I haven’t posted anything lately because nothing much has
been happening that wasn’t happening before. In America they continue to argue
over which of several rabble-rousing nonentities should be the puppet of big
business for the next four years, and in the rest of the world there are
various wars, squabbles, and humanitarian disasters, nearly all caused,
ultimately, by America’s gross materialist greed.
But this morning something was announced that is indeed new
and important: what was pretty unequivocally a gravitational wave has actually
been detected. And yes, the detection took place in America, though it has been
corroborated at the gravitational wave detector in Scotland.
Gravitational waves belong to the electromagnetic wave
family, among whose more familiar members are light, radio waves, and x-rays. They
might be described — not very helpfully — as ‘Ripples in the space-time
continuum’. Their existence is entailed by Einstein’s General Theory of
Relativity — the one, unlike the Special Theory, that no-one could understand —
but this is the first time one has been detected. It’s as difficult to say what
a gravitational wave actually is as
it would be to explain vision to the congenitally blind, and of course I can’t
feed your appetite for pictures with one of a gravitational wave, so here
instead is one of Einstein:
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