The Nobel Prize in Physics 2017 | Hacker News Reader

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2017

nobelprize.org

490 pointsrunesoerensen112 comments

This interview with Rana X Adhikari from Caltech who is involved with LIGO does give a perspective on the technical difficulties in carrying out such precise measurements and eliminating noise: https://blog.ycombinator.com/the-technical-challenges-of-mea...

Also to me, it seems that Barry Barish got his share of the Nobel more as he was the leader of the LIGO project and less due to his direct involvement with some experimental or theoretical work as is the case with most Nobel prize. Am I wrong in saying that? Also if this is true then has this occurred in past also when someone was awarded a Nobel prize more because of their leadership in starting a project or an institution then their direct involvement with the actual work?

I'm very interested in this question. In the age of massive physical collaborations, it is an oft-debated question whether the Nobel committee should be awarding the prizes to the collaborations themselves and/or the leaders thereof. I don't know anything about Barish's history.

Don't the original rules stipulate that at most three people can share a price?

I think that was added later.

Such a rule probably wouldn't have seemed necessary before the rise of big physics during WWII.

Perhaps, but I expect you become a leader of such a project only after you've already accomplished a lot.

One could argue that the 1984 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the W and Z Bosons, given to Carlo Rubbia, was more for his leadership of the UA1 Collaboration at CERN. His co-winner, van der Meers, actually developed the technology to make colliding protons and anti-protons possible. The theory behind the W and Z was already given a Nobel Prize in 1979.

EDIT: Rubbia is an interesting character in himself that some have said was a bit of an egomaniac and obsessed with getting a Nobel prize for himself. For a highly entertaining biography on him, as well as a look into the academic politics of a place like CERN, I recommend "Nobel Dreams" by Gary Taubes.

Barry created the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) and was instrumental in getting the collaboration to cohere and coordinate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._C._George_Sudarshan

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2010/aug/10/diracs-...

George Sudarshan was nominated about 5 times and never got it.

The idea of using laser interferometer for detecting gravitational waves was first proposed in 1962 (shortly after inventing lasers) by M. Gertsenshtein and V. Pustovoit [1]. So it took more than 50 years from the idea to its implementation.

[1] http://www.jetp.ac.ru/cgi-bin/dn/r_043_0605.pdf (in Russian, Abstract in English at the end).

one of the top candidates for the ligo nobel prize would have been ronald drever, but he unfortunately died earlier this year.

Thank you for the link! A quote from the interview:

> The wave comes to us and by the time it gets to us, because it’s billions of light years, the squeezing and stretching is much less than 500%. It’s more like a part in 10 to the 21 or 22. So that means if you have a, the whole earth for example is about 10,000 kilometers in size, and so the whole earth will be only stretching by about 100th of a micron. I don’t even know how to imagine that.

Yes, and LIGO itself is stretching/squeezing about a thousandth of the diameter of a proton!

William Shockley.

"Co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in physics in 1956, along with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. In his Nobel lecture, he gave full credit to Brattain and Bardeen as the inventors of the point-contact transistor."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley#Honors

If I'm not mistaken, he invented the predecessor of the Bipolar Junction Transistor, which was the type that was actually commercialized.

The key achievement, imho:

> In the mid-1970s, Rainer Weiss had already analysed possible sources of background noise that would disturb measurements, and had also designed a detector, a laser-based interferometer, which would overcome this noise.

Over 40 years ago, Weiss figured out how to do it. And finally, within his lifetime, he got to see it happen and actually work.

Here at MIT, there was some discussion if he would get it at all -- the experimentalists were not included for the Higgs 2013. It's great that they gave him half of it!

That doesn’t mean they will never get it.

Good thing he did. As for the Higgs discovery, the nature of the experimental facilities and the generations of physicists who designed them would have made it very difficult to point to singular recipients. Since the prize is never given to collaborations, the best alternative whould have been the spokespersons for ATLAS and CMS and perhaps the LHC/CERN director. But still that would have been misrepresenting the efforts of thousands. I think the Nobel Committee should fix this by allowing the prize to be awarded to collaborations. (An accepting, but slightly disgruntled co-discoverer of a new particle)

You discovered a particle?

I think there is also room for more prestigious awards to be named and given out. Perhaps one could function exclusively to shine a light on collaborative efforts?

