Hear ye Mortals....incredible scientific discovery on gravitational waves. Massively weigh in here.

I asked a colleague about this today over lunch.
We both decided it is time to refurbish the flux capacitors so that we can be ready the next time a couple of collapsing stars decide to rumba. 
You can only imagine how depressed we had become, knowing that we missed the last time bending, gravitational wave event by 1.3 billion years, or did we?
Given the age of earth, one would like to correlate such a powerful event's impact, if any, to our galaxy, solar system and planet, other than say, chirps on a graph. Interpretation and translation are wonderful tools, but in the wrong hands, Chaos!

NM

"Keep an eye on social media today, it should be a ruckus."

I'm glad to be part of the ruckus.

Oh, I agree that he cultivated it ... but, all the nurturing in the world would not nudge my brain even close to his level of insight. 

lkapigian said:

Is this going to affect the cook time on my briskets?

The discovery itself?  No.  Gravitational waves in general?  Yes.  Just be sure to cook it before the merge of another set of black holes, and you should be fine.

lkapigian said:

Is this going to affect the cook time on my briskets?

practically, no.  technically, yes.  it shortens it due to energy added into the system (viz: your BGE) by the grav-waves

but because it has been happening all along, you won't notice.  but if you
measured the impact, you would see that it had been making a difference all along, though infinitesimal.

it used to be thought that gravity waves, when passing through an object, rarify and compress  individuals atoms relative to each other, generating heat, just as when bending a spoon back and forth.

but this is incorrect.

actually, gravity waves remove energy from the thing casuing them, and transfer it to receivers.  in this case, your brisket would be a receiver.  lemme paint a word picture...

say you have two equally massive objects in orbit around their center of gravity. as they rotate and pull back from each other, they feel a delay in the   gravitational force that existed when they were closer together and the force was stronger. got it?

because of this, they lose some kinetic energy, and gravitational energy.

now let's say they come back into their orbits. as they approach each other, the time-delayed force is weak, so they gain less mechanical energy (from pairing up) than is to be expected under newtonian theory. [EDIT for clarity: newtonian conservation says they should get it back, but our observations show they don't.  so we conjectured that it was lost as waves, just as it islost when you boradcast a radio signal]

so what happens is, each cycle, mechancal energy is lost. this energy is carried by the waves the same friggin way that radio waves carry the energy that a transmitting antenna loses

but the big deal is, not only do the waves remove energy from a system, they further deposit that frigging energy in a detector (or a receiver, like a dampened mass, or even your brisket), even if it is a bajillion miles away. {EDIT: although these would receive the enrgy, it's so tiny as to be missed.  which is why right now the only receiver that has worked (ie.e "the discovery") is a two-plus mile long laser being deflected impossibly over that two miles minutely by the waves]

this was part of the whole sticky bead argument first tossed out there by tough-guy Feynman in 1957 (to a virtual blank stare), but which was later popularized by Bondi, who didn't exactly take all the credit, but didn't exactly pooh-pooh it either.

to sum up:  yes, in short, energy is transferred to your brisket, theoretically shortening cooking time.  but since this has always been the case, it will have no 'affect' on your perception of future cooks.  just as the discovery of oxygen and its role in combustion had no affect on cook times for foods after the moment when oxygen was isolated and 'discovered'

[ thanks and a "back atcha", Ben Cromwell]

It's funny to think about Einstein walking around his house and saying "friggin energy!" to himself.

nolaegghead said:

GOP scrambling to figure out if these waves kill jobs and therefore deny their existence....

I think their play is to complain about the cost of LIGO to discover waves, when if you want to see waves - you can just go to the ocean.

"verdammt Energie!"

oddly, dismissing the climate scientists who are no longer needed will increase the percentage of those non-believing scientists versus those who do believe.

this will reverberate back and forth, as the ratio of non-believing scientists rises (due to shedding those in agreement with science), it will eventually necessitate their rehiring until the superior ratio is reestablished.  whereupon there will again no longer be a need for climatologists, and they will be let go again.

stop posting! you hit an even 18000!  keep the zeroes, man.

like taking a pic of your odometer at 100,000