I said the bible was nonsense, and unscientific to boot. One may as well refer to Puss in Boots as a reference.

https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/news/ligo20181120 Winners of the 2018 Award for Excellence in Detector Characterization and Calibration Are Announced News Release • November 20, 2018 The LIGO Laboratory congratulates Derek Davis of Syracuse University and T.J. Massinger of Caltech for winning the first LIGO Laboratory Award for Excellence in Detector Characterization and Calibration. The LIGO gravitational wave detectors have registered gravitational wave signals from multiple black hole mergers and the spectacular collision of two neutron stars since Advanced LIGO first began observing in 2015. Davis and Massinger’s work to reduce the noise present in LIGO detector data was key to making these discoveries possible by allowing searches to more easily distinguish the signatures of true astrophysical gravitational wave events in noisy detector data. By improving how deep in space the LIGO-Hanford detector could sense by up to 50%, at least three gravitational wave signals were confidently detected during Advanced LIGO's second observing run (O2) that would not have been otherwise. Their efforts are an outstanding example of the detector characterization work needed to lay the groundwork for future discoveries in gravitational wave astrophysics and multi-messenger astronomy. Davis and Massinger will share a $1000 prize and are invited to present colloquia at one of the the LIGO Laboratory sites (LIGO-Hanford, LIGO-Livingston, Caltech, or MIT) to share their achievements with LIGO Laboratory members. They will each receive an award certificate at the LIGO-Virgo Collaboration meeting in March 2019. Derek Davis is currently a Ph.D. student at Syracuse University. As a part of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, they serve as the Event Validation Lead for the LIGO Detector Characterization group, leading follow-up investigations of candidate gravitational-wave detections. T.J. Massinger is currently a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech. He earned his PhD in 2016 from Syracuse University. Within the LIGO Detector Characterization group, he serves as instrument science lead and as a liaison to the compact binary coalescence data analysis working group. Read more about the LIGO Laboratory Award for Excellence in Detector Characterization and Calibration. Find a list of excellent LIGO Detector Characterization and Calibration projects that earned honorable mention for the 2018 award.

Albeit a stubborn one to finish the phrase....The question as to whether time is real is certainly debated...I am in the yes camp...time is real, space is real, spacetime is real...they may not be physical entities, but they are still real enough. Time stops everything from happening together...space stops everything from being together and spacetime is warped, twisted in the presence of mass and which we interpret as gravity. Is time fundamental appears to be even more profound.....http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/10/18/is-time-real/ hours, days, weeks, years etc, are just our way of measuring the passage of time. Actually there can probably never be any time travel to the past, because to do that we would need to exceed "c"the universal speed limit. No, that is wrong. Time will continue to pass, in all examples of which you are given...the universe will continue to move towards a probable process of decay and dying. Even if the universe was static as it was once thought to be before Hubble and the BB, Time would still pass. If you are saying that if space did not exist, neither would time, then yes I agree, as time and space evolved at the BB. Our 24 hr cycle is changing and will until a 24 hr period is equal to a lunar period [a month] and the Earth will have one side permanently facing the Sun. Before the beginning, [the BB] there was no time or space as we know them. Wrong. The BB suggests nothing of the sort. The BB was simply the evolution of space and time from t+10-43 seconds. We don't know what caused the BB or the expansion/evolution of space and time, but before that, there was nothing, no space, no time as we know them. Light existed long before the Sun started to undergo fusion...In fact light spread throughout the universe at around 380,000 years post BB. The bible is not a science book, more a mythical gathering of legends, hear say and other nonsense. You do not have any theories, you have thoughts and hypotheticals, some based on pure nonsense with regards to the bible, others just plain wrong. And obviously you are in the wrong section.

Firstly, thanks for the appreciation and interest. The rest of the remarks of yours are I agree, 100% correct. I would also add the Event Horizon Telescope and LISA as two more up and coming experiments that will add knowledge to gravitational waves research.

https://phys.org/news/2018-11-huge-quake-edges-zealand-islands.html Huge quake edges New Zealand islands closer together November 24, 2018: The Kaikoura earthquake raced north from the middle of New Zealand's South Island towards Cook Strait covering 170 kilometres in about 74 seconds A destructive earthquake that struck New Zealand two years ago has left its two main islands edging towards each other, and one city sinking, according to scientists. But the margins are minimal with the gap between the North and South islands narrowing a mere 35 centimetres (13 and a half inches), while Nelson at the top of the South Island has sunk by up to 20 millimetres. The magnitude 7.8 earthquake on November 14 initially pushed the two islands several metres closer and the unsettled fault lines have since nudged the southern landmass further north. Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-11-huge-quake-edges-zealand-islands.html#jCp

