“We Can Listen to the Universe Now” –LIGO Gravitational Wave Discovery (Today’s ‘Galaxy’ Insight)
The frequencies of gravitational waves that LIGO is designed to detect are actually in the human audible range. So when we’re working on LIGO, we often take its output and put it on a speaker and just listen to it. For this binary black hole system, it made a distinctive, rising “whoooop!” sound. It’s not that we just look up and see anymore, like we always have—we actually can listen to the universe now. It’s a whole new sense, and humanity did not have this sense until LIGO was built.”
via “We Can Listen to the Universe Now” –LIGO Gravitational Wave Discovery (Today’s ‘Galaxy’ Insight).
This ties in to my post about the discovery of gravitational waves with LIGO a couple of days ago. The frequency, as shown in a diagram in one of the articles I referred to, goes from roughly 50 to 500 Hz (middle C is 440 Hz.) So the output can indeed be played on a speaker and make an audible “whoop” noise. The article referenced above also mentions that the colliding black holes are about 1.5 billion light years away from us, an enormous distance; one would not want to be close to this event when it occurred, as it released about three times the mass of the Sun in gravitational wave energy alone in a few tenths of a second.
This web site (The “Daily Galaxy”) has much more about LIGO, the wave discovery, and the recent discovery of a black hole with 21 billion times the mass of the sun. This newly discovered black hole is in the center of the galaxy NGC 4889, and, unbelievably, is currently quiescent, that is, not “feeding” on its surrounding galaxy. I highly recommend this web site for astronomy buffs.
Mr. Donald J. Trump, self-proclaimed billionaire and front-runner for the Republican nomination to run for President in November, is an inveterate liar and everyone seems to know that. To his supporters, it doesn’t seem to matter, partly because they don’t believe the sources that call him out on his lies. To his detractors, it doesn’t matter either, because he doesn’t respond to requests for information or clarification and ignores the complaints.
Here is a particularly egregious example of his lying style:
“We should have never gone into Iraq. I’ve said it loud and clear. I was visited by people from the White House asking me to sort of, could I be silenced because I seem to get a disproportionate amount of publicity. I mean, I was very strong, though: ‘You’re going to destabilize the Middle East.’”
[From an interview with Fox News on October 6, 2015]
Both Washington Post’s “Fact Checker“, in a post on October 21, 2015, and “Politifact” published analyses of his statements. Neither was able to locate any of the twenty-five stories he claimed to have documented his early opposition to the war. The only statement they found that could be construed as cautionary was this:
“Well, he has either got to do something or not do something, perhaps, because perhaps shouldn’t be doing it yet and perhaps we should be waiting for the United Nations, you know. He’s under a lot of pressure. I think he’s doing a very good job. But, of course, if you look at the polls, a lot of people are getting a little tired. I think the Iraqi situation is a problem. And I think the economy is a much bigger problem as far as the president is concerned.”
[From an interview with Neil Cavuto on Fox News on January 28, 2003, where Cavuto asked Trump if Bush should concentrate on the economy or Iraq]
The invasion of Iraq began on March 19, 2003. A week later, Trump was quoted as saying, at an Academy Awards after-party (by the Washington Post): “The war’s a mess.” But it wasn’t until August of 2004 that he elaborated on this statement:
“Look at the war in Iraq and the mess that we’re in. I would never have handled it that way. Does anybody really believe that Iraq is going to be a wonderful democracy where people are going to run down to the voting box and gently put in their ballot and the winner is happily going to step up to lead the country? C’mon. Two minutes after we leave, there’s going to be a revolution, and the meanest, toughest, smartest, most vicious guy will take over. And he’ll have weapons of mass destruction, which Saddam didn’t have.
“What was the purpose of this whole thing? Hundreds and hundreds of young people killed. And what about the people coming back with no arms and legs? Not to mention the other side. All those Iraqi kids who’ve been blown to pieces. And it turns out that all of the reasons for the war were blatantly wrong. All this for nothing!”
