Discovering Gravitational Waves (Kindle Single)

Description

Gravitational waves hit the headlines in 2016 with the announcement of the direct detection of these ripples in space, predicted by Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. In a sense, this was no surprise to the experts, since astronomers already had indirect evidence of the existence of gravitational radiation from studies of exotic stars known as binary pulsars. However, the direct detection was one of the greatest achievements of experimental physics, involving measuring displacements of space itself equivalent to a shift in the orbit of the planet Jupiter by the width of a human hair. This has opened up a new window on the universe for the investigation of exotic objects such as black holes and neutron stars. John Gribbin tells the whole story of the search for gravitational waves, from Einstein's initial idea through the binary pulsar studies, the false starts and dead ends to the latest successful measurements and beyond, looking ahead to a space observatory being planned to study these waves in more detail. It is widely accepted that the Nobel Prize in physics for 2017 will be awarded for the discovery; here, you can get in on the ground floor and find out why it is worthy of that honour. John Gribbin is an award-winning science writer best known for his book In Search of Schrodinger's Cat. He studied astrophysics under Fred Hoyle in Cambridge, and is now a Visiting Fellow in Astronomy at the University of Sussex.