[time-nuts] gravity, space and time

Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell at gmail.com
Fri Dec 12 15:55:07 EST 2014


On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 8:42 PM, folkert <folkert at vanheusden.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> If I understood it well, we should occasionally encounter gravitational
> waves going through, well, the whole galaxy. As time and space are
> intertwined, those ripples may be measured somehow I guess.
> Isn't this that "we as time nuts community" can help the scientific
> world with? E.g. create some kind of grassroots effort where our very
> accurate clocks can detect this? I can imagine all kinds of reasons
> that existing infra for this may not always be able to detect this on
> its own.
> What do you think?

The waves fall of with distance just as other undirected radiations
do.  As a result they should be incredibly weak when we observe them
(if not, we have worse concerns!).

There are observatories working on detecting these with incredibly
sensitive equipment.  Search for LIGO  for an example.

Even assuming we all had H-masers at home (I wish... anyone know what
a VCH-1008 costs? is it too much to dream that it has a small price to
match its small size?), I'm not aware of any way we could usefully
measure gravitational waves, even ignoring their weakness, just due to
a lack of precise time transfer with enough time resolution.


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