[From an article in Esquire magazine]
In hindsight, he sounds very perceptive, but before the war he had little to say. He now changes the timing of his statements to fit his new narrative, that he was prescient in warning against the invasion. What’s more, he invents a visit from White House staffers where he is asked to “be silenced” about his inconvenient warnings. Why does he invent these lies? To polish his image as a wise man and visionary counselor, in order to convince his supporters that he is the very man to be our next president.
He is free with his lies because he knows the people who support him don’t believe anyone else when it comes to his statements, and the people who care about truth-telling wouldn’t support him anyway. He’s only interested in controlling the people who naturally gravitate to his camp; he has no interest in attracting new supporters, because they might make inconvenient demands on his speech or his policy positions.
There is a strategy at the bottom of Donald J. Trump’s behaviors, and it is not a strategy aimed at winning the US Presidency. He is planning on developing a group of fanatical supporters, who can be counted on to throw their votes in whatever direction he dictates. In this way, he can make a bargain with whoever the eventual Republican nominee will be, trading his endorsement for a wallet-full of advantages like preferred tax treatment and protection from legal harassment. He is treating the American Presidential election in the same way that he sees the Russians treating their electorate; we know that he “admires” Vladimir Putin.
Mr. Trump does not believe that any Republican candidate will have a chance against Hillary Clinton, and he assumes that she will be the eventual Democratic nominee. He doesn’t believe that Bernie Sanders will become Democratic nominee but his plan doesn’t depend on the eventual line-up, it merely depends on the Republican Party’s ability to see their own advantage in a trade-off of his endorsement for certain undisclosed advantages.
Even if he is the front-runner going into the Republican Convention, he will be reluctant to actually compete in the election; he knows he will lose unless there is a third party candidate to split the Democratic vote, and there is no advantage in spending money in a losing campaign. So far, he has managed to avoid spending a significant amount of his own money, relying on the free publicity that he attracts from television. This is a stark contrast from other candidates, who have spent millions or hundreds of millions, much of it from super-PACs. When it comes to the general election, though, there will be less opportunity for free publicity, more spending from the secret money of super-PACs (which he has not yet exploited) and more obligations to spend his campaign’s money and his own money.
Unless he is much more serious than he appears to be about really trying to become President, there is no future in spending any of his own money on the election campaign. If he had been serious about winning, he would have avoided offending women, or at least apologized for his past remarks. If he had any interest in the real election, he wouldn’t have said so many offensive things about Mexicans. The truth is, he doesn’t care, because he has no intention of putting himself up as a candidate in an actual election (as opposed to a primary contest).
On 2015 September 14 at 09:50:45 UTC, the merger of two black holes with masses in the range of 25-50 stellar masses was detected by a pair of advanced gravitational wave receivers, as reported in a letter to the Physical Review Letters of the American Physical Society on February 11, 2016. This was the first confirmed detection of a “gravitational wave” by the new advanced LIGO (laser interferometer gravitational wave observatory) based on the classic Michelson-Morley interferometer first used in an attempt to detect the presence of a universal ether.
This first attempt failed, resulting in the general conclusion that there is no “universal ether” that surrounds all objects in space and thus no preferred direction for orienting us in space. What was worse, there was no carrier on which to base the radiation of light to create “waves” (unlike the waves on the surface of a pond, which are carried by the water itself.) The new detection shows that the original interferometer was not sensitive enough; now that the sensitivity has been increased by a factor of several thousand, the extremely weak and small amplitude signals that accompany gravity waves can be “felt.”
Several of these new interferometers have been built, but so far only two were on line to record the merger of GW150914 last September. They are the culmination of a long series of increasingly sensitive devices, which have finally been built to reach the predicted sensitivity needed for detection of the most massive gravity waves: those produced by the merger of black holes. First, in 1975, the observation of a binary pulsar system, and later, the calculation of its energy loss, allowed the calculation of the amplitude of such waves at galactic distances and the demonstration of the definite existence of gravitational waves. Over a period of 30 years, the development of increasingly sensitive interferometers finally produced a network that could, theoretically, detect the passage of waves if sufficiently large objects producing waves could be found. By 2011, the upper limits for the magnitude of such waves had been established; finally, in 2015, the first definite signals of gravity waves were detected.
