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Comment by diegoperini | Hacker News Reader

If what LIGO achieved is not loud enough for the 21st century, then we are probably doomed. It is a NEW kind of telescope that has not even been utilized for 1% of its potential.

PS: I'm not arguing with your statement, you have all the right to think that way. Maybe even people who lived during Einstein's earlier times thought the same for their previous century.

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Yes, and there are also neutrino telescopes. I wait for the detection of an high energy neutrino event from beyond the CMBR. I think the opportunity, our understanding of physics and technology give us right now are immense. The fact that general relativity and quantum mechanics havent been reconciled by now only means that this is probably a very hard thing to do. But it doesn't mean that 'phyics is dead'.

[0]: https://icecube.wisc.edu/

> I wait for the detection of an high energy neutrino event from beyond the CMBR

My (non-physicist) understanding of this, is that neutrinos from then will be quite low energy now, due to the expansion of the universe(?), and so not detectable by the method IceCube uses. There is a minimum energy required, in part because the charged particles generated by the neutrino interaction need to be moving faster than the speed of light in water (or whatever the detection medium is) for there to be Cherenkov radiation generated and then detected.

That said, I would love to see a response from a more knowledgeable person!

The neutrinos may start out with any energy, whatever produced them will determine that. To cross the great expanse of time and redshifting due to expansion and still have a lot of energy left, they would simply have to start out with a whole lot more. Any neutrino event that we could detect from that far away would probably be massive anyways, so maybe we'll see something.

I would argue that one of the reasons why physics news has been quiet is because the state of the field has moved beyond a lay person's understanding at more than a high level.

If you can't explain your idead to your janitor, you don't really grasp them yourself.

I agree with your statement, but we're discussing physics reporting in the news. They are aiming for eyeballs and ad clicks, not for emanating understanding of the topic.

One can read Wikipedia as well

OTOH...

"Hell, if I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel prize." -- Richard Feynman

The thing I hate about this statement is it gives people an excuse to ignore things they don't understand at first glace by claiming the presenter doesn't fully understand it so it's probably not true.

Its a good standard to hold yourself to when explaining things to others. But not one to hold others to when explaining to you.

"Be liberal in what you accept but conservative in what you generate."

Even that is up to debate.

https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2011/8/114933-the-robustness-...

If you can successfully eli5, that indicates thorough mastery of a subject. Stuff on the bleeding edge of physics can be grasped by a limited group of experts, but nobody might have developed the 10th dan sensei level understanding yet. Maybe in 50 years we'll have great explanations of black holes and quantum mech that laypeople can grok.

Few non-physicists understand quantum mechanics even at a high level, but that certainly hasn't stopped journalists over the last hundred years. Whatever the new frontier is, I'm sure the popular media could cover it in technobabble just fine if they wanted to.

> If what LIGO achieved is not loud enough for the 21st century, then we are probably doomed.

The problem is that it is REALLY hard to describe to the layman just how excruciatingly difficult it is to do what LIGO does.

I like to think that I know a thing or two about electrical engineering and quantum mechanics, and even I probably don't get just exactly how amazing LIGO is.

The original paper on the first detection of a black hole merger by LIGO is really great[1]. It's even open access. Much of the paper is accessible to someone at the freshman physics level. Download the pdf as it is in a much nicer format than the online version.

[1]https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.11...

kip thorne's talks are really good about explaining ligo's importance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxhp4GBr1Zg

I think people have been predicting gravity wave telescopes for so long that when one finally showed up, it wasn’t that exciting to the press.

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