[time-nuts] LIGO detects gravitational waves

Tom Van Baak tvb at LeapSecond.com
Sat Feb 13 16:21:03 EST 2016


Hi Bill,

I don't think so; time and space are not related that way. Perhaps what you're thinking is that changes in gravity make changes in time, as in gravitational time dilation, or solid earth tides? The numbers are not favorable:

On earth, a 1 meter change in elevation causes a frequency shift of 1e-16. It takes a full 1 km change and waiting a whole day before that adds up to even 10 ns. Now imagine a gravity wave that changes your elevation by only 1e-21 m instead of 1 m. And one that lasts only lasts a few milliseconds instead of 24 h. So time differences is probably not the way to go.

In other words, I don't see any possibility for amateur GW experimentation. It will be a long time before a pair of LIGO shows up on eBay ;-)

The eventual follow-on to LIGO are space-based interferometers; https://www.elisascience.org/ is one such plan.

/tvb

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bill Hawkins" <bill.iaxs at pobox.com>
To: "'Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement'" <time-nuts at febo.com>
Sent: Friday, February 12, 2016 4:16 PM
Subject: Re: [time-nuts] LIGO detects gravitational waves


> If it were possible for time nuts to measure time differences to 10E-21,
> could they have seen the effects of the gravity wave?
> 
> Bill Hawkins
> 
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