The gravitational waves that are associated with the merger of two medium-sized black holes are very small at this distance, although the source intensity is roughly 2 x 10 to the 56th power ergs. In a time of less than 0.2 seconds, a signal increasing in frequency from about 35 Herz to almost 150 Herz (at maximum amplitude) was detected over a period of just eight cycles. It was calculated that this signal resulted from the final collapse of a binary system of two black holes, their merger, and the “ringdown” or reducing intensity signal after they were unified. A bandpass filter was used to confine the signal to these frequencies for convenient analysis. Only two of the interferometers were turned on and making observations at the time, but this was enough to record an identical signal with a 10 microsecond delay corresponding to the different locations of the two detectors: Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana.
Calculations placed the orbital period of the two black holes at 75 cycles per second, with a separation of roughly 350 kilometers apart, just before the final merger. Each of the black holes must have been less than 210 kilometers in diameter. The signal from this black hole merger traveled far enough to produce a redshift of 0.09– not very far away as galaxies go. A hundred years after the existence of gravitational waves was predicted by Einstein and their mathematical reality was confirmed by Schwarzschild (who published a solution for the field equations that described a black hole) their existence has been confirmed to a high degree of certainty by advances in instrumentation and physical technology.
What does this mean for us? It confirms to a high degree of confidence that Einstein’s predictions were correct and the “standard model” of physics is accurate (as far as it goes.) It opens up a new avenue for observing the universe around us. It makes us more comfortable in the certainty that Einstein was right. Other than that, it’s not very exciting. The implications for astrophysics of this observation are discussed in another technical article in Astrophysical Letters. For those of us deterred by astrophysical jargon, there is an article in Science News that clearly summarizes the findings in nontechnical language.
Physics has become fairly dull (at least, to outsiders) because all the observations made to date agree with our theories of what those observations should look like. The exciting part will be when we find Earth-like planets circulating not-so-distant star systems and tantalizing us with the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe. Or else, perhaps, some experiment will uncover an inconsistency in the “standard model” and we will have to start all over again.
Someday, we will solve the problem of travel to other star systems. The evolution of the technique for observing gravitational waves from theory to confirmation in just a hundred years makes me confident that we will not have to wait too terribly long for that trip to Alpha Centauri.
The Republicans in the Congress, the same ones who tried to make Obama a one-term President, are demanding that he give up his right to name a successor to the late Justice Antonin Scalia because only eleven months remain in Obama’s term. The scorn with which Obama should view this proposal is monumental. Not only depriving the President of his Constitutional rights, but leaving a seat on the Supreme Court empty for a year– they cannot be serious.
The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven– Or Didn’t
In 2004, in Huntsville, Ohio, six-year-old Alex Malarkey was involved in a “motor vehicle accident” (car crash) and was left quadriplegic due to neck injuries. He has been on a ventilator since the accident. He was listed as co-author of a book with his father in 2010 which described a visit to Heaven immediately after the crash. The book sold more than a million copies and was also made into a TV movie, but in 2012, Alex was quoted as saying that the book was “the most deceptive ever.” In 2015, he wrote an open letter to Christian bookstores that “forcefully disavowed” (Wikipedia) the book and referred readers to the Bible for accurate information. As a result, the publisher withdrew the book from sale in a first-ever near-death-event retraction.
The account that the boy gave of his near-death experience conformed closely to the Christian concept of Heaven, with the appropriate angels and details that could have been copied from a movie about Heaven. The open letter that the boy wrote, apparently in a final attempt to disavow the text, shows that the boy is still a devout Christian and believes in the sanctity of the text of the Bible. He states that the Bible was divinely inspired, which is still a Christian concept, although it shares that belief with other religions that revere holy texts.