I also think there's a little that some of us can do in this same/similar space. Maybe not at this scale, but quite a few of us have sold their company and made a few dollars. It's not terribly expensive to start a small managed trust and provide things like scholarships in perpetuity. It's not the prestige of a Nobel, but it's a little something that can go a long ways.

In that sense, we should also think about crowd-founded science. For example, travel costs are always a problem. There are also many table-top experiments which could be realized just with a small cash infusion. Most contributions to universities do not actually benefit an experiment in a direct way.

The closest I've come to that was helping somebody attend a conference. That's a good idea, I think.

I'm very interested novel funding strategies.

A friend of mine is directly funding early stage research related to Lyme Disease. Like an angel investor? Helping to bridge the gap between an idea and applying for grants.

Please thank you friend for me. Edit: Altruistic angel investor, I would call it. There is no pay-out coming, except maybe for acknowledgment in a paper and pride to have helped.

Check out the Breakthrough Prize.

Neat. It's still fairly new. It doesn't appear to prohibit collaborations, though it doesn't seem to emphasize them. I only skimmed their site and Wikipedia. There's probably room for lots of prizes, without diluting the importance of the Nobel.

There's room for plenty of prizes, as well as private underwriting of quality research.

As a physicist who’s listened to him talk about the experiment, it really really makes you take a step back and marvel at how incredible that detector was. And 40 years ago even. He could imagine it but to build it to such an accuracy is incredible and I’m so happy they won it. The teams at LIGO also deserve so so much credit. They work tirelessly!

And then, just as icing on a massive and impressive cake? Totally unforeseen rates of intermediate mass BH mergers! What a time to be alive!

This is probably the first time I actually recognize the name of one of the recipients: Kip Thorne. I learned about him when I read about the movie Interstellar, for which he was an executive producer. Then when reading up on him, it turns out he's been involved with a bunch of things I've read about or seen in the past.

When I saw the announcement, I was unreasonably happy for a person I've never known nor met. Funny what a little recognition can do.

Me too, although I recognized his name because I read his book Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy. That was over 20 years ago.

I believe we're in a small golden age for science fiction. There were completely wack aspects to Interstellar but it's still the most "science-y" science-fiction movie to make a mainstream impact since... 2001: A Space Odyssey, basically. I was so happy. I'd say that an executive producer and scientific advisor of the movie winning a nobel prize in physics is a sign that this is about as serious as a Hollywood-budget science fiction movie can get. It's great. Part of me wants to make a sarcastic joke about corn fields and bookshelves, now, but fuck it, those shots of the wormhole alone more than make up for it!

I think it's a stretch by far to call either Interstellar or 2001: A Space Odyssey most scientifically accurate movie. Using a correct simulation of black hole is one thing, but this alone does not make necessarily make it very accurate. This is not the first time I am seeing this, and I don't know it pops up everywhere. There are parts in the movies which make me cringe, like bending gravity by hands inside a black hole, and giving some strange bar code. Or the highly incorrect approximation of probability from TARS. If I were to select an interesting scientifically accurate sci-fi movie, I would select martian or primer. The later is more consistent than what is evident on watching it for first time.

I think he was talking more about "mainstream impact" than accuracy in his comment. How many average Joes that maybe didn't care for science and space are now interested because of movies like this? And for ones that already liked science and space it was awesome to see an abstract thought (more dimensions) put into play in Interstellar, that maybe got them even more interested in making contributions towards teams like LIGO? Although there was a lot of silly things in the movie I would like to think movies like those are pretty inspiring nonetheless.

"Love is the one thing that we're capable of perceiving, that transcends dimensions of time and space" :) ("Insterstellar")

Kip Thorne (with others) wrote the standard text book I used at university on Gravity: "Gravitation"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitation_(book)

It is a mighty tome, with lots of advanced maths (like tensor calculus), and I can't say I got through very much of it as a Physics undergraduate!

I was pleased to see him pop up again as a science adviser for the movie Interstellar and have enjoyed reading his much more accessible book - "The Science of Interstellar"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Science_of_Interstellar

Congratulations to Kip Thorne. I used to attend his lectures and sometimes greet him in the parking lot if I happen to come across at Caltech. Even though Caltech is not far from Hollywood I always thought these people are the real super stars. Caltech has probably 20+ Nobel laureates.

