Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
I'm still pleased to welcome back to KOA our show's
favorite and most frequent guests. See you, Physics Professor Paul Beale.
We have a couple of excellent physics topics to talk
about today. I want to do two quick things first
with Paul before we get into that. First Unfortunately, I'm
going to be out of town tomorrow, but You're giving
(00:21):
a talk at SEU that I wish I could go to,
and I want to make sure listeners know about so
they can go because it's going to be awesome and
it's free.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
So what do we need to know about your talk tomorrow?
Speaker 3 (00:30):
So this is part of the Saturday Physics series.
Speaker 4 (00:32):
So I'll be giving a talk about the Big Bang
and then the history of the universe as we understand it.
And it'll be a story about both the science and
the human beings that led to the discoveries that we
have come about that lead to us to understand the
universe began about fourteen billion years ago.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
And time and location of your tbion that is two
thirty in the afternoon in Dwayne Physics and that's on
Colorado Avenue, right across the street from Folsom Stadium.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
It's free and open to the public.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
And folks, if you forget any of that, it's up
on my blog at Rosskominski dot com. Just go into
the guests section of today's blog note and all that
stuff will be there and you can go here. Paul
tomorrow at two thirty give a fantastic talk, and I
wish I could join you, but I'm committed this weekend.
The other thing I wanted to ask you about just quickly, Paul,
(01:26):
I sent you a video and actually shared some of
it with listeners on the show yesterday with Neil Degrass
Tyson being asked who he thought was the greatest scientific
mind ever, and he said, without really pausing, he said,
Isaac Newton.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
And I wonder what you think of that answer.
Speaker 3 (01:46):
I agree completely.
Speaker 4 (01:47):
Newton was an enigma in terms of the number of
things he discovered with by himself, with very little input
from anyone else he discovered.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
So the interesting thing is it all happened in what
was known as the plague.
Speaker 4 (02:02):
Year in sixteen sixty six, and so Cambridge University was
closed because they wanted to send people away to so
they wouldn't be infecting get infected by the plague. And
so he was sent home and he went to live
on his mother's estate in Lincolnshire, and that's where he
wrote down and discovered the laws of physics that we
(02:24):
currently know, what are known as Newton's three laws. He
also figured out what's known as the universal law of gravitation,
that the planets orbit the Sun because of a force
caused gravity that falls off like one over the square
of the distance away from the Sun and the Moon
orbits the Earth for the same reason.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
And in order to understand all of that, he had.
Speaker 4 (02:47):
To invent differential and integral calculus. And he did that
at the age of twenty four.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Unbelievable. And he did a lot more, as we did
a lot more after that. More after that. We're pretty incredible.
All right, let's move on to a little bit of science.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
And actually you just mentioned Newton and gravity, and you
sent me an article entitled this gravitational wave breakthrough could
rewrite what we know about the universe. So, because I'm
not a physicist and most of my listeners aren't, I'd
like to just start at a high level, and that
is why or how are we to think of gravity
(03:28):
as a wave?
Speaker 3 (03:30):
So up to about a dozen years ago.
Speaker 4 (03:32):
Everything we knew about the universe came about from our
measurement and observation of gravity of electromagnetic waves, light and
radio waves, and X rays. But in nineteen fifteen Einstein
wrote down his field equations, and one of the solutions
of those field equations is that the fabric of space
(03:55):
time can oscillate like a wave, and that wave travels
the speed of light and it's not affected by dust
or anything in the middle. So gravitational waves have a
unique ability to pass through very dense objects and allow
us to see on the other side.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
And so around twenty ten.
Speaker 4 (04:19):
Scientists had created a detector trying to look for those
gravitational waves. And what they use is a laser beam
that bounced one in one direction north south along a
four kilometer path, and east and west along a four
kilometer path. And then you're looking for the interference of
those waves and those paths. If they're exactly the same length,
(04:40):
the waves interfere in such a way that you call
that zero. And if anything changes with the distance between
the two the mirrors at the ends of those paths,
then you might be detecting a gravitational wave that came
from something like two black holes colliding and co into a.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
Single black hole.