https://phys.org/news/2018-11-alma-highest-frequency-scientific-result.html#jCp ALMA's highest frequency receiver produces its first scientific result on massive star formation: November 22, 2018, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan: The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has tuned in another new channel for signals from space. Using its highest frequency receivers yet, researchers obtained 695 radio signatures for various molecules, including simple sugar, in the direction of a massive star forming region. These first scientific results from the ALMA Band 10 receivers developed in Japan ensure a promising future for high frequency observations. Similar to how different radio stations on Earth broadcast different information, the various frequencies of radio waves coming from space carry different information about the environment and chemical composition at their source. ALMA's Band 10 (787 to 950 GHz) receivers are its highest frequency band yet. It has been a difficult frequency band to observe, not just for ALMA, but for other ground-based radio telescopes as well. Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-11-alma-highest-frequency-scientific-result.html#jCp the paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1808.05438.pdf First Results of an ALMA Band 10 Spectral Line Survey of NGC 6334I: Detections of Glycolaldehyde (HC(O)CH2OH) and a New Compact Bipolar Outflow in HDO and CS: ABSTRACT: We present the first results of a pilot program to conduct an ALMA Band 10 spectral line survey of the high-mass star-forming region NGC 6334I. The observations were taken in exceptional weather conditions (0.19 mm precipitable water) with typical system temperatures Tsys <950 K at ∼890 GHz. A bright, bipolar north-south outflow is seen in HDO and CS emission, driven by the embedded massive protostar MM1B. This has allowed, for the first time, a direct comparison of the thermal water in this outflow to the location of water maser emission from prior 22 GHz VLA observations. The maser locations are shown to correspond to the sites along the outflow cavity walls where high velocity gas impacts the surrounding material. We also compare our new observations to prior Herschel HIFI spectral line survey data of this field, detecting an order of magnitude more spectral lines (695 vs 65) in the ALMA data. We focus on the strong detections of the complex organic molecule glycolaldehyde (HC(O)CH2OH) in the ALMA data that is not detected in the heavily beam-diluted HIFI spectra. Finally, we stress the need for dedicated THz laboratory spectroscopy to support and exploit future high-frequency molecular line observations with ALMA. 4. CONCLUSIONS: We have presented a first look at ALMA Band 10 spectral line survey toward a line-rich source – the high-mass star-forming region NGC 6334I – obtained in exceptional weather conditions. The resulting map shows a bright, bi-polar north-south outflow from the central massive protostar MM1b as traced by both HDO and CS emission. A comparison to archival Herschel HIFI data of the source shows the power of spatially resolving underlying substructure with a beam size well-matched to the source, resulting in the unambiguous identification of CH(O)CH2OH. A wealth of additional transitions suggest the presence of additional complex molecules that can be identified once high resolution laboratory data are available. The authors thank the anonymous referee for their careful evaluation which improved the quality of this manuscript. This paper makes use of the following ALMA data: ADS/JAO.ALMA#2017.1.00717.S, #2017.1.00661.S, and #2015.A.00022.T. ALMA is a partnership of ESO (representing its member states), NSF (USA) and NINS (Japan), together with NRC (Canada) and NSC and ASIAA (Taiwan) and KASI (Republic of Korea), in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. The Joint ALMA Observatory is operated by ESO, AUI/NRAO and NAOJ. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. Support for B.A.M. was provided by NASA through Hubble Fellowship grant #HST-HF2-51396 awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS5-26555. Support for A.M.B. was provided by the NSF through the Grote Reber Fellowship Program administered by Associated Universities, Inc./National Radio Astronomy Observatory and the Virginia Space Grant Consortium. This research made use of NASAs Astrophysics Data System Bibliographic Services, Astropy, a community-developed core Python package for Astronomy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013), and APLpy, an open-source plotting package for Python hosted at http://aplpy.github.com.

Gravity has nothing to do with sound, rather sound is caused by compressions and rarifications of the atmopshere and the vibration one particle imparts to another. Let me correct that...sound is caused by the vibration of a medium, and sound waves consist of areas of low and high pressures, caused by the compression and rarification of the atmosphere.

Not sure what this thread is about but that is certainly wrong. There was "nothing" before the BB and even up to a very small fraction of a second post BB. The BB was the evolution of space and time from a hot dense state including the combination of the four forces we know of today, known as the superforce...matter came later as expansion continued with drops in temperatures and pressures and the superforce started to decouple. Matter also did not expand, it simply coalesced as temperatures decreased with expansion until at around 3 minutes the first atomic nuclei were formed and at around 380,000 years, the first light element was formed.

