Ripples in the cosmic pond

Springboarding off yesterday's post, about a mysterious flare-up of Sagittarius A* (the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy), today we have an even more momentous discovery -- a background thrum of gravitational waves from supermassive black holes in orbit around each other.

Gravitational waves are created when massive objects accelerate through space.  They're actually pulsed fluctuations in the fabric of space-time that propagate out from the source at the speed of light.  The idea has been around for a long time; English mathematician Oliver Heaviside proposed them all the way back in 1893.  Once Einstein wrote his paradigm-overturning paper on relativity in 1915, Heaviside's proposal gained a solid theoretical underpinning.

The problem was detecting them.  They're tiny, especially at large distances from the source; and the converse difficulty is that if you were close enough to the source that they were obvious, they'd be big enough to tear you to shreds.  So observing from a distance is the only real option.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons ESO/L. Calçada/M. Kornmesser, Artist’s impression of merging neutron stars, CC BY 4.0]

The result is that it took a hundred years to get direct evidence of their existence.  In 2015 the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory) successfully detected the gravitational waves from the merger of two black holes.  The whirling cyclone of energy as they spun around their center of mass, then finally coalesced, caused the space around the detector to oscillate enough to trigger a shift in the interference pattern between two lasers.  The physicists had finally seen the fabric of space shudder for a moment -- and in 2017, the accomplishment won the Nobel Prize for Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Barry Barish.

Now, though, a new study at the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) has found a whole different kind.  Instead of the sudden, violent, there-and-gone-again waves seen by LIGO, NANOGrav has found a background "hum" in the universe -- the stirring of spacetime because of the orbiting of supermassive black holes around each other.

The accomplishment is made even more astonishing when you find out how long the wavelengths of these waves are.  Frequency is inversely proportional to wavelength, so the "nanohertz" part of the name of the observatory might have given you a clue.  The gravitational waves detected by NANOGrav have wavelengths measured in light years.  So how in the hell do you detect a wave in which -- even traveling at the speed of light -- the trough of the wave doesn't hit you until a year after the crest?

The way they did it is as clever as it is amazing.  Just as you can see a pattern of waves if you look across the surface of a pond, the propagation of these gravitational waves should create a ripple in space that affects the path of any light that travels through them.  The scientists at NANOGrav measured the timing of the light from pulsars -- the spinning remnants of collapsed massive stars, that because of their immense mass and breakneck rotational speed flash on and off with clocklike precision.  And sure enough, as the waves passed, the contraction and expansion of the fabric of space in between caused the pulsars to seem to speed up and slow down, by exactly the amount predicted by the theory.

"The Earth is just bumping around on this sea of gravitational waves," said astrophysicist Maura McLaughlin, of West Virginia University, who was on the team that discovered the phenomenon.

It's a little overwhelming to think about, isn't it?  Millions of light years away, two enormous black holes are orbiting around a common center of gravity, and the ripples that creates in the cosmic pond flow outward at the speed of light, eventually getting here and jostling us.  Makes me feel very, very small.

Which, honestly, is not a bad thing.  It's always good to remember we're (very) tiny entities in a (very) large universe.  Maybe it'll help us not to take our day-to-day worries quite so seriously.

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A ripple in space-time

I find it nothing short of mind-boggling how far we've come in creating equipment with which to explore the cosmos.

The first telescope was invented in 1608, and it was so crude (mostly with respect to the clarity, resolution, and magnification of the lenses) that it accomplished little more than make the blurry bits look bigger.  For example, Galileo used it to see Saturn's rings in 1610, but to him they looked like "handles" -- it took another half-century for the telescope to improve enough to allow Christiaan Huygens to see that they were actually full rings encircling the planet.

Not long after that, Isaac Newton invented the reflecting telescope, substituting parabolic mirrors for lenses, allowing for a much shorter tube length (and thus easier alignment).  The equipment gradually grew in power and resolution, and we were able to peer farther and farther out into space with increasing clarity.

Then, a little before 1900, things exploded.

In 1887, Albert Michelson invented the interferometer, which used a property of light to analyze the motion of the Earth through space, and which led directly to Albert Einstein's Theories of Relativity.  The idea here is that you take a beam of light, split off part of it, and reflect that split part at right angles to the original beam; then you bounce both pieces back so they recombine after traveling equal distances.  At that point you should see positive interference -- the wave crests and troughs should all still be "in phase" (i.e. lined up).

