Gravity

Gravity (not the song by John Mayer​ but the force) is in the news. More specifically, gravity waves are in the news.

Predicted by Albert Einstein 100 years ago, gravity waves are extremely difficult to detect. Just how difficult I didn't know until I read an article in Science Newsline​:

At each observatory, the 2 1/2-mile (4-km) long, L-shaped LIGO interferometer uses laser light split into two beams that travel back and forth down the arms (four-foot diameter tubes kept under a near-perfect vacuum). The beams are used to monitor the distance between mirrors precisely positioned at the ends of the arms. According to Einstein's theory, the distance between the mirrors will change by an infinitesimal amount when a gravitational wave passes by the detector.A change in the lengths of the arms smaller than one-ten-thousandth the diameter of a proton (10^-19 or 0.0000000000000000001 meter) can be detected.

Measuring something that small is truly amazing. Hats off to all involved.

Now, where is my star ship?

Imagination > Knowledge

“I believe in intuition and inspiration. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.” 

Albert Einstein

On Cosmic Religion and Other Opinions and Aphorisms

Hide and Seek

Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, and Blaise Pascal were playing hide-and-seek.

It was Einstein’s turn to count, so he hid his eyes and started counting to ten.

Pascal ran off and hid. Newton drew a one meter by one meter square on the ground in front of Einstein and stood in it.

Einstein reached ten and uncovered his eyes. He immediately saw Newton and shouted, “Newton! I found you! You’re it!”

Newton smiled and said, “No, you didn’t find me. You found a Newton per square meter. You found Pascal!”

Ah, nerd humor. To some, it is incomprehensible and to others, it is stupid. But to the select few it is joyously funny.

The wonder of knowledge embraced so comfortably that it can be played with, of jumping between one area of knowledge and another in totally novel ways. One laughs at the at both the humor and the excitement of making the connections that make the humor possible.