Mindblowing sensitivity; they can detect a shift of a trillionth of the diameter of a proton. But even that isn't enough for them. They've tinkered with it and doubled the sensitivity yet again!
Thanks for posting this.
I viewed a youtube recently that remarkably conveyed pictorially like I’ve never seen, a complete vacuum where electrons and even atomic matter just appear from nothing, as long as the anti-electron or anti atomic matter (proton or neutron) appears out of the nothingness with it. It’s very short duration.
Pretty amazing stuff... with obvious links to creation itself.
I think that was a Pink Floyd album.
In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream.
It’s amazing what some humans can accomplish, while other humans go into a homicidal rage because they didn’t get a ketchup packet in their fast food order.
“detect a shift of a trillionth of the diameter of a proton.”
You’ll be comforted to note that elsewhere in the article it says they only need to detect a whopping “few thousandths of the width of a proton,” on the order of a trillionth of a micron.
A micron is still sizable in many ways. A person can feel texture features down to about 1/100 of a micron in size.
Do they still use red shift for these laser calculations?
Oh. OK.
Nifty. I wrote a college paper on “squeezed light” near 30 years ago. First time I’ve seen a reference to it since.
This to me is a new revelation. That is a lot of mass and yet:
The effects of gravitational waves are so small that you’d need to be extremely close to a merger to feel them.
How is mass converted to gravitational waves?
If mass was converted to gravitational waves that suggest that mass is continuously being converted into gravitational waves.
If mass is continuously being converted into gravitational waves does that not suggest that eventually all mas will be converted into gravitational waves?
There seems to be quite a lot to be unpacked from this revelation.
One trillionth of of a micrometer, not one trillionth of a proton diameter.
Micrometer: 10E-6m
Trillionth: 10E-12
Ergo: a sensitivity of 10E-18m
Which is 1/1,000 of the diameter of a proton: ~10E-15m
Still, pretty large dimensions compared to the Planck length: ~2x10E-35m (”the smallest possible distance” - 5 trillionth of 1 billionth of a meter, you’ll need new reading glasses for that)