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Krishnavedala, Michelson interferometer with labels, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Michelson and his colleague Edward Morley used the interferometer to test a model that had been used to explain the wave nature of light -- the "luminiferous aether."  The idea here is that if light is a wave, something had to be waving -- just as water molecules move in a water wave, air molecules move in a sound wave, and so on.  When light goes through a vacuum, what, exactly, is waving?  Because it was impossible for people to imagine how a wave could travel through a complete vacuum, it was suggested that space wasn't a complete vacuum -- that there is some kind of stuff (the aether) filling it, and it is through this medium that light propagates in space.

Because the interferometer involved beams of light traveling at right angles, Michelson and Morley surmised that this meant they were moving at different speeds through the aether because of the Earth's motion around the Sun.  To take the simplest configuration, if you place the device so that one beam is parallel to the direction of the Earth's motion and the other perpendicular to it, the parallel one would be dragged back by the aether on the way out and propelled faster on the way back (in the fashion of a boat first moving upriver, then turning around and going downriver).  The perpendicular one, on the other hand, would be deflected slightly to the side (like a boat moving cross-current).  In that case, it was possible to calculate exactly how out of phase the two beams would be with each other by the time they recombined at the detector.  You should see an interference pattern -- the two waves would partially reinforce each other and partially cancel each other out, creating a pattern of stripes.

Interference between two separate waves, the green one moving to the right and the blue one moving to the left -- the red wave is what you'd see as the waves pass through each other, with the peaks and troughs alternately adding to and subtracting from each other. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Lookangmany thanks to author of original simulation = Wolfgang Christian and Francisco Esquembre author of Easy Java Simulation = Francisco Esquembre, Waventerference, CC BY-SA 4.0]

In fact, they didn't see an interference pattern -- the two beams were still completely in phase when they recombined -- which proved that the luminiferous aether didn't exist, and there was no "aether drag" phenomenon as the Earth moved through space.  It left unsolved the original question -- "what's waving when light moves through a vacuum? -- until Albert Einstein added the electromagnetic theories of James Clerk Maxwell to light apparently having an invariant speed regardless of how fast you're traveling to completely upend physics with his Special Theory of Relativity.

All this is just a lead-up to looking at how far we've come since then.  Because it's a twist on the Michelson-Morley interferometer that is currently being used to test a prediction of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity -- the existence of gravitational waves.  The General Theory, you'll recall, says that space-time is like a three-dimensional fabric that can be stretched and compressed by the presence of massive objects -- that, in fact, is what gravity is, a deformation of space-time that's a little like what happens when you put a bowling ball on a trampoline.  Objects are deflected toward a massive object not because there's a literal pull being exerted, but because they're following the lines of curved space-time they're passing through (picture rolling a marble on the aforementioned trampoline and you'll get the picture -- the marble might appear to be attracted to the bowling ball, but it's just following the curves of the trampoline it's rolling on).

So the General Theory states that if you have massive objects moving at a high velocity, they should create waves in space-time that would propagate outward at the speed of light.  Those waves would be really small, unless you're talking about very large masses moving very fast -- such as two black holes orbiting each other.  Here's a rather contrived way to picture it:  Take a barbell, and attach it at the center of the bar to a powerful motor that spins it rapidly.  Lower it into a pond so that the weights are sweeping in circles across the surface.  The rippling waves created would spread out across the pond -- those are what gravitational waves of two orbiting black holes do to the fabric of space-time.

The problem is, the waves are incredibly feeble.  Gravity, although it seems powerful, is by far the weakest force; in fact, it's about 10^40 times weaker than the next strongest force (electromagnetism).  (That's a factor of 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, if you don't like scientific notation,)  Consider that a weak magnet can pick up a paperclip -- overcoming the gravitational pull on the clip exerted by the entire planet.

So how in the hell could you detect something that weak, from so far away?

Enter LIGO -- the Laser Interferometric Gravitational-Wave Observatories, in Livingston, Louisiana and Hanford, Washington.  The idea here is precisely the same as the Michelson-Morley interferometer I described earlier, except instead of some mysterious aether, they're looking for gravitational waves sweeping past the Earth from a billion light years away.  What General Relativity predicts is that as those waves roll past, the tube of the device that's parallel to the wave should compress a little, while the one perpendicular would be unaffected (well, it'd shrink a little in diameter, but that wouldn't affect the experiment).  Since the two laser beams would for an instant be traveling different distances, they'd momentarily go out of phase, and you'd pick up an interference pattern.

