Gravitational Waves Exist: The Inside Story of How Scientists Finally Found Them – The New Yorker

 

This article documents the incredible complexity issues that were resolved through concerted international scientific and academic efforts to help discover yet another elemental force of nature. Its ramifications are manifold. The glimpse into the universe of which earth and our solar system is an infinitesimal footnote is bringing forth for human observation the very creation of the big bag where matter arose and its evolution through the interaction of time and gravity into the universe that is constantly changing. The findings challenge our cherished narratives of God and faith. It is a process that has just begun.

Nasik

http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/gravitational-waves-exist-heres-how-scientists-finally-found-them?mbid=nl_160211_Daily&CNDID=17878219&spMailingID=8536128&spUserID=MTA5MjM5OTQyNjM5S0&spJobID=861189416&spReportId=ODYxMTg5NDE2S0

http://news.mit.edu/2016/gravitational-waves-detected-100-years-after-einstein-prediction-0211

Is Reproductive Drive responsible for shaping our cultures, society and even religions, including Islam?

Book Review by F. Sheikh

Book “Conflicts Of Fitness” Islam, America and Evolutionary Psychology.

Author: A. S. Amin

It is a fascinating read that postulates how the reproductive drive to maximize fitness influences evolution of different cultures, societies and even religions.  It also provokes intriguing questions and thinking.

Author lays the ground work of the rest of the book in Polygamy Chapter. It explains animals’ reproductive biology and how polygamy works in a society in different scenarios. It explains polygamy in Islam. It introduces us to terms of Paternity Confidence, short-term reproductive strategies, long-term reproductive strategies and how these effect our attitudes and decision-making from casual sex to traditional marriage, from interpreting religious edits to human rights motives, from dressing flashy to wear Hijab, from conservatism to modernization and from peaceful stability to terrorism. The book also touches upon helpful hints to find a better suit by employing reproductive instincts.

It familiarized us to the term ‘conflicts of fitness’ which is also the title of the book, and how it creates conflict in the society when one’s pursue of short-term reproductive strategy conflicts with the other’s goal of long-term commitment. This conflict of fitness influences from individuals to society at large and from Western countries, where casual sex and short-term commitment is prevalent to conservative Muslim countries, which mostly practice long-term commitment. Is this causing clash of civilization?

The book looks at some practices in Islam, like polygamy, Hijab and interpretation and selection of Hadiths, through the lens of evolutionary psychology and how the short and long-term reproductive strategies play a role in these practices. The author touches upon terrorism and its association with long-term reproductive strategy, but this relationship seems very tenuous and incidental.

As I mentioned the book provokes some intriguing thinking and questions, and the one question that repeatedly keep creeping up in my mind, while reading the book, is the question of cause or effect. For example, do short-term reproductive strategies or commitment  emerge as incidental consequence of modernization, education, women independence  and sexual  liberation or it is the short-term reproductive drive that pursues the policies of modernization, education, women independence and sexual liberation to achieve short-term reproductive strategies? Or both perpetuate each other?

After reading the book, it allures you to know more about the subject and I can relate to the author when he describes how he got hooked to the topic and spent many years in writing this book. It is obvious from the reference section why he spent so much time. I congratulate the young author for doing a wonderful job in writing this book and would highly recommend for everyone, especially young generation, to read it. It is also available in Kindle Edition and makes it easy to get it in few minutes from Amazon.

The promising young author, Dr. A.S. Amin will be our guest speaker at TFUSA monthly meeting in April or May, and it will be a great session to hear the author’s views and his response to questions which naturally emerge while reading the book on such a complex topic. In order to enjoy the discussion, please read the book before coming to session.

 

Nergis Mavalvala: The Karachiite who went on to detect Einstein’s gravitational waves

The article rightly lauds the achievements and key role of the Karachi native Nergis Mavalvala in providing validation for a key aspect of Einstein's theory of relativity.  
Regretably there are so many talented people floundering in Pakistan  because of the failing educational system.    

Nasik Elahi

http://www.dawn.com/news/1239270/nergis-mavalvala-the-karachiite-who-went-on-to-detect-einsteins-gravitational-waves

What is general relativity? by David Tong

It is one of the best simple understandable explanation from Newton’s law of gravity to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, Watch video below or continue to read below(f.sheikh).

The general theory of relativity describes the force of gravity. Einstein wasn’t the first to come up with such a theory — back in 1686 Isaac Newton formulated his famous inverse square law of gravitation. Newton’s law works perfectly well on small-ish scales: we can use it to calculate how fast an object dropped off a tall building will hurtle to the ground and even to send people to the Moon. But when distances and speeds are very large, or very massive objects are involved, Newton’s law becomes inaccurate. It’s a good place to start though, as it’s easier to describe than Einstein’s theory.

Suppose you have two objects, say the Sun and the Earth, with masses $m_1$ and $m_2$ respectively. Write $r$ for the distance between the two objects. Then Newton’s law says that the gravitational force $F$ between them is

\[ F=G_ N\frac{m_1 m_2}{r^2}, \]

where $G_ N$ is a fixed number, known as Newton’s constant.

The formula makes intuitive sense: it tells us that gravity gets weaker over long distances (the larger $r$ the smaller $F$) and that the gravitational force is stronger between more massive objects (the larger either of $m_1$ and $m_2$ the larger $F$).

