On Thursday, scientists announced that they had recorded the sound of two black holes colliding a billion light years away, providing the first real proof that gravitational waves actually exist–something Albert Einstein predicted 100 years ago in his famous paper on general relativity. If you would like an introduction to the whole concept of gravitational waves, I’d recommend watching the animation below, created by PhD Comics–the same folks who created a handy animation explaining the Higgs Boson when it was confirmed back in 2012.
But, for the moment, I’d really like you to listen to the “Gravitational Wave Chirp,” the audio recording unveiled by scientists this week. (Hear it up top.) As The New York Times describes it, the chirp rises to “the note of middle C before abruptly stopping,” And it’s likely to “take its place among the great sound bites of science,” ranking up there with Alexander Graham Bell’s “Mr. Watson — come here” and Sputnik’s first beeps from orbit.” Decades from now, you can tell your grandkids you heard it here first.
A quick note: This week, the BBC posted the second of Stephen Hawking’s Reith Lectures focusing on Black Holes. And, once again, they’ve animated the presentation with some fun chalkboard illustrations. You can watch Part 1, “Do Black Holes Have No Hair?” here. And now Part 2, “Black Holes Ain’t as Black as They Are Painted,” above. Hawking is getting a little playful with his grammar, isn’t he? Enjoy.
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The Institute for Quantum Information and Matter (IQIM) at Caltech posted on its YouTube channel today a fun little video called “Anyone Can Quantum”–the “Anyone” probably referring to actor Paul Rudd, who takes on Stephen Hawking in a game of Quantum Chess, narrated by Keanu Reeves. Quantum Chess, a made-up thing, a gimmick, you say? Not so apparently. It’s a thing.
You can now hear in full on the BBC’s website the first part of Stephen Hawking’s 2016 Reith Lecture—“Do Black Holes Have No Hair?” Just above, listen to Hawking’s lecture while you follow along with an animated chalkboard on which artist Andrew Park sketches out the key points in helpful images and diagrams. We alerted you to the coming lecture this past Tuesday, and we also pointed you toward the paper Hawking recently posted online, “Soft Hair on Black Holes,” co-authored with Malcolm J. Perry and Andrew Strominger. There, Hawking argues that black holes may indeed have “hair,” or waves of zero-energy particles that store information previously thought lost.
The article is tough going for anyone without a background in theoretical physics, but Hawking’s talk above makes these ideas approachable, without dumbing them down. He has a winning way of communicating with everyday examples and witticisms, and Park’s illustrations further help make sense of things. Hawking begins with a brief history of black hole theory, then builds slowly to his thesis: as the BBC puts it, rather than see black holes as “scary, destructive and dark he says if properly understood, they could unlock the deepest secrets of the cosmos.”
Hawking is introduced by BBC broadcaster Sue Lawley, who also chairs a question-and-answer session (in the full lecture audio) with a few select Radio 4 listeners whose questions Hawking chose from hundreds submitted to the BBC. Stay tuned for Part Two, which should come online shortly after Tuesday’s broadcast.
The short animated video above gives us a tantalizing excerpt from Hawking’s second talk. “If you feel you are in a black hole,” he says reassuringly, “don’t give up. There’s a way out.” That nice little aside is but one of many colorful ways Hawking has of expressing himself when discussing the theoretical physics of black holes, a subject that could turn deadly serious, and—speaking for myself—incomprehensible. As far as I know, black holes work in the real universe just like they do in Interstellar.
I kid, but there is, however, at least one way in which Christopher Nolan’s apocalyptic space fantasy with its improbably happy ending may not be total hokum: as Hawking theorizes above, certain particles (or anti-particles) may escape from a black hole, “to infinity,” he says, or “possibly to another universe.” The main idea, says Hawking, is that black holes “are not the eternal prisons they were once thought.” Or, in other words, “black holes ain’t as black as they are painted,” which also happens to be the title of his next talk. Stay tuned: we’ll bring you more of Hawking’s fascinating black hole theory soon.
What’s it like inside the mind of theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking? Is it an electro-cosmic dance party narrated by Carl Sagan? I would like to think so. So would director Will Studd of Aardman Studios who created the hip promo video above, which also includes audio clips from Hawking himself and fellow physicists Brian Cox and Andrew Strominger, with music by Max Halstead. Pretty cool, but what’s it for?
Ask Hawking—or rather, read his paper (or one of the layfolk summaries), “Soft Hair on Black Holes,” which he posted a couple of weeks ago on Cornell University’s arXiv, an open access database of physics, mathematics, and other scientific research. Of Hawking and other physicists’ theory, Tia Ghose at Live Science writes, “black holes may sport a luxurious head of ‘hair’ made up of ghostly, zero-energy particles.” These “hairs” may store quantum information that would otherwise be lost forever. In the second part of his lecture, Hawking will expand on his theory of black hole radiation. Get a brief summary of that theory in the video clip above, and watch this space for Hawking’s sure-to-be-enlightening black hole lectures.