And it worked.  In 2015, gravitational waves were detected, just as Einstein predicted.  They've now been seen over ninety times.

I've said before that just about every time I talk about astrophysics, I should just write "Einstein wins again!" and call it good.  (Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, whose wonderful YouTube channel Science Without the Gobbledygook is a must-watch, just pops a photo up on the screen of Einstein sticking his tongue out every time his name comes up, and says, "Yeah, that guy again.")  Relativity, as bizarre as some of its predictions are, has passed every single test.  And now, the physicists are using LIGO to look for another prediction of Relativity -- that as gravitational waves pass other massive objects, the waves themselves will be deflected -- just as the waves in the pond would be if there was rock protruding above the surface of the water.  That deflection should be detectable from Earth, even though it's even more feeble than the original wave.

I bet they'll find it, too.  We've come light years from the crude telescopes of the seventeenth century -- in only four hundred years, we've progressed from blurry glimpses of large objects in our own Solar System to observing the faint traces of phenomena that occurred (to borrow a phrase) long ago in a galaxy far, far away.  With the speed our equipment is improving, you have to wonder what refinements we'd see a hundred years from now -- or even a decade.

What new wonders will open up before us?  Galileo and Huygens and the rest, I think, would be thrilled to see what they started -- and where it led.

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After the collapse

When you start looking into black holes, there's a lot to be fascinated by.

As you probably know, a black hole is one type of collapsed star.  The ultimate fate of a star depends on its initial mass.  When the collapse begins at the end of a star's life, it continues until it meets a force strong enough to counteract the gravitational pull of its mass.  In low-mass stars like the Sun, that oppositional force is the mutual repulsion of the negatively-charged electrons in its constituent atoms.  This leaves a dense, white-hot blob called a white dwarf, slowly radiating its heat away and cooling.  More massive stars -- between ten and twenty-five solar masses -- have such a high gravitational pull that once they start collapsing the electrostatic repulsion is insufficient to stop it.  The electrons are forced into the nuclei, resulting in a neutron star, a stellar core so dense that a matchbox-sized chunk of its matter would weigh three billion tons.

Above twenty-five solar masses, however, even the neutron degeneracy pressure isn't enough to halt the collapse.  Supergiant stars continue to collapse, warping space into a closed form that even light can't escape.

This is the origin of a black hole.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

Black holes are seriously odd beasts.  Let's start with what we can infer from the upshot of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, that gravitational fields and accelerated frames of reference are indistinguishable.  (To clarify with an easy example; if you were in a box with no windows, and were being accelerated at a rate of 9.8 m/s^2, you would have no way of knowing you weren't simply in Earth's gravitational field.)  So as weird as it sounds, the same relativistic weirdness would occur in a powerful gravitational field as occurs when you move at a high velocity; time would slow down, mass increase, and so on.  You might recall this from the movie Interstellar.  The crew of a spaceship stranded on a planet orbiting a black hole experiences time dilation -- while a year passes for them, a hundred years passes for people out in the more ordinary reaches of the universe.

This is only the start of the weirdness, though.  You may have heard about spaghettification -- yes, that's really what it's called -- when an object falls into a black hole.  Usually the example given is an astronaut, but that kind of seems cruel; spaghettification would be as unpleasant as it sounds.  What happens is that the falling object would be ripped apart by tidal forces.  A tidal force occurs when one part of an object experiences a different gravitational pull than another part of the same object, and the result is that the object is stretched.

There actually is a tidal force on your own body right now; assuming you're not doing a headstand, your feet are closer to the Earth's center of mass, so they're being pulled a little harder than your head is.  The difference is so small that we're unaware of it.  But with an object near a black hole, the gradient of gravitational pull is so large that when the object gets close -- how close depends on the black hole's mass -- the tidal forces rip it apart, stretching it in a thin filament of matter (thus the "spaghetti" in "spaghettification").

The reason all this comes up is a paper published this week in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society that contains observational data of a star getting sucked into a black hole and spaghettified.  "When an unlucky star wanders too close to a supermassive black hole in the centre of a galaxy, the extreme gravitational pull of the black hole shreds the star into thin streams of material," said study co-author Thomas Wevers, a European Southern Observatory Fellow in Santiago, Chile, in an interview with Science Daily.  "As some of the thin strands of stellar material fall into the black hole during this spaghettification process, a bright flare of energy is released, which we can detect."

