Surf’s up!
Maybe you missed the big news this week: physicists have observed gravitational waves, something Einstein predicted 100 years ago. Or maybe you heard, but you’re like me, wondering what I’m supposed to do with this breaking news, run out and buy a surfboard? A few years ago, okay, over a billion years ago two black holes ate themselves, distorting space and time just like Albert said they would.
You might be asking yourself, where do black holes go when they shrink and shrink and grow incredibly dense? Their gravitational pull sucks in even light itself. Hard to see the inside of these if no light is emitted. Telescopes are pretty much useless, sorry Hubble.
I wonder sometimes if the reason people don’t believe in science is that deep down we don’t understand it. Take quantum physics, for instance. Really strange behavior on the subatomic level. Particles behave different if they’re being observed. Don’t know about you, but this is mind boggling to me. How do you trust experiments if the experimenter affects the results just by watching?
The world we live in is beyond us now. Computers and lasers, microwaves and particle accelerators — I suppose they made Facebook possible and maybe that’s plenty for 95% of us. Gravitational waves, oh boy, let us see back to the Big Bang, sure, but will it give us better cellphones or 3-D printers? Those we can believe in, not the mumbo jumbo that contributed to ceating them.
Pretty soon our cars will do most of our driving, our machines will do most of our thinking. Satellites will spin in geosynchronous orbit and our TV reception will improve. Hopefully these gravitational waves won’t fuzz things up. We got some favorite programs to watch.
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