How can you make the invisible, visible? One way to do it is through a nineteenth century photography technique called Schlieren Flow Visualization. Better demonstrated than explained, the NPR video above shows Schlieren Flow Visualization in action, rendering visible (after the 2:00 minute mark) the sounds of hands clapping, a towel snapping, a firecracker cracking, and an AK-47 firing off a round. The images, which capture changes in air density, were provided by Michael Hargather, a professor who leads the Shock and Gas Dynamics Laboratory at New Mexico Tech.
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With dependable frequency, the religious views of Albert Einstein get revised and re-revised according to some re-discovered or re-interpreted quotation from his scientific work or personal correspondence. It’s not especially surprising that Einstein had a few things to say on the subject. As the pre-eminent theoretical physicist of his age, he spent his days pondering the mysteries of the universe. As one of the most famous public intellectuals in history, and an immigrant to a country as highly religious as the United States, Einstein was often called on to voice his religious opinions. Like any one of us over the course of a lifetime, those statements do not harmonize into a neat and tidy confession of belief, or unbelief. Instead, at times, Einstein explicitly aligns himself with the pantheism of Baruch Spinoza; at other times, he expresses a much more skeptical attitude. Often he seems to stand in awe of a vague deist notion of God; Often, he seems maximally agnostic.
Einstein rejected the atheist label, it’s true. At no point in his adult life, however, did he express anything at all like a belief in traditional religion. On the contrary, he made a particular point of distancing himself from the theologies of Judaism and Christianity especially. Though he did admit to a brief period of “deep religiousness” as a child, this phase, he wrote “reached an abrupt end at the age of twelve.” As he writes in his Autobiographical Notes, after a “fanatic orgy of freethinking,” brought on by his exposure to scientific literature, he developed a “mistrust of every kind of authority… a skeptical attitude toward the convictions that were alive in any specific social environment—an attitude that has never left me, even though, later on, it has been tempered by a better insight into the causal connections.” In contrast to the “religious paradise” of his youth, Einstein wrote that he had come to find another kind of faith—in the “huge world… out yonder… which stands before us like a great riddle.”
Einstein’s rejection of a personal God was undeniably final, such that in 1954, a year before his death, he would write the letter above to philosopher Erik Gutkind after reading Gutkind’s book Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt on the recommendation of a mutual friend. The book, Einstein tells its author, is “written in a language inaccessible to me.” He goes on to disparage all religion as “the most childish superstition”:
The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can change this for me. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstition. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong, and whose thinking I have a deep affinity for, have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power…
You can read a full transcript at Letters of Note, who include the letter in their second volume of fascinating correspondence from famous figures, More Letters of Note. The letter went up for auction in May of 2008, and a much more dogmatically anti-religious scientist had a keen interest in acquiring it: “Unsurprisingly,” Letters of Note point out, “one of the unsuccessful bidders was Richard Dawkins.”
A few years ago, String Theory seemed the prime candidate for the “long-sought Theory of Everything,” the holy grail of physics that will reveal, writes Jim Holt in The New Yorker, “how the universe began and how it will end… in a few elegant equations, perhaps concise enough to be emblazoned on a T‑shirt.” Popular physicist and science communicator Brian Greene has touted the theory everywhere—in his book The Elegant Universe and PBS series of the same name; in interview after interview, a World Science Festival forum and TED talk…. Given such evangelism, you’d think he’d have his elevator pitch for string theory down pat. And you’d be right. In an io9 Q&A, he defined it in just 14 words: “It’s an attempt to unify all matter and all forces into one mathematical tapestry.”
All of this might make string theory sound simple to understand, even for a lay person like myself. But is it? Well, you will find no shortage of primers online in addition to Greene’s exhaustive explanations. There’s even a “String Theory for Dummies.” If you’d prefer to avoid being insulted by the title of that instructional series, you can also watch the video above of another excellent popular physics communicator, Michio Kaku, explaining string theory, with helpful visual aids, in four minutes flat. He quickly lays out such essential components as the multiverse, the big bang, wormholes, and the cheerful inevitability of the death of the universe. The short talk is excerpted from Kaku’s Floating University presentation “The Universe in a Nutshell,” which you can watch in full here.
For all of Kaku’s references to Einstein and the equations of string theory, however, he doesn’t quite explain to us what those equations are or how and why physicists arrived at them, perhaps because they’re written in a mathematical language that might as well come from an alien dimension as far as non-specialists are concerned. But we can still learn much more about the theory as lay people. Above, watch Greene’s short TED talk on string theory from 2005 for more straight talk on the concepts involved. And as for whether the possibly unfalsifiable theory is still, ten years later, a candidate for the grandly unifying “Theory of Everything,” see his article from this past January in the Smithsonian magazine.
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