Your post made me curious. I hit up Google and got a result that may turn into a bit of a time sink.

If you're very busy, you may not want to click on this link:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_u...

I was a bit surprised by some of the results. I honestly wasn't expecting Harvard to be that high. MIT was right where I expected it to be. CalTech was lower than I expected, but your number is too low.

Berkeley really surprised me.

Can I ask what surprised you about Harvard? It's been historically strong in the sciences, medicine, and economics, and produces lots of the sorts of politicians that frequently win the peace prize. Which sorts of other universities were you expecting to be higher?

I'd expected more politicians and less science, and seeing as they give away more science awards...

I was expecting them and Berkeley to be much lower on the list. Those where the two most striking.

Harvard and Berkeley are huge schools compared to CalTech and MIT, which affects placement on lists that count number of affiliated people with some trait.

True, but not something I'd considered until I'd read the list and saw the numbers.

Caltech is still a relatively small school with about 300 professors, so it's not that surprising to me that it's down the list in raw numbers. In terms of Nobel laureates per capita it beats MIT and Harvard.

If you ever visit the Berkeley campus you may notice that they have special parking spots reserved for Nobel laureates:

http://cenblog.org/newscripts/files/2010/07/CIMG3733-compres...

And given the difficulty of parking at Berkeley, that is probably lusted after more than the prize money.

> CalTech was lower than I expected, but your number is too low.

CalTech has always been pretty tiny (MIT had about 3× the faculty, Harvard 15×; Berkeley has more than 5×, but possibly much more—I can find total faculty for all the rest, but only full-time count for Berkeley, which has nearly as many degree programs as CalTech has faculty; I think for most of those the student body multiples are much higher.)

A video describing the LIGO mirror suspension:

https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/video/ligo20170216v

It's worth watching. The engineering behind just this part of the system is jaw-dropping.

How normal is it for the Nobel Prizes to be for something done so recently? Often I feel the stuff is at least a decade old, if not decades.

(Other than the Peace one, which is supposed to be for the last year).

Well, let's put it this way: some of my friends (who unlike me didn't drop out of physics) were discussing if LIGO would get the Nobel Prize this morning, and the main point wasn't whether it was deserved (everyone agreed to that), but that the Nobel Prize doesn't get awarded that quickly most of the time.

I'm just a casual observer so I'm probably way off, so grain of salt but, I believe we'll see more prizes get awarded more quickly as the people who initially lay out the theoretical physics and design the experiments to test their hypothesis are no longer living long enough to see the results of their experiments because the technology to test their ideas lags so far behind what would be needed. Just think of Higgs and the fact that the LHC had to be planned, funded, built, and then used to confirm the Higgs-Boson. Same deal with LIGO.

The big piece of LIGO was the incredible effort that went into data analysis and verification. The second these things were detected a monumental effort went into confirming it meaning when it happened again the methods were already in place. This heavily contributed to how quickly these results were accepted.

The Higgs particle experiment was awarded the Nobel just a year after the discovery.

The awards went to the theorists who did the work in the 60s.

I think the key is that it must be clear that the work had impact on the progress of science. If the Higgs would not have been found, it would have been a costly dead end. With LIGO, the theoretical foundations have been defined decades ago too.

The high-Tc superconductor prize was almost instantaneous. BECs were quick, too.

The Nobel committee wants to be really certain that work is correct and impactful before making an award.

It often takes a long time for the importance of a work to become clear.

In the distant past there have been bloopers- results that have stood the test of time. And there are results that become more significant and durable after decades have passed.

the theory and prediction of gravitational waves has been around forever. and the work to do experimental detection has been going on for many decades. so the actual detection was just a sort of check mark that validated many, many years of work. plus, the people involved are getting quite old, and the nobel prize isn't awarded posthumously. for example, ronald drever died earlier this year and could have probably been named instead of barry barish.

Kip S. Thorne

Should be a household name. He has written several books and was consulted by Christopher Nolan for the movie Interstellar:

https://www.amazon.com/Science-Interstellar-Kip-Thorne/dp/03...

Kip Thorne and Neil deGrasse Tyson are my five-year-old daughter’s favorite physicists.

