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A GW 'thought experiment' for Sally
Hey Sally. It's neat to chat with a gal who's interested in astrophysics
and gravity waves in particular. Check out this page on the Alcubierre warp drive- www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw81.html As a 'thought experiment', you're stationed on a distant asteroid for doing gravity-wave research. Far away from any terrestrial seismic/ tectonic noise, your GW antennae (actually highly specialized acoustic microphones) are free to detect any passing GW radiation. (As a side note, the LIGO interferometers are actually such 'microphones'.) Meanwhile, a newly-commisioned starship, the Vlanderskree, with an Alcubierre Drive, is undergoing space trials. Theory has it that as the ship is running in hyperdrive, it will trail a cone-shaped GW 'wake' thru normal space exactly analogous to the sonic-boom wake trailed by a supersonic jet in the atmosphere. Since the ship and its warp-node 'cocoon' are traveling in hyperspace, they are de facto superluminal in 'our' space, undetectable except by the GW signature. So you're equipment's all set up, ready to detect the wake of the unseen ship. Right on cue comes the shuddering, compression-rarefaction BOOM of the Vlanderskree's superluminal passage. Simultaneously, the starfield flickers blue-red from the compression-expansion wave, then returns to normal. Of course this 'thought experiment' presumes that in such a future setting, it'll be fully understood that space is not a 'void' but a fluidic medium amenable to compression and expansion (and gravity itself will be understood as the pressure-driven flow of this medium) Whaddya think? oc |
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