Different force, same formula

There is another formula which looks very similar, but describes a different force. In 1785 the French physicist Charles-Augustin de Coulomb came up with an equation to capture the electrostatic force $F$ that acts between two charged particles with charges $Q_1$ and $Q_2$:

\[ F = \frac{1}{4 \pi \epsilon _0} \frac{Q_1 Q_2}{r^2}. \]

Here $r$ stands for the distance between the two particles and $\epsilon _0$ is a constant which determines the strength of electromagnetism. (It has the fancy name permittivity of free space.)

The problem with Newton

Newton’s and Coulomb’s formula are nice and neat, but there is a problem. Going back to Newton’s law, suppose you took the Earth and the Sun and very quickly moved them further apart. This would make the force acting between them weaker, but, according to the formula, the weakening of the force would happen straight away, the instant you move the two bodies apart. The same goes for Coulomb’s law: moving the charged particles apart very quickly would result in an immediate weakening of the electrostatic force between them.

But this can’t be true. Einstein’s special theory of relativity, proposed ten years before the general theory in 1905, says that nothing in the Universe can travel faster than light — not even the “signal” that communicates that two objects have moved apart and the force should become weaker.

Why we need fields

This one reason why the classical idea of a force needs replacing in modern physics. Instead, we need to think in terms of something — new objects — that transmit the force between one object and another. This was the great contribution of the British scientist Michael Faraday to theoretical physics. Faraday realised that spread throughout the Universe there are objects we today call fields, which are involved in transmitting a force. Examples are the electric and magnetic fields you are probably familiar with from school.

EinsteinAlbert Einstein (1879-1955) in 1921.

A charged particle gives rise to an electric field, which is “felt” by another particle (which has its own electric field). One particle will move in response to the other’s electric field — that’s what we call a force. When one particle is quickly moved away from the other, then this causes ripples in the first particle’s electric field. The ripples travel through space, at the speed of light, and eventually affect the other particle. In fact, the particle that is moved also generates a magnetic field and emits electromagnetic radiation. The end result is a complex interaction of rippling fields — but the point is that the force is really one particle being affected by ripples propagating through the field of the other.

It took scientists a long time to fully develop this field picture of electromagnetism. The main credit goes to the Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell, who not only realised that the electric and magnetic forces were two aspects of a unified force of electromagnetism, but also replaced Coulomb’s simple law of electrostatics with four equations that describe how electric and magnetic fields respond to moving charged particles. Maxwell’s four formulae are some of the most amazing equations in physics because they capture all there is to know about electricity and magnetism.

Gravity and spacetime

So what about gravity? Just as with electromagnetism there needs to be a field giving rise to what we perceive as the gravitational force acting between two bodies. Einstein’s great insight was that this field is made of something we already know about: space and time. Imagine a heavy body, like the Sun, sitting in space. Einstein realised that space isn’t just a passive by-stander, but responds to the heavy object by bending. Another body, like the Earth, moving into the dent created by the heavier object will be diverted by that dent. Rather than carrying on moving along a straight line, it will start orbiting the heavier object. Or, if it is sufficiently slow, will crash into it. (It took Einstein many years of struggle to arrive at his theory — see this article to find out more.)

Another lesson of Einstein’s theory is that space and time can warp into each other — they are inextricable linked and time, too, can be distorted by massive objects. This is why we talk, not just about the curvature of space, but about the curvature of spacetime.

The equation

The general theory of relativity is captured by a deceptively simple-looking equation:

\[ R_{\mu \nu } - \frac{1}{2}Rg_{\mu \nu } = \frac{G_ N}{8 \pi c^4}T_{\mu \nu }. \]

Essentially the equation tells us how a given amount of mass and energy warps spacetime. The left-hand side of the equation,

\[ R_{\mu \nu } - \frac{1}{2}Rg_{\mu \nu }, \]

describes the curvature of spacetime whose effect we perceive as the gravitational force. It’s the analogue of the term $F$on the left-hand side of Newton’s equation.

The term $T_{\mu \nu }$ on right-hand side of the equation describes everything there is to know about the way mass, energy, momentum and pressure are distributed throughout the Universe. It is what became of the term $m_1 m_2$ in Newton’s equation, but it is much more complicated. All of these things are needed to figure out how space and time bends. $T_{\mu \nu }$ goes by the technical term energy-momentum tensor. The constant $G_ N$ that appears on the right-hand side of the equation is again Newton’s constant and $c$ is the speed of light.

What about the Greek letters $\mu $ and $\nu $ that appear as subscripts? To understand what they mean, first notice that spacetime has four dimensions. There are three dimensions of space (corresponding to the three directions left-right, up-down and forwards-backwards of space) and one dimension of time (which only has one direction). If you want to understand how a moving bit of mass affects spacetime, you need to understand how it affects each of those four dimensions and their various combinations.

(As an analogy, think of the way you’d describe an object moving at constant speed along a straight line in Newton’s classical physics. You need two pieces of information: the direction and the speed of the motion. The direction is given by three numbers, each telling you by how much the object moves in each of the three directions of space. Therefore, the motion is described by a total of four numbers, three relating to space and one giving the speed. Since speed is distance covered per unit time, we need three bits of information relating to space and one to time, in order to describe the motion.)

Click link below for full article;

https://plus.maths.org/content/what-general-relativity