Kip Thorne was sort of hippie physicist in the 1970s. But CalTech recognized his brillance in hiring him.

Generality Relativity was sort of a graveyard from 1920s to 1960s because there were too few doable experiments and specialized solutions of the core equation was intractable. Then several thing gelled then. Clever physicists like Thorne and Hawking started developing specialized GR solutions. Computer numerical methods could find other solutions. Atomic clocks became sensitive to measure GR in Earth’s gravity. GR is now a routinely observed effect observed billions of times a day in computing GPS positions.

I'm disappointed Ron Drever wasn't remembered - but I hope he will get mentioned in the speeches.

Congrats to three truly brilliant scientists. This is how Hard Sci/Tech is done. Decades long commitments even when everyone around you thinks it impossible!

For a gripping day by day account of advanced LIGO's first candidate detection event and ensuing aftermath. From the very first email with subject line: "Very interesting event on ER8". To publishing the breakout paper “Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger”. Read Harry Collins' Gravity's Kiss: The Detection of Gravitational Waves

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/gravitys-kiss

This is a well deserved one. I've been watching LIGO back from their first announcement last year.

Really happy with their progress and happy to see taxpayer dollars well spent.

Very true. Also congratulations to the hosting institutes and funding agencies, who allowed to keep them going for 40 years.

It reminded me of this old article describing various sources of gravitational waves and our ability to detect them.

http://www.tapir.caltech.edu/~teviet/Waves/gwave_spectrum.ht...

I don't know how accurate it is today but I remember being fascinated by the possibilities.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIGO Two large observatories were built in the United States with the aim of detecting gravitational waves by laser interferometry.

These can detect a change in the 4 km mirror spacing of less than a ten-thousandth the charge diameter of a proton, equivalent to measuring the distance to Proxima Centauri with an accuracy smaller than the width of a human hair

Wow, feeling like a true parasite, relatively a few brilliant people are doing the heavy lifting. These guys should be the real Michael Jordans (nothing against Jordan or sports)

Would be really interesting to read a undergrad level piece on how they exclude [systematic] errors ... that accuracy makes me wonder many things, like what temperatures they're using and what the expansivity of common materials (steel, say) at those temps. What's the contraction (expansion) per km of the Earth like, can you detect flexing in the crust?

/lazy-digression

Don't be bashful, email one of the people listed in the papers. There's surely some published research with names attached.

Be clear, don't be verbose, be polite, and be grateful, thanking them for their time and contributions. Be sure to mention that the award was what triggered your curiosity.

Also, make sure to ask them to put you in touch with the right person, if they aren't the right person. You're probably looking for someone with 'materials' near their name. There may also be a coordinator for the project. If so, first try them.

Seriously, go ahead and ask. Chances are, you're even welcome to ask follow up questions. I'm retired but I always enjoyed it when people legitimately wanted to know more about what I was doing. It was only a problem if I was busy, but I still made time. It just sometimes took a while.

Yes this is so important. These are professors and from all the physicists I have ever met they are all incredible open to questions. Remember that these people sit there and think about these problems all day so they love talking about them. Just be polite and especially verbose.

Not too verbose, would be my recommendation. Though, that may be because I have the tendency to be rather wordy and I suspect they are currently all pressed for time.

This is the third time it has come up recently, at least for my comments. I really lament the quashing of the citizen scientist idea.

I'm technically a scientist, albeit retired. I don't want a pedestal, nor an ivory tower. Someone mentioned that they weren't a real scientist. Yes, yes you are - so long as you follow the method.

Scientists aren't ordained. They are just people following a set of rules established by the Philosophy of Science. Anyone can follow those rules.

I encourage everyone to try to apply them to learning new things. I encourage them to get involved, to experiment, and to share their results. Ask questions. Ask for data. Ask why.

Intellectual curiosity is one of our species' defining traits. Giving that up and just accepting answers goes against the principles of science.

There are very, very good odds that they'll get the data they want, so long as they find the correct person. On a project this large, they should be able to find that person.

I would up-vote this a hundred times if I could. More awareness of the power of the scientific method, in general, would be a good thing for the world.

Don't only ask, test! Build a hypothesis and test it until it breaks. Make a better one. Break it. Rinse, repeat.