Speaker 4 (05:01):
And their first observation was in two thoy and eleven
detected exactly that two black holes several times the mass
of the Sun and then becoming a single black hole
that was, you know, twice as big as that.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Okay, this is one of those things that clearly needs bourbon.
But if you're if you're running lasers, very precise high
power lasers on Earth, and you're trying to and you're
measuring a gravitational wave that came from somewhere, how do
you know the origin of that gravitational wave?
Speaker 2 (05:38):
How do they how do they know where it came from?
Speaker 4 (05:41):
Okay, So, first of all, you can detect the relative
amount that the two legs oscillated, and from that you
can determine the rough direction at which it came from.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
And there were two different detectors.
Speaker 4 (05:52):
One in Louisiana and one in the state of Washington,
and that helped to identify a little better the direction the.
Speaker 3 (05:59):
Waves came from.
Speaker 4 (06:01):
And so as we add more and more of these
gravitational wave detectors, it's like adding more and more lenses
to your telescope and having more accuracy of where it
came from. But this particular one originated about a billion
light years far away and took a billion.
Speaker 3 (06:20):
Years to get to us.
Speaker 4 (06:22):
But since then they've measured dozens of similar things, both
black holes and neutron stars colliding with each other.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
For example.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
Wow, all right, last thing on this, and then what
is this breakthrough and what's it going to help with?
Speaker 4 (06:39):
So the goal is to build much bigger and more
sensitive detectors, and so the next generation of the detectors
will be about ten times larger. The lengths of the
distance between the mirrors will be about forty kilometers rather
than four, and so you need much more powerful lasers.
And much more powerful lasers mean the mirrors are going
to heat up because of the laser power, and so
(07:01):
the recent breakthrough has been finding way to have the
lasers adapt to that in real time, so that you
can actually get the laser beam to bounce back and forth,
many many, many many times between the two ends of
the legs.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Wow, whenever I talk with you, and whenever we talk
about stuff like this, I'm just blown away by the
fact that there are people smart enough to figure this
out and design this equipment and figure out I'm gonna
use a laser to measure gravity, and it's just it's
just so beyond me.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
It's incredible.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
One other quick thing sort of related to this, So
you and your buddy Neil de grass Tyson both said
without hesitation that Isaac Newton is the greatest scientific mind
in history.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
Would you put Einstein at number two? Or is there
somebody else?
Speaker 3 (07:55):
I would, and I think he would too.
Speaker 4 (07:57):
Einstein had an also a profet and effect on the
way we think about science. He had this fantastic year
much like Newton did. In nineteen oh five. He published
four papers. Each one of those could have easily won
an independent Nobel prize in four different fields.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
Wow, okay, let's do something that's much easier and probably
much more in line with ordinary humans, everyday experience. And
I was thinking of this the other day when I
was I was cleaning something, and oh no, I wasn't
cleaning something. I was putting honey in my tea, and
(08:36):
I sort of popped into my mind, like this, honey's
running pretty slowly.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
If I heated it up, it would run a little fast.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
I could put it in the in my tea faster,
And so my physics question occurred to me to ask you,
why do liquids get thinner get less viscous when they're
heated up, And is that just a subset of the
same kind of spectrum that would include melting a solid.
Speaker 4 (09:07):
So the particular liquid you mentioned and the ones that
are most you see this effect most easily are liquids
which are composed of sizable molecules like sugar, molecules in
your honey, for example, polymers of.
Speaker 3 (09:23):
Carbon chains in motor oil.
Speaker 4 (09:26):
Any sort of material like that almost invariably gets less
discus and more easy to flow as you heat them up,
And so heating up the honey, the molecules become a
little more they're bouncing into each other, have more flexibility
and how they move by each other, and what viscosity
(09:47):
is a measure of how the molecules can move past
each other. And what's called shear, so you can move
the top without moving the bottom of the material. That's
a that's called a sheer motion, and that's much easier
if the molecules are warmer and able to bounce around
and rotate more easily.
Speaker 3 (10:08):
And it's the rotations that are inhibited at.
Speaker 4 (10:12):
At lower temperatures and the material tends to be slightly
more dense, and so it's also interferes with their ability
to rotate.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
So I don't know if we can answer this without
getting way more technical than I had intended to be
with this question. But why would warming up the honey
and the sugar molecules in the honey, why would that
allow them?