That's not the only reason that black holes were in the news last week.  In a paper in Nature Communications Physics, scientists describe their observations of a rare event -- the merger of two black holes.  When this happens, the coalescence causes such a powerful shift in the warped gravitational field surrounding it that it sends ripples out through the fabric of space.  These gravitational waves travel outward from their source at the speed of light, and the ones from something as cataclysmic as a black hole merger are so powerful they can be detected here on Earth, thousands of light years away.

"The pitch and amplitude of the signal increases as the two black holes orbit around their mutual center of mass, faster and faster as they approach each other," said Juan Calderón Bustillo, of the University of Hong Kong.  "After the collision, the final remnant black hole emits a signal with a constant pitch and decaying amplitude -- like the sound of a bell being struck."

So that's our excursion into the bizarre and counterintuitive world of collapsed stars.  The whole thing makes me realize what a violent and hostile place much of the universe is, and glad we're relatively safe down here on our comfortable little planet orbiting an ordinary star in the outer spiral arms of an ordinary galaxy.

Boring as it can seem sometimes, it beats being spaghettified by a significant margin.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is brand new, and is as elegiac as it is inspiring -- David Attenborough's A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future.

Attenborough is a familiar name, face, and (especially) voice to those of us who love nature documentaries.  Through series such as Our Planet, Life on Earth, and Planet Earth, he has brought into our homes the beauty of nature -- and its desperate fragility.

At 93, Attenborough's A Life on Our Planet is a fitting coda to his lifelong quest to spark wonder in our minds at the beauty that surrounds us, but at the same time wake us up to the perils of what we're doing to it.  His message isn't all doom and gloom; despite it all, he remains hopeful, and firm in his conviction that we can reverse our course and save what's left of the biodiversity of the Earth.  It's a poignant and evocative work -- something everyone who has been inspired by Attenborough for decades should put on their reading list.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Revising Hubble

If I had to pick the most paradigm-changing discovery of the twentieth century, a strong contender would be the discovery of red shift by astronomer Edwin Hubble.

What Hubble found was that when he analyzed the spectral lines from stars in distant galaxies, the lines -- representing wavelengths of light emitted by elements in the stars' atmospheres -- had slid toward the red (longer-wavelength) end of the spectrum.  Hubble realized that this meant that the galaxies were receding from us at fantastic speeds, resulting in a Doppler shift of the light coming from them.

What was most startling, though, is that the further away a galaxy was, the faster it was moving.  This observation led directly to the theory of the Big Bang, that originally all matter in the universe was coalesced into a single point, then -- for reasons still unclear -- began to expand outward at a rate that defies comprehension.

There's a simple quantity (well, simple to define, anyhow) that describes the relationship that Hubble discovered.  It's called the Hubble constant, and is defined at the ratio between the velocity of a galaxy and its distance from us.  The relationship seems to be linear (meaning the constant isn't itself dependent upon distance), but the exact value has proven extremely difficult to determine.  Measurements have varied between 50 and 500 kilometers per second per megaparsec, which is a hell of a range for something that's supposed to be a constant.

And the problem is, the value has varied depending on how it's calculated.  Measurements based upon the cosmic microwave background radiation give one range of values; measurements using Type 1A supernovae (a commonly-used "standard candle" for calculating the distances to galaxies) give a different range.

Enter Kenta Hotokezaka of Princeton University, who has decided to tackle this problem head-on.  “The Hubble constant is one of the most fundamental pieces of information that describes the state of the universe in the past, present and future," Hotokezaka said in a press release.  "So we’d like to know what its value is...  either one of [the accepted calculations of the constant] is incorrect, or the models of the physics which underpin them are wrong.  We’d like to know what is really happening in the universe, so we need a third, independent check."

Hotokezaka and his team have found the check they were looking for in the collision of two neutron stars in a distant galaxy.  The measurements made of the gravitational waves emitted by this collision were so precise it kind of boggles the mind.  Adam Deller, of Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, who co-authored the paper, said, "The resolution of the radio images we made was so high, if it was an optical camera, it could see individual hairs on someone’s head 3 miles away."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons ESA, Colliding neutron stars ESA385307, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO]

Using this information, the researchers were able to narrow in on the Hubble constant -- reducing the uncertainty to between 65.3 and 75.6 kilometers per second per megaparsec.

