No fail no gain

While astronomers recently have been celebrating great discoveries (gravitational waves from colliding black holes keep rolling), at the opposite end of matter size ruler things don’t look as brightly. For instance, the search for ‘sterile’ neutrinos didn’t spot anything, despite the IceCube, a massive 2-km long neutrino detector buried in the Antarctic ice.

Catching gravitational waves

OK, seems like I am on a track of rebuilding my daily routine under new circumstances of the offline life. So it’s a good time to incorporate some blogging activity in it.

While I was away, some fascinating things happened. First of all I mean the direct observation of gravitational waves, which were theoretically predicted by Einstein in 1915 (or Poincare in 1905, if you stretch your definition of “prediction”). As with all fundamental physics experiments, the measurement was not a trivial one. It required construction of two interferometers each having two orthogonal 4 km-long tubes to detect distortion of the spacetime by a fraction of a proton diameter.