It turns out that Alex is unable to receive any of the profits from the book and that his father controls the money. The boy’s parents have become estranged and the mother has said that the account in the book is “embellished” and inaccurate, distorted to make money. Books about near-death experiences and visits to Heaven in particular are apparently a “lucrative genre” (Wikipedia) of “nonfiction” or more accurately, religious literature. They seem to comfort readers with stories of Heaven that agree with popular religious beliefs.
Wikipedia lists several popular, million-selling books including “Ninety Minutes in Heaven” and “Heaven is for Real” but also lists the maligned “Twenty-three Minutes in Hell.” Some Christian writers have expressed concern about the items recounted in these books, stating that they are extra-Biblical, that is, not canonical, and may cause confusion among the faithful about what is and what is not an article of faith.
I am impelled to remind readers that neither the account of the near-death experience nor the retraction of it has anything to do with Christian beliefs per se. One can be a Christian without believing in near-death experiences. There is, at most, a doctrinal dispute between the boy and Christians who believed in the original account. That is, there is a variety of belief that accepts the validity of near-death experiences that include meetings with G-d and so forth, and there is another variety which accepts the validity of G-d but not of such experiences. I am impelled to document this fact, but not required to comment further on it.
So if you encounter anybody who chastises you for saying “gravity waves” because the phrase also has a meaning in fluid mechanics, tell them to spend eight minutes listening to Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” ’Cause you know sometimes words have two meanings.
via ‘Gravity waves’ is an OK way to refer to gravitational radiation | Science News.
Shades of 1971.
Zika Virus: Spread and Complications
In my previous post about Zika virus, I noted that it had spread from Africa and Asia, across the Pacific Ocean, with stops in Yap and Easter Island, and into South America. A recent article in the New York Times discussed the spread of Zika into Brazil and its appearance as an epidemic after the 2014 soccer World Cup: a definite identification was made by May 14, 2015. Early in 2015, in Brazil, patients began to appear in large numbers with fever, rash, joint pain, and headaches. Most patients had mild disease, but complications showed up soon: Guillan-Barre syndrome, a rare neurological syndrome.
By March of 2015, cases had spread to Salvador, a city of 2.5 million; by April, the cause of the “mystery disease” had been identified: Zika virus. Ironically, Zika had already been identified in the US in travelers from the Pacific.
The first identification of Zika virus in the US came from an international traveler who had just returned from a tour of the western Pacific in December 2013. He walked in to the Traveler’s Medical Service on Madison Avenue in New York City with a rash that, he said, had persisted for eleven days. The nurse practicioner who first saw him thought he had dengue fever, but the symptoms were not nearly severe enough. The traveler, an intelligent, sophisticated man, told the NP that he knew he had Zika virus. He had been reading reports in the newspapers in Polynesia about the virus and its sudden appearance in the islands.
The patient had also read an article about a scientist in Colorado who had infected his wife with Zika after returning from Africa. Because of this, he avoided having unprotected sex with his partner and kept her from being infected. The CDC later issued a warning about transmission of Zika virus through unprotected intercourse.
He had even heard about cases of Guillan-Barre syndrome. This condition is a form of temporary paralysis that starts distally, in the hands and feet. The syndrome is usually resolved after several weeks, but it can be deadly if it reaches the muscles that power breathing; immediate placement on a ventilator if a patient develops distress is required to assist respiration. It is thought to be caused by an autoimmune attack on the nerves that supply voluntary muscles, a side effect of the body’s immune response to the viral attack.
Back in Brazil, numerous cases of Guillan-Barre syndrome began to appear. Then, in July 2015, a pair of twins, one of them afflicted with microcephaly (a small head), were born in Recife. In August, the parents brought the infants to a famous neurologist, Dr. Vanessa van der Linden; she ruled out the usual causes of microcephaly: syphilis, toxoplasmosis, rubella, and other congenital infections, as well as genetic causes like Down’s syndrome. By September, the public hospital in Recife had five cases of microcephaly. Dr. van Linden’s mother, a pediatric neurologist, soon had seven cases of microcephaly at the hospital where she worked.
Recife is in northern Brazil, and Natal, capital of the state of Rio Grande do Norte, is about 200 miles up the coast from Recife. Natal was one of the host cities of the World Cup soccer championship.
