A team of scientists announced on Thursday that they had heard and recorded the sound of two black holes colliding a billion light-years away, a fleeting chirp that fulfilled the last prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
That faint rising tone, physicists say, is the first direct evidence of gravitational waves, the ripples in the fabric of space-time that Einstein predicted a century ago. It completes his vision of a universe in which space and time are interwoven and dynamic, able to stretch, shrink and jiggle.
(New York Times, February 11, 2016)
Perhaps you saw these scientists on TV hailing this as the greatest scientific discovery since, well, E = mc2. I’m sure they intended no disrespect to the discovery of everything from the Big Bang to the Atomic Bomb.
But I recall a team of scientists announcing a few years ago that they had discovered the Higgs boson, which they hailed in similar fashion.
Higgs boson (aka the God particle) was the theoretical missing link that explains (or should explain) the DNA – not just of our universe, but of others that might be out there.
Certainly, watching scientists behave at Wednesday’s news conference announcing this discovery like little girls at a Justin Bieber concert indicates what a big deal they think it is…
Frankly, not since Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (1988) has there been so much media hype about a subject so few people know anything about…
Therefore, whatever benefits it might lead to at some point in the distant future, I suspect this discovery will have about as much impact on our daily lives as the pre-historic discovery of Halley’s comet.
(“The God Particle? Hardly…,” The iPINIONS Journal, July 7, 2012)
Moreover, after the God particle, you’d have thought discovery of gravitational waves (or any phenomenon related to the origin of the universe) would pale into insignificance. Indeed, this is a deduction even I, with my C in Physics 101, can make without fear of contradiction.
But at least we can relate, in this case, by looking at the gravitational “waves of panic” the two black holes of plummeting oil prices and plummeting stock prices are causing across the globe.
Meanwhile, hope springs eternal for “Breaking News” featuring a team of scientists announcing their discovery of a cure for cancer, a vaccine for HIV, or even a cure for the common cold, for Christ’s sake. Until then, these physicists really should keep their quixotic backslapping to themselves.
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