Wave hello to gravity!

[tuco]

I am searching for? I was answering question. I know we do not know ..

[pErvinalia]

You keep saying we don't know what gravity is. You are categorically wrong. I was suggesting perhaps the question regarding gravity that you claim is unanswered was something esle. But if you prefer to be straight wrong instead, go for it..

[JimC]

There is little doubt that the picture of space-time as framed in General Relativity is essentially correct; every detailed prediction it has made about measurable phenomena has proved accurate to an extremely high degree. In essence, space-time is a field whose vectors are distorted by the presence of matter, and this distortion then manifests as gravity. It has been said this way: "Matter tells space-time how to be, and spacetime tells matter how to move"

The equations of general relativity predict that an accelerating mass will produce a travelling distortion of the vector field of space-time, in much the same way that Maxwell's equations predicted that an accelerating charge would produce a travelling electromagnetic wave. Both travel at the "speed of light". The problem is that, even when the acceleration is enormous (i.e. the merging of 2 black holes) the ripple in space-time is incredibly minute by the time it reaches us. The detection itself was a technical triumph.

Of course, there still remains the elephant in the room; the incompatibility of general relativity and quantum physics in those situations where they overlap...

[Brian Peacock]

I am searching for? I was answering question. I know we do not know ..

Tell that to an astronaut on the ISS.

[klr]

I remember watching a BBC Horizon documentary a couple of years ago on these detectors and other similar research efforts. I wasn't expecting them to deliver results so soon ... or to be honest, at all in some cases.