Gravitational waves

Being the story of the discovery of gravitational waves, the existence of which had long been predicted by the theory of relativity, as told by Sheila Rowan teamed up with a journalist from Nature, at the Royal Institution. I did look for the journalist at reference 1, but far too elaborate a site without more to go on. Sheila Rowan being easier to find as a director of the Institute for Gravitational Research at the University of Glasgow and moonlighting as Chief Scientific Adviser for the devolved administration in Edinburgh, thus proving that Glasgow people can talk to Edinburgh people without necessarily getting into a fight. Perhaps things have moved on since I used to travel north on a reasonably regular basis.

Started off in the usual way with train and tube to Green Park. No offers of seats on the tube, but there was a gentleman sporting a bracelet which appeared to have been made from a short length of nicely polished motor bicycle chain.

Quick glass of 'Quickie' at the Goat, a cheeky, young, white wine from Australia, a wine which I am sure I have mentioned before but which search fails to turn up this morning.

Historic brown wood desk missing, the one which Maxwell and Faraday had stood at in their time, reminding me of my disappointment when I first learned that it moved. Fullish house for gravity, clearly a better pull than teeth had been at reference 2. The new director, first seen last time around, acted as MC. He did not do much, but managed to give the impression that he had a good opinion of himself and that he liked the sound of his own voice. Two youngish boys near us, both rather badly behaved in the sense that they could not sit still, despite at least one of them clearly being quite clever. And the other may have had one of the currently fashionable behavioral disorders. Took me quite a while to count the occupants of the bank of seats opposite, perhaps because there were gaps which confused the count, but ended up fairly convinced that it was 61, with 2 more arriving late.

Moving onto the session proper, I might say that I do not usually care for the 'A talking to B' format, but on this occasion it worked reasonably well. Plus, being two ladies, more time was given to human affairs, at the expense of scientific affairs, that is to say the LIGO at reference 3. I offer various snippets.

Hunting the gravitational wave was a big endeavor, involving thousands of people, and a small number of very serious instruments, maybe with arms which were a mile long. Large cubes of very fancy glass suspended on threads of silica, with microscopic wobbles of the cubes being the mark of the wave. But it took a long time to bring the instruments up to the mark and the team leaders had to put a lot of effort into persuading the holders of the various public purses on-message.

I associated to the scanners of neurologists, another endeavor yielding vast amounts of signal and noise, all mixed up, and requiring all kinds of computing, mathematical and statistical trickery to get at the signal.

The signals in question being what you get when a couple of black holes or a couple of neutron stars spiral into each other, an annihilating collision. Events which seem to happen once a week or so, once you know how to look. Waves which head for us at the speed of light, entirely undisturbed by interstellar dust, dark matter or anything else.

Scientists can be into secrecy and it seems that when the team, the thousands of people, got wind of the first gravitational wave, they were all sworn to secrecy until the wave had been properly nailed down and confirmed. They wanted to make a splash with it, rather than having it leak out, and possibly having to be denied. In this rather like government statisticians who are similarly careful with important, market sensitive statistics.

Then all three thousand of them get to have their names on the papers in which the work was published. A democratic arrangement which we had heard about before at the Institution, but one which rather changes the meaning of the word 'publications' when applied to an individual. Do they list alphabetically in the way of some cast lists for shows or are the names effectively ranked by their order? I have come across phrases like 'lead author' and 'corresponding author'.

It seems that the instruments can detect a wave, but with one of them you cannot do direction. But with two of them at opposite corners of the US, you can do something, rather like ears being on opposite sides of the head. Perhaps more important, if two instruments both detect a wave at the same time, much more likely that you are looking at signal rather than noise.

One Ferrari and several Bentleys out in the street afterwards.

Wound up with another glass of white at the Rifleman in Epsom, while the chap I was with downed a couple of glasses of 'Naked Lady' from the people at reference 4, to complement my earlier quickie from Australia. Possibly named for the large naked ladies in York House gardens, by the river at Twickenham. Which house was named, according to Wikipedia, for some wealthy farmers called Yorke, rather than for any Duke of York. Furthemore, given that both public houses were Greene King operations and that the landlord of the Rifleman took a keen interest in the matter, we look forward to both quickie and naked lady for our next visit. Opposite which, as it happens, we have Epsom's one and only strip club.

Reference 1: https://www.nature.com/.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/03/dental-affairs.html.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIGO.

Reference 4: http://twickenham-fine-ales.co.uk/.