physics

Astrophysics / cosmology / Physics / etc.

Dark Energy, Numerical Relativity, and Astrophysics

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binary neutron star merger

So I did an interview for the “Tilting at the Universe” podcast. In it, I describe: the history of dark energy and the expanding universe, how the mystery of dark energy may be solved once we reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity, how the astrophysics of black holes and neutron stars may help us understand quantum gravity, and how my field of numerical relativity fits in to all of this. I think I did a pretty good job of explaining what excites me about the field. So check it out. The interview is here. In the interview, I mention

Astrophysics / Physics / Relativity / etc.

The Black Holes that Created LIGO’s Gravitational Waves

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LIGO merger Bohn

A little over a week ago, the LIGO collaboration detected gravitational waves emitted during the in-spiral and merger of two black holes. And the world’s scientists, myself included, collectively went bananas. Last week, I attempted to summarize the event and capture some of the science, and poetry, that has us so excited. In short, gravitational waves provide us a totally new way to look at the universe. LIGO’s one detection has already provided us with a wealth of information about gravity and astrophysics. Today, I summarize some of what we’ve learned. Black Holes As We Knew Them In the

Astrophysics / Physics / Relativity / etc.

The Poetry of LIGO’s Gravitational Waves

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Binary Black Hole Merger Signal

Yesterday the LIGO scientific collaboration announced that they had detected the gravitational waves from the in-spiral and merger of two black holes, shown in figure 1. It would not be an overstatement to say that this result has changed science forever. As a gravitational physicist, it is hard for me to put into words how scientifically important and emotionally powerful this moment is for me and for everyone in my field. But I’m going to try. This is my attempt to capture some of the science—and the poetry—of LIGO’s gravitational wave announcement. The Source About 1.3 billion years ago

Astrophysics / Physics / Relativity / etc.

The Geodetic Effect: Measuring the Curvature of Spacetime

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gravity probe B in curved spacetime

A couple of weeks ago, I described the so-called “classical tests of general relativity,” which were tests of early predictions of the theory. This week, I want to tell you about a much more modern, difficult, and convincing test: A direct measurement of the curvature of spacetime. It’s called the geodetic effect. This is the eighth post in my howgrworks series. Let’s get to it. We know from general relativity that gravity is a distortion of how we measure distance and duration. And that we can interpret this distortion as the curvature of a unified spacetime. When particles travel

cosmology / Physics / Science And Math

The CMB Axis of Evil and the Nature of Randomness

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axis of evil planck

This Halloween, Nature News released an article titled Zombie Physics: 6 Baffling Results that Just Won’t Die. It’s a fun article describing several mysteries in physics whose solution sits in a sort of limbo. For fun, I figured, I’d explain some of these mysteries, and give my opinion about possible solutions. And first, I’m going to discuss the CMB Axis of Evil, a strange pattern in the leftover radiation from the Big Bang. A Much-Too-Short Summary of Cosmic Inflation and the CMB About 13.8 billion years ago, the universe was extremely hot, so hot that matter couldn’t form at

Mathematics / Physics / Science And Math

A Retraction: Backwards Heat is Not Chaotic

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Airplane_vortex_edit

Yesterday I wrote a post that explored the flow of heat both forwards and backwards in time. I used this as a venue to introduce the notion of entropy and to describe one extreme example of the butterfly effect—where small changes in initial data can create big changes in the final result. That’s all fine and good and I stand by that. But I said that the reverse heat equation, which runs the flow of heat backwards in time, was an example of chaos. And as this reddit user points out, this is very wrong. I have now fixed the

Mathematics / Physics / Science And Math

Heat, Chaos, and Predictability

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A funny comic about the butterfly effect

The butterfly effect, shown comically in figure 1, is the idea that a very small change in one place on Earth can cause a very big change somewhere else. In this case, a butterfly flaps its wings and causes a tornado. This metaphor illustrates the mathematical concept of chaos, in which the Earth’s atmosphere is a chaotic system. While a single butterfly probably isn’t literally responsible for a tornado, mathematical chaos is very real and important. So this week, I’m going to try giving you some intuition for the butterfly effect using one extreme example from physics. Heat Suppose

Geometry / Physics / Relativity / etc.

In-Falling Geodesics in Our Local Spacetime

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spacetime!

My previous post was a description of the shape of spacetime around the Earth. I framed the discussion by asking what happens when I drop a ball from rest above the surface of the Earth. Spacetime is curved. And the ball takes the straightest possible path through spacetime. So what does that look like? Last time I generated a representation of the spacetime to illustrate. However, I generated some confusion by claiming that it “should be obvious” that the straightest possible path is curved towards or away from the Earth. When a textbook author says “the proof is trivial”

Geometry / Physics / Relativity / etc.

Our Local Spacetime

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Gravity Probe B circling Earth

General relativity tells us that mass (and energy) bend spacetime. And when people visualize the effect of a planet on spacetime, they usually imagine something like in figure 1, where the planet creates a “dip” in spacetime much like a “gravitational well.” But today I’m going to show you what spacetime actually looks like near a planet… and it doesn’t look anything like the common picture. This is the fifth part in my many-part series on general relativity. Here are the first four parts: Galileo almost discovered general relativity General relativity is the dynamics of distance General relativity is

Geometry / Mathematics / Physics / etc.

General Relativity is the Curvature of Spacetime

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Einstein rings are awesome!

Figure 1 shows light from a distant blue galaxy that is distorted into a so-called Einstein ring by the curvature of spacetime around a red galaxy. This is called gravitational lensing and today we’ll learn how it works. This is part three of my many-part series on general relativity. Last time, I told you how general relativity is the dynamics of distance, which we know is a consequence of the fact that gravity is the same as acceleration. This time, I describe the consequences of the fact gravity warps distance. And in the process, we’ll learn precisely why gravity