City on the Edge of Forever opens with the Enterprise in orbit around something that’s setting
City on the Edge of Forever opens with the Enterprise in orbit around something that’s setting off the fireworks in the navigation console in front of poor Sulu. Spock is unperturbed, though, because he’s chasing Science: specifically, something he calls “ripples in time.”Now, obviously, we know these time ripples are caused by the Guardian of Forever. But it’s pretty cool that we’ve actually observed an effect like this recently from Earth: we call them ‘gravitational waves’.Gravitational waves are a consequence of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, which says that massive objects (by which I mean anything that has mass) distort the space around them. When dense objects like neutron stars or black holes orbit each other, these distortions radiate outwards as gravitational waves, which are essentially ripples in spacetime. Although Einstein suggested this around a hundred years ago, they were only detected for the first time by LIGO in September 2015.When the gravitational field changes, so does the speed of time. So technically, your head - which is further from the Earth’s center of gravity - is aging faster than your feet (although the difference is tiny - something like a few billionths of a second over an average lifespan). Hence, those gravitational waves also contained “ripples in time,” albeit very, very tiny ones, because they came from far away.So ripples in time are real! Does that mean the LIGO detection was not a pair of merging black holes as has been assumed, but actually the Guardian of Forever? I vote yes. -- source link
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