The infants tested negative for Zika virus, but many of their mothers recalled having had an illness with a rash months earlier, during their first trimester of pregnancy. Most of these women were from rural areas, and had minimal to no education. “Dr. Kátia Petribu, a hospital psychiatrist in Recife” described the overwhelming experience of the mothers: they came by bus from far away, with nothing but the clothes on their backs and their peculiar children. ‘ “They come with nothing,” she said. “No food. They travel by bus for hours, arrive at 7 a.m., and wait for hours to be seen.” ‘
In severe cases, these infants appeared to have no foreheads: their faces simply terminated at the eyebrows. The mothers, with no knowledge of medicine, had forlorn hopes that their children would somehow grow out of it. Many of them were in shock at the appearance of their monstrous children. The infants still behaved as if they were normal: they nursed normally, slept, woke up, cried, and were comforted.
The criterion for microcephaly had been a head size of 33 cm at birth; to narrow the definition, scientists changed the measure down to 32 cm.
Dr. Mauricio L. Nogueira, from the southern part of Brazil where no cases had been seen, visited a hospital in the north and was stunned by what he saw: 25 infants born in a single ten day period with microcephaly. The NYT says: “He is still haunted by what he saw.” ‘ One mother, he said, looked up at him and asked, “Hey, doctor, his head is going to grow, right?” ‘
The World Health Organization (WHO) declared a public health emergency on February 1, 2016 because of a spike in cases of Guillan-Barre syndrome and microcephaly in the Americas. WHO has a Q+A page with general information about the virus and additional materials on line. WHO has also coordinated activities of scientists around the world and is working on controlling the Aedes mosquito which carries Zika. The same control measures used for malaria would be effective against Zika.
In November 2015, scientists obtained amniotic fluid (the fluid that surrounds the growing fetus) and found Zika virus. Two stillbirths were analyzed and, again, Zika virus was found in their brain tissue. This represents the first time a mosquito-borne virus has been directly associated with congenital malformations.
At last, the epidemic appears to have peaked: in Recife, the incidence of microcephaly in newborns appears to have declined during the last three weeks. This was the first spot that the infection was recognized in South America, and there are some 600 million people on the continent who have never been exposed before. Thousands of cases of microcephaly have been reported in Brazil and Colombia, most thought to be linked to the Zika virus.
North America has never been exposed to the virus, and epidemiologists think there will be at least small outbreaks here. There are areas of the southern United States where mosquitoes breed year-around, and these are likely to have some degree of spread of the virus. Aggressive mosquito-control measures are warranted and have already begun in Florida, Texas, and across the South.
Zika Virus Timeline
Zika virus was first described in Uganda in 1947. It was detected only because blood viruses in monkeys were being studied. Even in people, there are few symptoms. The virus spread to the Pacific Islands from Africa and Asia, then to South America in 2013-15.
Zika is thought to be spread by mosquito bites. The symptoms are described as “mild” and last about 4-7 days; they consist of fever, joint pain, rash, and conjunctivitis (red eyes) in about 1 in 5 exposed people, with headache and muscle pain at times. The incubation period is probably a few days to two weeks. Fatalities are said to be “rare” (unless you are affected.)
The greatest concern is for women who are pregnant when they become acutely ill with Zika. An increase in the incidence of microcephaly in epidemic areas of Brazil was reported and the Brazilian Ministry of Health established a registry of cases in the fall of 2015. Of 37 cases reported, 35 could not be attributed to known causes; one had cytomegalovirus and one had a genetic anomaly. Most (71%) of the mothers reported an acute illness with fever and rash during the pregnancy, and all were negative for syphilis, CMV, etc., etc. The historical incidence of microcephaly at birth was about 0.5 per 10,000 births but a new estimate could not be given.
