Originally posted by vistesd
Yeah, I have the DVDs; maybe I'll take a look at it again too...
I just finished watching it, except for the interactive modules. One thing new for me was the concept of communicating with intelligences in other universes a 'brane' away by beaming gravitational radiation.
This follows from the idea that the reason gravity is so weak relative to electromagnatism is it leaks into other dimensions so the full strength is diluted by its interactions with any one dimension, so we only feel 1/10^21 of its full power in our universe, having shared part of itself with the rest of eternity. So if gravity can leak into other universes maybe we can vibrate the suckers so hard it gets noticed in that other universe and they ring back. All well and good but first we have to A) prove they exist (gravitons) and B) generate them powerful enough to be noticed elsewhere in other universes.
As it happens, the new gravitational wave detectors are coming online, like LISA which strives to detect the rattling of the cosmos, but because these vibrations are so weak, we have to be able to detect vibrations on the order of a thousand's of the size of a proton to even have a chance at it. There are other schemes afoot which will make detectors in space, laser beams travelling a million km or more and reflecting back in a triangular arrangement that will reveal tiny tiny variations of the laser light that would be the signature of gravitational waves. But still that is only the detection of such waves.
It might go as follows (my probably cocamamee ideas but here goes):
Just as we over a hundred years ago developed methods of detecting electromagnetic radiation with extremely crude devices, these devices basically shook up a small test tube full of crystals in such a way as to reveal the presence of RF waves. At first we could detect only the crudest of waves because of the incredible insensitivity of the instruments of the day, they were called Coherers, here is a link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherer
So time went on and we figured better and much much more sensitive ways to detect RF till now they are so dang sensitive we can here the rattling of the big bang itself which is still being refined and look at the information THAT gave us, the exact age of the universe for one.
So in that light, our crude detectors will (if they work at all) give us a crude picture of the gravitaional radiation of say, two colliding black holes (a mind boggling idea in itself!) which as you might expect is the signiature of one of the most violent events in our known universe.
So with the detection of such an event under our belts, we refine the detectors which would be on the order of the old coherers, and come up with vastly more sensitive detectors able to tease out smaller and smaller events, such as two stars orbiting one another, and maybe one day, vibrations that don't come from our universe at all but somewhere else. Now THAT would be something!
The Universe as a Hologram
18 Apr '07 20:16
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