Quite an improvement over 50 to 500, isn't it?

"This is the first time that astronomers have been able to measure the Hubble constant by using a joint analysis of a gravitational-wave signals and radio images,"  Hotokezaka said about the accomplishment of his team.  "It is remarkable that only a single merger event allows us to measure the Hubble constant with a high precision — and this approach relies neither on the cosmological model (Planck) nor the cosmic-distance ladder (Type Ia)."

I'm constantly astonished by what we can learn of our universe as we sit here, stuck on this little ball of spinning rock around an average star in one arm of an average galaxy.  It's a considerable credit to our ingenuity, persistence, and creativity, isn't it?  From our vantage point, we're able to gain an understanding of the behavior of the most distant objects in the universe -- and from that, deduce how everything began.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is pure fun for anyone who (like me) appreciates both plants and an occasional nice cocktail -- The Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart.  Most of the things we drink (both alcohol-containing and not) come from plants, and Stewart takes a look at some of the plants that have provided us with bar staples -- from the obvious, like grapes (wine), barley (beer), and agave (tequila), to the obscure, like gentian (angostura bitters) and hyssop (Bénédictine).

It's not a scientific tome, more a bit of light reading for anyone who wants to know more about what they're imbibing.  So learn a little about what's behind the bar -- and along the way, a little history and botany as well.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Weighty matters

Despite all of the daily litany of depressing and/or fury-inducing news, I'm pleased to say that the scientists are still hard at work showing us more of the internal workings of the universe, giving us better insights into the nature of the cosmos even as most of the rest of us focus on the minuscule doings of one species on a tiny planet around a completely ordinary star in the edge of a spiral galaxy that is one amongst billions.

Not to denigrate my fellow humans, of course.  I rather like being human, and I'm awfully fond of the little floating green-and-blue sphere where I live.  But it's nice to know that while we focus on our petty concerns, we have people who are looking outward, not downward.

The discovery I'm referencing is the observation by LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) of the collision of two neutron stars.  Neutron stars are the phenomenally dense cores of exploded giant stars; their matter is so compressed that, in the famous comparison, one teaspoon of neutron star-stuff would weigh as much as Mount Everest.

What is stunning about this observation isn't just the thought of what it would be like to see two such dense objects collide; in fact, the collision itself is just part of what's fascinating about this event.  Other amazing features are:

• In the moments before the collision occurred, the two stars were circling their center of mass at a rate of a thousand times per second.
• The collision not only created gravitational waves and a burst of light across the spectrum, it's thought that such events are what create a lot of the heavy elements in the periodic table.  So yes: the gold in your ring was very likely formed in a cosmic cataclysm.
• It is possible that the combined mass of the two stars exceeded the mass limit for a neutron star, and after the collision the stars immediately vanished -- became a black hole.  That point isn't settled yet.

The coolest part of all of this, however, is that the light and the gravitational waves from the collision arrived at detectors at the same moment -- showing that gravitational waves do indeed travel at the speed of light, which is one of the predictions of the General Theory of Relativity.  Put simply: Einstein wins again.  

If that doesn't put relativity into the "proven beyond a shadow of a doubt" column, I don't know what would.

The result was a flurry of papers being published, including one in Astrophysical Journal Letters that had 4,500 authors from 910 different institutions -- which surely must be some kind of record.

Daniel Holz, astrophysicist at the University of Chicago, who worked on the LIGO project, said, "I can't think of a similar situation in the field of science in my lifetime, where a single event provides so many staggering insights about our universe."

So maybe it's time to take a step back from the dreary ongoing march of political news and think a little bit more about the bigger picture.  I mean, the really big picture.  The one that encompasses the entire universe in which we live.  And now, because of a cataclysmic event 130 million light years away, one piece of which we are now able to view with greater clarity and understanding.

Weighty matters

Yesterday, we looked at how apparently it's impossible for some people to believe that a 79-year-old man in poor health could die in his sleep without there being a sophisticated Black Ops conspiracy to take him out.  Today, we find out that gravitational waves, the recent discovery that vindicated Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, are a sophisticated hoax.