Speaker 2 (10:33):
You said it lets them flow past each other better.
But why?
Speaker 4 (10:36):
Okay, So these are fairly large molecules and their ability
to rotate relative to each other because they are preventing
each other from rotating at lower temperatures, and as you
get down toward the freezing point, they in fact stop
being able to rotate at all with respect to each other,
and that's what what.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
Cause that to freeze.
Speaker 4 (10:57):
So after they are liquid, they're still inhibited quite strongly
from moving relative to each other quickly. And the warmer
they are, the more faster they can rotate, and they
have slightly more distance between them to rotate.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Okay, that last part was what I was wondering about, Like,
does it does it slightly increase the distance between the molecules,
thereby giving them a little more freedom to rotate? And
if it does, does that mean it's actually also changing
the density of that liquid while I'm heating it.
Speaker 4 (11:28):
Liquids tend to get less stentse as you heat them up,
and that's a one of the two effects I believe
in this viscosity. I think the primary one is this
ability to rotate relative to each other is a function
of temperature.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
That makes that makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
All right, one more time, Paul, the information about your
talk tomorrow.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
Okay.
Speaker 4 (11:48):
So the talk on Saturday is at two thirty in
the afternoon in the Dwayne Physics Building on the CU campus.
That's on Colorado Avenue, right across from folsome Field, and
it's free and open to the public. It'll be in
the big lecture hall on the east end of Dwayne Visits.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
Folks, go here Paul tomorrow at CEU.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
Well worth your time, and you can't beat the price,
of course, and tell him I said Hi. I mean
I'm already telling him because unfortunately I can't be there tomorrow,
but hopefully the next one I will. Paul, thanks so
much for your time. As always, I hope you have
a great talk tomorrow. I hope some listeners show up
and we'll talk again soon. Okay, we're gonna have some fun,
see it all right. That's the great Paul Beal, and
(12:31):
I sure hope you can go to his talk tomorrow.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Sorry, I won't be able to meet you there this time,
but I'll try to come to another one.
I'm still pleased to welcome back to KOA our show's
favorite and most frequent guests. See you, Physics Professor Paul Beale.
We have a couple of excellent physics topics to talk
about today. I want to do two quick things first
with Paul before we get into that. First Unfortunately, I'm
going to be out of town tomorrow, but You're giving
(00:21):
a talk at SEU that I wish I could go to,
and I want to make sure listeners know about so
they can go because it's going to be awesome and
it's free.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
So what do we need to know about your talk tomorrow?
Speaker 3 (00:30):
So this is part of the Saturday Physics series.
Speaker 4 (00:32):
So I'll be giving a talk about the Big Bang
and then the history of the universe as we understand it.
And it'll be a story about both the science and
the human beings that led to the discoveries that we
have come about that lead to us to understand the
universe began about fourteen billion years ago.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
And time and location of your tbion that is two
thirty in the afternoon in Dwayne Physics and that's on
Colorado Avenue, right across the street from Folsom Stadium.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
It's free and open to the public.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
And folks, if you forget any of that, it's up
on my blog at Rosskominski dot com. Just go into
the guests section of today's blog note and all that
stuff will be there and you can go here. Paul
tomorrow at two thirty give a fantastic talk, and I
wish I could join you, but I'm committed this weekend.
The other thing I wanted to ask you about just quickly, Paul,
(01:26):
I sent you a video and actually shared some of
it with listeners on the show yesterday with Neil Degrass
Tyson being asked who he thought was the greatest scientific
mind ever, and he said, without really pausing, he said,
Isaac Newton.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
And I wonder what you think of that answer.
Speaker 3 (01:46):
I agree completely.
Speaker 4 (01:47):
Newton was an enigma in terms of the number of
things he discovered with by himself, with very little input
from anyone else he discovered.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
So the interesting thing is it all happened in what
was known as the plague.
