banduan wrote:
They're not doing a good job telling the layman why it's such a big deal.
The biggest result is that it'll open up a whole new field of physics.
It has some important implications for the attempts to find a unified theory in the future too probably. We already know that the four fundamental forces that act on everything in the universe almost definitely arose from one single unified force that split into gravity, electromagnetism and strong and weak interaction. The problem with general relativity and quantum mechanics is that they can only describe parts of the universe on their own. General relativity describes gravity and quantum physics describe the strong interaction, which is binding quarks together to form subatomic particles like protons (for instance). Both theories break down when they try to describe things like singularities, like black holes.
We've already managed to unify electromagnetism with the weak force (which binds atoms together) to the electroweak force a long time ago, but it's thought that they all converge somewhere around energy levels of 1016 GeV. Theoretically. It cannot be recreated since no particle accelerator will ever be able to produce that much energy. I only know the very basics of string theory, but I know a lot of the theories out there predict that those energy levels can't ever have existed in nature (instead they're supposed to have emanated from other, theoretical, dimensions).
... But things like gravitational waves indicate otherwise. Measurable waves could only have been created during extreme conditions. Like these two primordial black holes merging. I read somewhere that the resulting waves had an energy level of 3 solar masses. That is to say, the amount of mass that was converted to energy when those fuckers merged was the equivalent of three times what our sun is weighing. That's actually insane. Think of the atom bomb that levelled Hiroshima, an entire city - less than one gram of matter was torn apart and converted to energy in that process. Now try to imagine the equivalent of three suns converted to pure energy. It's almost incomprehensible for the human mind.
The fact that we now have proof that such energy levels do exist means that 1016 gev is not a far reach. The next thing they're gonna look for once they build wave detectors in space (where the length of the detectors isn't restricted by distances on Earth) is probably primordial gravitational waves... reverberations from the big bang. And if they find those it might go a long way to solve some of physics unanswered questions, as well as disproving many mathematical models that some theoretical physicists are developing.
