You have probably heard the news that gravitational waves have finally been directly detected. The Times has a nice summary. Also see Steve Hsu. Here is an interview with one of the founders, Rainer Weiss. I remember Weiss talking about LIGO back when I was a graduate student at MIT. It’s nice to see that he finally succeeded.
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Scientific Clearing House 
Rainer Weiss was my freshman adviser, and I remember wondering why anyone still studied gravity when Einstein had solved it decades earlier!
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Was waiting for you comments on this.
So the thinking in the physics community is that this is a real signal?
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Same signal was measured at both detectors 7 ms apart. That is definitely real.
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there is an hour long video the presentation i think on the nsf web site if its archived with all the principle scientists i think—i saw it—barely understood it. (all i know about black holes if i recall is they are singular solutions einstein’s equations. all i ever got up to was a bit on the renormalization group which is still a big subject—ricci flow, etc.)
LIGO cost i think they said 150 million dollars or more. i guess its good that not all govt spending goes for weapons and war. but maybe it was taken out of the food stamp budget.
yesterday was darwin’s birthday. the people who write ‘common core’ textbooks supposedly ‘dumb them down to the lowerst common denonimator so they fit every state —its all about the money. the lowest was texas, so trivialities like the theory of evolution and the civil rights movement were downplayed while religion and american exceptionalism were stressed. its been all progress since 1776.
they have U Tx Austin of course, and a few other places, but there are some exceptional faculty members at Tx universities—they seem to have come from civilizations on black holes (Hoyle’s theory on life originating in space) or are creatures from the black lagoon.
there was some result on ‘cosmic inflation’ not long ago that turned out to be wrong. this one may be better. i can’t believe this technology—setting up this computer again took me 2 days (after my landlord came in here and dismantled it in 5 minutes and sort of threw it my other room since my music was annoying my neighbors). i cant figure out my cell phone or tape recorder. i would be perfect at caltech.
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