You might have an easier time getting a hold of Gabriela Gonzalez, the head of one of the LIGO sites, or a project scientist there. I can probably put you in touch with some people in Livingston (email is HN name at gmail)

Very valid point and I earnestly hope that they see your post and take full advantage of the opportunity.

I am/was unfamiliar with these specific researchers and only know the research through popular science. So, I am unable to give them specifics.

I'm a mathematician, not a physicist. My interest is purely curiosity. Well, that and I like to encourage the citizen scientist.

I second that. While the people in the limelight will probably get a ton of requests right now and might not find time to answer, the "lower" ranks will.

I'm a scientist myself, and it's always nice to get feedback/questions from interested people outside of the community, especially if they are not peddling their pet "theory" and are honestly willing to learn, read papers etc.

It is too late to edit it. If I could, I'd change it to suggest they not be more verbose than absolutely needed. Put time and effort into writing it, as they will be putting time and effort int responding to it. That time can be used to ensure the grammar is acceptable, the questions clear, and the message as concise as it can reasonably be.

Given the popularity of this project, and all the media attention, I suspect they are fairly busy.

Like you, though past-tense, I loved having interested people contact me for more information. I didn't even mind if they were also my business competition. Sometimes, the projects I worked on had a public face and yet was great - but it sometimes reached the point where it was eating into my limited time.

I'm more than happy to share what I know, what I am doing, and how I got there. What I was doing was innovative and there was more business than we could reasonably handle. (I helped move traffic modeling to the computer age and would later expand into pedestrian traffic modeling.)

LIGO collaboration member here. We're delighted to take questions from the public - just email question@ligo.org!

I figured you were absolutely willing to take questions from the general public.

Now, the average person seems woefully unaware of this. To them, the science and scientists seem unapproachable. They've stacked scientists up on a pedestal and fashioned imaginary ivory towers for them.

As a scientist, I have countless examples of such.

So, how do we let people know that you'd be delighted to take questions? Maybe one of those live BBC science specials would be in order? Something like that?

For all the marchers who believe in science, so few seem aware that they can practice it and be a part of it. They aren't even aware that they can be published without affiliation or a degree. Sure, it is harder, but they can and they can contribute.

I am particularly impressed by the efforts of the rest of my colleagues when it comes to public outreach. Our members attend loads of local events around the world, sharing LIGO outreach material across the collaboration; members are often invited to talk at science clubs and societies; we conduct Reddit AMAs after each detection announcement [1-3] and tweet to the public about the goings-on. There are even apps [4]! Two other things we've gotten a lot of positive feedback for are our open science center [5], which has tutorials where you can conduct essentially the same analysis we did in our discovery on the same data (using Python notebooks), and Gravity Spy [6], which lets the public hunt for glitches in our data (a new type of glitch was identified by the public, showing how important it can be!).

So, while we can always do more to reach out to the public who fund our work, I feel like I'm surrounded by colleagues who are really passionate and dedicated to interacting with the public!

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/45g8qu/we_are_the_lig...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4odza8/we_are_the_lig...

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/6fekz5/science_ama...

[4] https://www.laserlabs.org/spacetimequest.php

[5] http://losc.ligo.org/

[6] https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/zooniverse/gravity-spy

I try to have an analogy for humanity's place in the universe. I think the best is a colony of ants floating on a branch in the Pacific Ocean. But with careful attention to wind, smell those ants have worked out shipping and landmass. Now they just found out how to detect Skyscrapers. One day they will be able to read the menus at the deli by Central Park. Let's discuss science funding again shall we?

I hope all this means there will be funding for LISA. Basically an enormous LIGO in space, so no earth vibrations and no tunnels needed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Interferometer_Space_Ant...

I visited the LIGO at Caltech a few months before they discovered gravitational waves cause I was such a hipster nerd about it.

It's strange because they're just a few nondescript buildings in the middle of the campus yet they're there detecting lil nano hems and haws in the fabric of the universe.

The actual instruments are not at Caltech. The instruments next to Central Engineering Services / Steele House / Annenberg are just test equipment afaik. The instrument sites are in Washington and Louisiana.

It blows my mind that accelerating a mass gives off gravitational waves. But it makes total sense since mass increases with speed, if only the tiniest bit until you get close to the speed of light. Which is probably why you can't detect the waves unless you have some massive event (pun intended) like 2 black holes colliding.