A detailed timeline of the known spread of the Zika virus is available from NPR here. First detected in the Zika forest in Uganda, it was followed in Central African countries until 1981. Asian countries, from India to the Phillipines, were also found to have cases in the fifties to the eighties. In 2007, the virus jumped to Yap Island and infected virtually all of its seven thousand residents. In 2013-14, the virus continued across the Pacific, finally to Easter Island, and then in 2015 it appeared in South America. There are estimates of at least a million Brazilians infected already.
Then, in 2015, a woman gave birth in Hawaii after having been in Brazil while pregnant. The infant had microcephaly. More than a dozen imported cases of Zika in adults have been found in the US during the course of 2015. A Centers for Disease Control report published in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report on Zika and microcephaly is here.
The latest New York Times (NYT) story has Gloria Steinem and other women political pioneers scolding young women for backing Bernie Sanders instead of Hillary Clinton. “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other!” is how Madeline Albright termed it.
Indeed, there is a distinct political uncertainty created when one backs a seventy-four year old socialist Senator against the heir apparent to the Democratic leadership, a woman who is favored in every poll over every Republican. Almost equal to the uncertainty introduced when one backs Donald Trump, a man who has already lost most of the female vote and all of the Hispanic vote, against Jeb Bush, who at least has the name value of a solid Republican.
An oddly symmetrical degree of political uncertainty develops when one considers the possibilities introduced by off-center candidates who might be thought unlikely to win but not having been considered against each other simply because they are so unlikely. There is a potentially severe degree of Republican control of government created if the President happens to be Republican, with both houses of Congress majority Republican. For Democrats, this is very bad. History has also shown poor results, especially during the last Bush administration.
Recent history has shown good results for a Democratic President. Steady economic improvement with a steadily dropping unemployment rate and a steadily dropping yearly deficit in accounts are the results of recent history. In foreign policy, we have withdrawn from Afghanistan and Iraq, two painful, prolonged, and ultimately poorly benefitted conflicts, and avoided inserting troops in Lybia and Syria. Avoiding open conflict in Syria and Iraq, in particular, has frustrated the ambitions of the Islamic State and negated their prophecies.
At the same time, the Democratic administration, in concert with multiple Western countries, has negotiated a treaty with Iran whereby the Iranians agree not to pursue offensive nuclear technologies and will receive relief of economic sanctions in return, creating an economic boon for both sides. The Republicans have vilified this treaty but their negative arguments are not convincing when set against the agreements with a half-dozen other countries.
On the other hand, there is wide speculation among the Republican establishment about the tragic consequences of Trump being the Republican candidate for President and winning, to the destruction of Republican patronage. This is a more serious consequence to them, the loss of establishment Republican influence and the take-over of the Tea Party Republicans. They haven’t considered the possibility of the collapse of competent government after a Trump victory. Nor have they considered the possibility of a descent into overt fascism with 12 million Mexicans taking the place of 6 million Jews.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas
The New York Times (NYT) has come out with a piece about Justice Clarence Thomas and how he almost never asks questions from the bench during oral arguments. His explanations for this vary: first, he is ashamed of his Georgia accent; second, the cases have already been decided, and the oral arguments are just theater. In reality, he has nothing to say, because he has already decided his opinion on the case (or has had his opinion handed to him by Antonin Scalia.) He is arguably the worst Supreme Court Justice ever appointed (although there could be some other candidates) and his silence is justifiable on the grounds that he has nothing to say.
Here are some representative reader comments on the NYT story:
Ozark
is a trusted commenter
A decade and a half ago, I learned from a person at the Supreme Court in a position to know that Clarence Thomas had never ordered a single case from the library. Never to that point. It was clear too from his lack of requesting documents that he had never written an opinion that came out under his name; Scalia had written all of them. One may assume that the librarians play a different role now that so much information is in digital form, so perhaps we cannot so easily trace how little work Thomas is doing. Nonetheless, why should anything have changed? He’d already been on the bench well over a decade when that Supreme Court staff person outed him for doing absolutely nothing as a justice. You say that Thomas should talk, but what would he say? There is no indication that he has studied the cases, the laws that could shape them, or anything else but his marching orders from Scalia, ALEC, and the Koch brothers.
