Tag: gravitational wave detectors
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Measuring the gravity of climate change
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Don’t be turned off by the name of the publication! This article for SPIE Photonics is meant for anyone, and describes a very sophisticated experiment that connects my area…
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Gravitational waves and climate change
Since early 2018, I’ve contributed multiple articles to Mercury, the membership magazine for the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP). These articles are only available in full to members of ASP, but recently Mercury has put extensive previews for certain articles up on the website as enticement to join. One of those articles is my…
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Squeezing light to detect more gravitational waves
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] This article appeared in the fall print issue of Popular Science, but I missed that this article had also been published online. Something called ‘squeezed light’ is about to…
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Doing astronomy using gravity
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! If you like my writing and want to support it, please donate to my Patreon. ] Astronomy without light Gravitational waves let us see the invisible universe in new ways…
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A discovery that made a thousand scientists burst into cheers and tears
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] It’s not every day that we get to usher in an entirely new branch of astronomy. Yesterday, members of the LIGO collaboration announced the first direct detection of gravitational…
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Be very very quiet, we’re hunting gravitational waves
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Gravitational waves and where to find them Advanced LIGO has just begun its search for gravitational waves For Symmetry Magazine: For thousands of years, astronomy was the province of…
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Listening to the sounds of the cosmos
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Last year, I went to a conference in Florida to hear — and in some cases meet — some of the leading thinkers in the study of gravitational waves.…
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If we could only build one huge observatory….
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Q: Suppose we can only build one big telescope. Should we look for life among the stars or the origins of the universe? I participated in an experts’ roundtable…
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Gravitational waves: the froth of spacetime
My second piece for BBC Future is up! I ask—and partly answer—the question, “Will we ever detect gravitational waves directly?” (And don’t worry if you don’t know what a gravitational wave is: I answer that one too!) A major part of the problem is that gravity is weak: even the strongest gravitational wave will only…
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Speak softly and carry a 2.3-ton aluminum bar
We have no complete, consistent quantum theory of gravity. However, clues from other theories indicate that the physics we know breaks down at a certain fundamental length scale: the Planck length. In particular, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics must be modified if you can’t measure position to arbitrary precision. However, length and energy…
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