Do those waves come at a cost of energy? Just what the heck is a gravitational wave?

And can those waves be refracted, reflected, and/or focused?

Let's make a gravitational wave telescope.

Sure - you manipulate gravity waves using large masses (the only thing we know of which interacts with gravity). It's not very practical to move stars around in order to make a lens, though.

The waves do come at a cost of energy. That's why these black holes collide in the first place: they're orbiting each other, but the orbits decay because they radiate away kinetic energy as gravitational waves. Eventually it decays enough that they collide.

The same thing happens for all orbits, but the amount of energy radiated away is so small that it basically doesn't matter. Black holes are so massive and so small that they can get close enough for it to become significant.

The amount of energy involved is colossal. The first detected collision was estimated to have converted the equivalent of three solar masses to energy, which is about 2 x 10^47 joules of energy. Released over 20 milliseconds, it briefly output more power than all the stars in the universe combined by a factor of 50.

> Just what the heck is a gravitational wave?

A ripple in space time as two massive bodies orbit each other. Mass bends space time, if the mass moves, it's going to change how it bends space time, if it moves in a regular pattern (an orbit), that creates a wave.

are there videos of the acceptance speeches or ceremonies anywhere? i always want to watch them. are they televised or streamed?

The Nobel Prize has a YouTube channel, not sure if it has all speeches or if they're complete: https://www.youtube.com/user/thenobelprize/search?query=spee...

The Nobel lectures given by the recipients are generally targeted at a broad audience, and some of the lectures are extremely good. The ceremony is in Stockholm on Dec. 9.

You can see the old speeches if you choose the year, then click on the laureate and "Nobel lecture." The older ones only have illustrated transcripts available---no video---but I still recommend them.

https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/19...

this is sad: https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_organizations/nobelfoundati...

everything is basically paywalled.

we get to see teen choice awards shived down our throats but the speeches of the greatest minds of our times are inaccessible.

No, all the Nobel speeches are there, from the link I gave. They are the same speeches, with the same illustrations and the same English translations, as you get in those books. Even the biographical sketches are the same. I don't know that the books include anything not on the website.

Love the popular science and scientific background PDFs.

This has great implications for blockchain. The interferometer is basically a blockchain at it's core. The trust circle it generates enables physicist to investigate bigger and bigger beams. Very excited!

I am entirely unsure whether you're joking.

The account is 25 minutes old, so I would assume so

And as we all know, after 25 minutes of exposure to HN, one loses any and all sense of humor.

Dear lord, do the Germans know we're encroaching on their turf?

As a German, I don't find this funny.

That joke was so self-referential my brain short-circuited, well done.

Surely, You're Joking, Mr. Nerd.

I am convinced they are joking. I know that HN frowns on humorous posts that add nothing to the conversation, but I legitimately laughed.

There's so much hype about blockchains, cryptocurrencies, and ICOs, that it is kind of surprising that the tech (or a person) hasn't been awarded a prestigious award that it's not really qualified for.

I guess there is still the one for economics that isn't really a Nobel prize but has a different name.

I think that moving forward we need to preserve all Nobel prizes for posterity, otherwise they are in danger of reductive values subject to fiat currencies of the dollar values of awards. The best place for this type of currency storage is always by converting to smart contracts.

Smart contracts provide the necessary certainty that comes with binding and unchangeable code, even if it hasn't had the opportunity to be audited for correctness. If some unfortunate Nobel prize winners don't see the full value of their smart contracts, due to ethereum gas, any issues will always be fixed in the smart contracts for subsequent winners. Open Source Blockchains have been shown to be double blind statistical anomalies that always get fixed sooner or later.

Funniest post I’ve ever read on HN. Bursted out laughing.

What on earth are you on about?

This is the most 2017 thing to ever be said.

Is there some way this ties into Rick and Morty?

Yes. Rick is a poor scientist.

Gravitational waves are just the universe trying to get us to buy into its ICO.

I am writing a blockchain implementation using go, rust and quantum: livir-go[1]. I started when the news broke out and half finished already.

Are gravitational waves = "gravimetric distortion" [1]?

[1] http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Gravimetric_distortion

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