Why would scientists do this, you might ask?  Is it so they can fool us into giving them more grant money?  Is it to put them in contention for a Nobel Prize?  Is it just so they can sit in their labs, surrounded by flasks of brightly-colored liquids, rubbing their hands together and cackling in maniacal glee?

Well, sure.  Of course it's all that.  But there's more.  There's always more, where these people are concerned.

First, we have the claim that the gravitational wave hoax is a clever scheme to convince the gullible public that the Earth is a sphere.  You think I'm making this up?  Watch this video by someone who goes by the handle "Stinky Cash," and which lays the whole thing out plainly.  Or, if you'd prefer not to waste five minutes and thousands of innocent brain cells in your prefrontal cortex, just read the following excerpt:

Unless you were in a coma, or living under a rock, you have heard that scientists have detected gravitational waves, and have proven Einstein right once and for all.  Every single science outlet and news outlet has reported this bullshit throughout the day.  The propaganda machine is working overtime right now.  First you have Reuters and the Associated Press, they wouldn't stop reporting this during the last twenty-four hours, then you had the Washington Post, you got The Wall Street Journal, you got CNN, you got BBC News, you got Fox News, you got MSNBC.  MSNBC and Fox News, reporting the same propaganda!  It's because they're owned and operated by the same people, with the same agendas.  Don't get fooled by that whole conservative/liberal crap.  NBC News, The Telegraph, Al Jazeera, CBS News, ABC News, Discovery News, Newsweek, Gawker, Futurism, even Neil deGrasse Tyson got in on the action today!

Yes, and that's undoubtedly because Tyson is actually an astrophysicist, and knows what he's talking about.  But do go on.

The propaganda machine was in full force today, and this was solely as a reaction to the Flat Earth Movement.  It was a reaction to all of the videos up on YouTube explaining how gravity doesn't exist.

Of course it is.  Because all of the scientists I know decide what to research by looking at YouTube videos uploaded by lunatics, and designing experiments to prove them wrong.

Gravity is a theory, an unproven theory thought up by an occultist to explain away everything that doesn't make sense about living on a spinning ball.  Why you're sticking to the bottom of it and still feel upright.  Why you don't feel the spin, and why you don't fall off this magical ball.  Gravity was invented to explain away all common sense...  Even Einstein knew this relativity thing was a bunch of bullshit.

We then see a quote with Einstein's picture, and attributed to him, saying, "If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts," which apparently there's reason to believe that either was (1) Einstein being sarcastic about scientific fraudsters, or (2) something he never said in the first place.  But you know how that goes.

But Stinky Cash is far from done yet:

These people are in serious damage control mode.  Let's look at this quote from Stephen Hawking about why gravity is so important to them.  Because every lie in the scientific community -- or I should say, the pseudoscientific community -- every lie in the community has one agenda, and this is what it comes down to:  "Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing."  Is the agenda becoming more clear?  All of the lies coming out of the scientific community have one agenda, and that's removing god from creation.  Gravity is the false god of this false science.

Righty-o.  Let's move on, shall we?  Because if you thought that the Flat Earthers are the only ones who have a problem with gravitational waves, you are sorely mistaken.

Next, we'll turn our attention to the folks who think that the gravitational waves announcement was a false flag, to turn our attention away from... um... wait, I'm sure it will come to me.  Um.  Something. Something big:

LIGO Detects Gravitational Waves using blind injection simulation which means it is basically a hoax or false flag...  People need to understand if they cannot make it they fake it. 100 years the best research labs could not confirm the assumption so they just fake it. 

There was a massive preparation for this with Hawkins [sic] doing special lectures and hinting he is going to get a Noble [sic] Prize (you see the narrative), its [sic] all showbiz. 

Astrophysics needs to be rescued. (I have never seen so much inferences made from so little data!) 

Then, we had the scientists themselves positing that the whole thing might be the work of an evil genius.  UCLA physicist and LIGO collaborator Alain Weinstein said the following in an interview with Gizmodo: 

An evil genius is, by definition, smarter than we are.  We cannot rule out the evil genius hypothesis because we’re not smart enough. 

We thought very hard about this, and concluded that we didn’t know how to do it.  So anyone who did do it had to be smarter than us.

Can't argue with that kind of logic.  And although I'll point out that Weinstein was making a joke, the conspiracy theorists -- who are kind of notorious for not getting humor -- will immediately go, "AHA!  The scientists have let the truth slip!  We're on to them now!"