Speaker 4 (02:02):
Year in sixteen sixty six, and so Cambridge University was
closed because they wanted to send people away to so
they wouldn't be infecting get infected by the plague. And
so he was sent home and he went to live
on his mother's estate in Lincolnshire, and that's where he
wrote down and discovered the laws of physics that we
(02:24):
currently know, what are known as Newton's three laws. He
also figured out what's known as the universal law of gravitation,
that the planets orbit the Sun because of a force
caused gravity that falls off like one over the square
of the distance away from the Sun and the Moon
orbits the Earth for the same reason.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
And in order to understand all of that, he had.
Speaker 4 (02:47):
To invent differential and integral calculus. And he did that
at the age of twenty four.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Unbelievable. And he did a lot more, as we did
a lot more after that. More after that. We're pretty incredible.
All right, let's move on to a little bit of science.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
And actually you just mentioned Newton and gravity, and you
sent me an article entitled this gravitational wave breakthrough could
rewrite what we know about the universe. So, because I'm
not a physicist and most of my listeners aren't, I'd
like to just start at a high level, and that
is why or how are we to think of gravity
(03:28):
as a wave?
Speaker 3 (03:30):
So up to about a dozen years ago.
Speaker 4 (03:32):
Everything we knew about the universe came about from our
measurement and observation of gravity of electromagnetic waves, light and
radio waves, and X rays. But in nineteen fifteen Einstein
wrote down his field equations, and one of the solutions
of those field equations is that the fabric of space
(03:55):
time can oscillate like a wave, and that wave travels
the speed of light and it's not affected by dust
or anything in the middle. So gravitational waves have a
unique ability to pass through very dense objects and allow
us to see on the other side.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
And so around twenty ten.
Speaker 4 (04:19):
Scientists had created a detector trying to look for those
gravitational waves. And what they use is a laser beam
that bounced one in one direction north south along a
four kilometer path, and east and west along a four
kilometer path. And then you're looking for the interference of
those waves and those paths. If they're exactly the same length,
(04:40):
the waves interfere in such a way that you call
that zero. And if anything changes with the distance between
the two the mirrors at the ends of those paths,
then you might be detecting a gravitational wave that came
from something like two black holes colliding and co into a.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
Single black hole.
Speaker 4 (05:01):
And their first observation was in two thoy and eleven
detected exactly that two black holes several times the mass
of the Sun and then becoming a single black hole
that was, you know, twice as big as that.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Okay, this is one of those things that clearly needs bourbon.
But if you're if you're running lasers, very precise high
power lasers on Earth, and you're trying to and you're
measuring a gravitational wave that came from somewhere, how do
you know the origin of that gravitational wave?
Speaker 2 (05:38):
How do they how do they know where it came from?
Speaker 4 (05:41):
Okay, So, first of all, you can detect the relative
amount that the two legs oscillated, and from that you
can determine the rough direction at which it came from.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
And there were two different detectors.
Speaker 4 (05:52):
One in Louisiana and one in the state of Washington,
and that helped to identify a little better the direction the.
Speaker 3 (05:59):
Waves came from.
Speaker 4 (06:01):
And so as we add more and more of these
gravitational wave detectors, it's like adding more and more lenses
to your telescope and having more accuracy of where it
came from. But this particular one originated about a billion
light years far away and took a billion.
Speaker 3 (06:20):
Years to get to us.
Speaker 4 (06:22):
But since then they've measured dozens of similar things, both
black holes and neutron stars colliding with each other.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
For example.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
Wow, all right, last thing on this, and then what
is this breakthrough and what's it going to help with?
Speaker 4 (06:39):
So the goal is to build much bigger and more
sensitive detectors, and so the next generation of the detectors
will be about ten times larger. The lengths of the
distance between the mirrors will be about forty kilometers rather
than four, and so you need much more powerful lasers.
And much more powerful lasers mean the mirrors are going
to heat up because of the laser power, and so
(07:01):
the recent breakthrough has been finding way to have the
lasers adapt to that in real time, so that you
can actually get the laser beam to bounce back and forth,
many many, many many times between the two ends of
the legs.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Wow, whenever I talk with you, and whenever we talk
about stuff like this, I'm just blown away by the
fact that there are people smart enough to figure this
out and design this equipment and figure out I'm gonna
use a laser to measure gravity, and it's just it's
just so beyond me.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
It's incredible.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
One other quick thing sort of related to this, So
you and your buddy Neil de grass Tyson both said
without hesitation that Isaac Newton is the greatest scientific mind
in history.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
Would you put Einstein at number two? Or is there
somebody else?