That is nothing more then crazy unevidenced and total conspiracy nonsense. A thousand times more evidence suggests it happened as reported and observed. How gullible are people to accept such conspiracy nonsense!

https://phys.org/news/2018-11-defy-19th-century-law-physics.html#jCp Researchers defy 19th Century law of Physics in 21st century boost for energy efficiency: November 21, 2018 by Anna Ford, University of Sussex: Research led by a University of Sussex scientist has turned a 156-year-old law of physics on its head in a development which could lead to more efficient recharging of batteries in cars and mobile phones. Dr. Jordi Prat-Camps, a research fellow at the University of Sussex, has for the first time demonstrated that the coupling between two magnetic elements can be made extremely asymmetrical. Working with colleagues from the Austrian Academy of Sciences and University of Innsbruck, Dr. Prat-Camps' research rips up the physics rule book by showing it is possible to make one magnet connect to another without the connection happening in the opposite direction. Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-11-defy-19th-century-law-physics.html#jCp the paper: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.213903 Circumventing Magnetostatic Reciprocity: A Diode for Magnetic Fields: ABSTRACT: Lorentz reciprocity establishes a stringent relation between electromagnetic fields and their sources. For static magnetic fields, a relation between magnetic sources and fields can be drawn in analogy to the Green’s reciprocity principle for electrostatics. So far, the magnetostatic reciprocity principle remains unchallenged and the magnetostatic interaction is assumed to be symmetric (reciprocal). Here, we theoretically and experimentally show that a linear and isotropic electrically conductive material moving with constant velocity is able to circumvent the magnetostatic reciprocity principle and realize a diode for magnetic fields. This result is demonstrated by measuring an extremely asymmetric magnetic coupling between two coils that are located near a moving conductor. The possibility to generate controlled unidirectional magnetic couplings implies that the mutual inductances between magnetic elements or circuits can be made extremely asymmetric. We anticipate that this result will provide novel possibilities for applications and technologies based on magnetically coupled elements and might open fundamentally new avenues in artificial magnetic spin systems. <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Do they? What would be the full repercussions of such a discovery? Any other comments?

As I mentioned before, gravity is simply geometry or warped, twisted, undulating spacetime. Gravitational waves are undulations of this same spacetime. Again, as yet we have no verifiable theory of quantized gravity/spacetime. All science and scientific theories begin as speculation. Speculative science has to be defined separately from evidence based scientific theories. You seem to have a great interest in science, particularly cosmology. That's admirable. But a tip from myself, who also like you has a great interest in cosmology, but with no real formal education in that discipline, is that as an amateur, you must be aware that most of our science presenters on TV etc, are giving simplified versions of certain aspects of science. Pop science mags and presentations have there place, but again, need to be accepted with that proviso that it is by necessity simplified. If you read something, or hear something interesting, get it verified on forums such as this by those educated in that discipline...again, I'm not one of them, but I have tempered my enthusiasm and first impressions by more advanced readings such as Kip Thorne's Black Holes and Time Warps, and separating speculation from scientific theory.

Wrong: DM is certainly defined. http://chandra.harvard.edu/press/06_releases/press_082106.html Also you would need to explain gravitational lensing by unseen matter. DE is the term we apply to whatever it is that is responsible for the universe accelerating in its expansion rate...see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova_Cosmology_Project and.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Z_Supernova_Search_Team Further more the BB was not an explosion, rather simply just the evolution of space and time from t+10-43 seconds. Anything else you would like to make up? In medical circles we may call your rant illusionary or delusionary thinking, or simply perhaps Delusions of grandeur. yes scientists do disgree on many things including DM and DE, but the vast majority hold a similar view according to the evidence. Those that don't, unlike you are at least educated in the sciences, instead of like you, choosing to be contrary for contrariness sake when in actual fact you have no idea.

A gravitational wave is not a particle....Gravity/spacetime can be warped, curved, twisted and waved in the presence of mass. Gravity is spacetime. Gravity is geometry.

The maximum speed limit applies to massive objects. There for spacetime is not really inhibited by "c": Light has no rest mass. No, virtual particles are by definition, particle, anti particle pairs that are created, and annihilate in less than a Planck instant.

Wormholes are a theoretical prediction of GR: As yet we have not verified their existence, or whether or not they are on the other side of BH's. Normally we speak of the vacuum of space, that is space devoid of matter. But a perfect vacuum [devoid of everything] is effectively impossible and something that is actually non existent. We would actually find that what we presume to be empty space is actually filled with energy and virtual particles popping in and out of existence.

No, scientists remain unsure whether gravity can be quantised or not.