So there you have it.  The thrilling announcement about gravitational waves a couple of weeks ago is just another in a long series of scientific hoaxes, conspiracies, and general screw-ups.  I'm disappointed, honestly.  Not in the scientists, who are doing phenomenal work, and richly deserve either a Nobel or a Noble Prize, whichever they end up winning.  I'm disappointed in the conspiracy theorists, who really need to come up with some new tropes.  Because everything can't be a false flag, you know?  Eventually something has to be the truth.  Even if it's the idea that gravity is real, and is what is holding us down to the surface of the Earth right now.  It'd have to be a pretty fucking huge false flag to distract us from that.

Big brawl over the Big Bang

So apparently, there are a number of people who have their knickers in a twist over the new Cosmos.

The young-Earthers are, predictably, upset with host Neil deGrasse Tyson's repeated mentioning of evolution.  Dan Dewitt, writing for Baptist Press, was perturbed by the whole message, but showed evidence of a severe irony deficiency when he stated that Tyson's Cosmos was "regurgitating... old myths... and proposing theories that have zero physical evidence."

Then we have the climate change deniers, who were torqued by a mention of anthropogenic climate change in each of the first two episodes, with more likely to come.  Jeff Meyer, writing at Brent Bozell's conservative outlet Media Research Center, said, "...deGrasse Tyson chose to take a cheap shot at religious people and claim they don't believe in science, i.e. liberal causes like global warming."

Well, yeah.  Because, largely, they don't.  And climate change is hardly a "liberal cause," unless you accept the idea that in Stephen Colbert's words, "reality has a well-known liberal bias."

Then, we have the people who object to the idea of the Big Bang, which was more or less the topic of the entire first episode.  Elizabeth Mitchell, writing over at the frequently-quoted site Answers in Genesis, had the following to say:

The “observational evidence” [for the Big Bang] to which Tyson refers is not, however, observations that confirm big bang cosmology but interpretations of scientific data that interpret observations within a big bang model of origins. The big bang model is unable to explain many scientific observations, but this is of course not mentioned.

What makes Mitchell's comment even more ludicrous than it would be if read alone is how it appears in juxtaposition with the news from two days ago, in which we find that scientists working in Antarctica have conclusively proven the existence of gravitational waves -- remnants of quantum fluctuations that were created in the first 0.00000000000000000000000000000001 seconds of the universe's existence.  (For those of you who don't want to count, that's 31 zeroes; if you're conversant in scientific notation, it's 10^-32 seconds.)

This map represents nine years' worth of data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, which shows minor temperature fluctuations registering in the microwave region of the spectrum -- fluctuations caused by inflation that occurred 13.7 billion years ago.  [image courtesy of NASA, the WMAP team, and the Wikimedia Commons]

I'm sure Mitchell would shriek about "observational" versus "historical" science, and how I wasn't there during the Big Bang to observe what the universe was doing (and given what was happening at the time, I'm damn glad I wasn't).  But keep in mind that the gravitational waves that have been observed were predicted years ago by Andrei Linde, one of the chief architects of inflation theory -- a model of Big Bang cosmology that has now been given a significant leg up over other theories of the early universe.

The synchronicity of Mitchell's snarky little commentary, followed by the triumphal announcement of Linde's vindication, makes me think that if there is a god, he's got quite a wicked sense of humor.  It puts me in mind of a quote from Voltaire: "God is a comedian playing to an audience that is afraid to laugh." And if you want to see something uplifting to counterbalance Mitchell's ignorant criticism, watch this video of Linde being told by physicist Chao-Lin Kuo that the existence of gravitational waves had been proven.  It'll make you smile.

But back to Cosmos.  I do find it heartening that Tyson isn't pussyfooting around on these subjects.  Sagan, partly driven by the fact that the original series was filmed in the 1970s, had to be a little more circumspect about what he said, a little more diplomatic.  Myself, I think Tyson is taking the right approach.  I'm sorry if you don't "believe" in the Big Bang, in evolution, in climate change.  You're wrong.  You can continue to claim that the evidence doesn't exist, or is inconclusive or equivocal.  You're wrong about that, too.  If you'd like to remain ignorant of the reality, that's entirely your prerogative, but you can no longer expect the rest of us to go along with you out of some odd notion that ideas, however ridiculous they are, deserve respect.

Time to play hardball, people.