Sucide-Angel

“Cotton picker at night looks like a huge concert crowd”

My friend learned the hard way to not answer the door to late night trick-or-treaters

by reddit user manen_lyset

We all have that one friend who’s not into the holidays. You know the one: won’t decorate, won’t dress up, won’t wish you a happy -whatever day it is-, and, though he’ll reluctantly agree to come to your themed party, he’ll stay in the back and scowl the whole time. In most cases, the hate is directed at just one holiday, whether it be Valentines, Christmas, Easter, or, hell, even arbor day. My friend Patrick? He hated Halloween with every fiber of his being.

BUT GUESS WHAT MOTHERFUCKERS

I WAS FUCKING PREPPED

HER NAME WAS LEELAH

SHE WENT BY LAZERPRINCESS HERE, NOSTALGIAPRINCESS ON REDDIT

but idk

this is alexandrias melon (wow)

it never grows seeds but it can still produce other melons (its magic)

it is grown deep in the jungles of peru and can prevent you from aging well into the hundreds

it is known by the natives there as k’uhul ajaw cacao shi-jiiy.

This is the Peppermeloni. (seriously gosh just look at that sexy mother fucker) Its scientific name is Tumblrous Pepperonus.

The only known specimen is in a pot in David Karps treasure dungeon. It is a tradition that a single slice is given to every tumblr blog that reaches 500,000 followers.

It has the remarkable property of being as healthy as watermelon but tasting like cheesy pepperoni pizza.

Patrickmelon

I say this not in the sense of imposter syndrome. I don’t feel ashamed about it. If my passion lies elsewhere, that’s totally fine. I just wonder. Have my motivations for studying physics been more fundamentally vain than I originally thought? Or does it have real substance?

Is that why I feel like I’m suffering all the time?

To anyone who claims to love their subject of study. Do you think about it when you’re not supposed to be working? Is it ingrained into any of your hobbies? Is it your hobby?

Physics… Has actually never been a hobby for me. I kinda question whether I’ve ever actually enjoyed it or just enjoyed the idea of it.

I mean, c’mon. It sounds so badass to say, “I’m a physicist.”

So confusing.

When people ask me for book recommendations for physics (and quite frequently) I have to Google recommendations. Have I even read a physics-related book for pure fun? I… Don’t think I ever have.

But. You know. Senior year. The optimum year to worry about your life choices. I’m trying to push these feelings down to a more manageable level but they keep popping back up. Problem is, there doesn’t seem to be a “proper” way to deal with this.

Black Holes are not so Black (Part 3) - Gravitational Waves

The existence of Gravitational Waves have been confirmed. But you probably have heard that. In this post, we will break down this profound discovery into comprehend-able chunks.

This is going to be a amazing journey. Ready ?

Redefining Gravity

When we usually talk of Gravitation we are bound to think like Newton, where objects are assumed to exerting a force upon each other.

Like imaginary arrows of force in space. But this picture, although good for high school crumbled, with the advent of Einstein’s theory of Relativity.

What is the Space-Time Fabric?

Think of space-time fabric as an actual cloth of fabric. ( An analogy )

When you place an object on the fabric, the cloth curves. This is exactly what happens in the solar system as well.

The sun with such a huge mass bends the space-time fabric. And the earth and all the planets are kept in orbit by following this curvature that has been made by the sun.

Attributing to the various masses of objects, the way they bend this fabric also varies.

What are Gravitational Waves?

If you drop an object in a medium such as water, they produce ripples that propagate as waves through the medium.

Similarly, Gravitational waves are ripples in space-time fabric produced when you drag heavy objects through space time.

And the nature of these waves is that they don’t require a medium to propagate.

How do you make one?

Everything with mass/energy can create these waves.

Source

Two persons dancing around each other in space too can create gravitational waves. But the waves would be extremely faint.

You need something big and massive accelerating through space-time in order to even detect them.

And orbiting binary stars/black holes are valuable in this retrospect.

How can you detect them?

Let’s turn to the problem to detecting them assuming you do find binary stars/black-holes in the wondrous space to suite your needs.

Well, for starters you cannot use rocks/ rulers to measure them because as the space expands and contracts, so do the rocks. ( the distances will remain same in both the cases )

Here’s where the high school fact that the speed of Light is a constant no matter what plays an important and pivotal role.

If the space expands, the time taken for light to reach from A to B would be longer. And if it contracts, the time taken for it to reach from A to B would be smaller.

PC: PHDComics

By allowing the light waves from the contraction and expansion to interfere with each other, such as done in any interferometry experiment we can detect the expansion or contraction. Voila!

And this is exactly what they did! ( on a macroscopic level ) at LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory)

14 September 2015

Two Black Holes with masses of 29 and 36 solar masses merged together some 1.3 Billion light years away.

Two Black Holes colliding is the header animation of the ‘Black Holes are not so Black Series’, in case if you haven’t noticed.

The merger of these two black holes results in the emission of energy equivalent to 3 solar masses as Gravitational Waves.

This signal was seen by both LIGO detectors, in Livingston and Hanford, with a time difference of 7 milliseconds.

And with the measurement of this time difference, physicists have pronounced the existence of Gravitational Waves.

Source

All this is most certainly easily said than done and requires meticulous and extensive research, not to mention highly sensitive instruments.

Had they not have measured this time difference, we might have had to wait for the merger for more massive black holes to collide and maybe even build more sensitive instruments to detect these waves.

And Einstein predicted this a 100 years back!

Mind Blown!

Note: Hope you are able to understand and appreciate the profundity of the discovery done by mankind.

Gravitational waves gives us another way to observe celestial phenomenon. These waves also form when supernovae explode, when black holes collide and during many other space activities.

Detecting them might give us a new perspective into the cosmic events. There is hell of a lot of space that is left unexplored or lies beyond human exuberance and this discovery might shed some light on it. ( like the big bang per se )

The ultimate goal is to understand the fundamental laws of the universe. It is a quest through the oblivion towards a theory of everything.

Although it is unknown how many years/decades it might take to get us there, but these discoveries are markers to getting there.

What is this Image that i see everywhere?

This is not the photograph of the actual event but a simulation run by NASA of two black holes merging.

A2A: Anonymous

How does the actual experimental setup look like ?

The actual experimental setup is a bit complex in its entirety. But the guardian has an elegant image that seems to cover its essence:

A2A: Anonymous