Speaker 3 (07:55):
I would, and I think he would too.
Speaker 4 (07:57):
Einstein had an also a profet and effect on the
way we think about science. He had this fantastic year
much like Newton did. In nineteen oh five. He published
four papers. Each one of those could have easily won
an independent Nobel prize in four different fields.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
Wow, okay, let's do something that's much easier and probably
much more in line with ordinary humans, everyday experience. And
I was thinking of this the other day when I
was I was cleaning something, and oh no, I wasn't
cleaning something. I was putting honey in my tea, and
(08:36):
I sort of popped into my mind, like this, honey's
running pretty slowly.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
If I heated it up, it would run a little fast.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
I could put it in the in my tea faster,
And so my physics question occurred to me to ask you,
why do liquids get thinner get less viscous when they're
heated up, And is that just a subset of the
same kind of spectrum that would include melting a solid.
Speaker 4 (09:07):
So the particular liquid you mentioned and the ones that
are most you see this effect most easily are liquids
which are composed of sizable molecules like sugar, molecules in
your honey, for example, polymers of.
Speaker 3 (09:23):
Carbon chains in motor oil.
Speaker 4 (09:26):
Any sort of material like that almost invariably gets less
discus and more easy to flow as you heat them up,
And so heating up the honey, the molecules become a
little more they're bouncing into each other, have more flexibility
and how they move by each other, and what viscosity
(09:47):
is a measure of how the molecules can move past
each other. And what's called shear, so you can move
the top without moving the bottom of the material. That's
a that's called a sheer motion, and that's much easier
if the molecules are warmer and able to bounce around
and rotate more easily.
Speaker 3 (10:08):
And it's the rotations that are inhibited at.
Speaker 4 (10:12):
At lower temperatures and the material tends to be slightly
more dense, and so it's also interferes with their ability
to rotate.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
So I don't know if we can answer this without
getting way more technical than I had intended to be
with this question. But why would warming up the honey
and the sugar molecules in the honey, why would that
allow them?
Speaker 2 (10:33):
You said it lets them flow past each other better.
But why?
Speaker 4 (10:36):
Okay, So these are fairly large molecules and their ability
to rotate relative to each other because they are preventing
each other from rotating at lower temperatures, and as you
get down toward the freezing point, they in fact stop
being able to rotate at all with respect to each other,
and that's what what.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
Cause that to freeze.
Speaker 4 (10:57):
So after they are liquid, they're still inhibited quite strongly
from moving relative to each other quickly. And the warmer
they are, the more faster they can rotate, and they
have slightly more distance between them to rotate.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Okay, that last part was what I was wondering about, Like,
does it does it slightly increase the distance between the molecules,
thereby giving them a little more freedom to rotate? And
if it does, does that mean it's actually also changing
the density of that liquid while I'm heating it.
Speaker 4 (11:28):
Liquids tend to get less stentse as you heat them up,
and that's a one of the two effects I believe
in this viscosity. I think the primary one is this
ability to rotate relative to each other is a function
of temperature.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
That makes that makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
All right, one more time, Paul, the information about your
talk tomorrow.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
Okay.
Speaker 4 (11:48):
So the talk on Saturday is at two thirty in
the afternoon in the Dwayne Physics Building on the CU campus.
That's on Colorado Avenue, right across from folsome Field, and
it's free and open to the public. It'll be in
the big lecture hall on the east end of Dwayne Visits.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
Folks, go here Paul tomorrow at CEU.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
Well worth your time, and you can't beat the price,
of course, and tell him I said Hi. I mean
I'm already telling him because unfortunately I can't be there tomorrow,
but hopefully the next one I will. Paul, thanks so
much for your time. As always, I hope you have
a great talk tomorrow. I hope some listeners show up
and we'll talk again soon. Okay, we're gonna have some fun,
see it all right. That's the great Paul Beal, and
(12:31):
I sure hope you can go to his talk tomorrow.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Sorry, I won't be able to meet you there this time,
but I'll try to come to another one.
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