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AnonymousInactiveHelp test Einstein’s theories @
home
Software sifts through gravity’s mysteries
Physicists kick off Einstein @ Home
campaignWASHINGTON-Physicists on Saturday kicked off a campaign to enlist
Internet users to help solve one of the biggest unresolved questions surrounding
Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity: Do gravitational waves really
exist?Eighty-nine years
ago, Einstein predicted that such ripples in space-time should be set off by
dramatic cosmic events, such as black hole collisions and stellar explosions.
But to date, no one has ever detected the waves. Two sprawling observatories
have been set up in the United States and Germany to look for them, but
analyzing the data from those efforts requires an enormous amount of computing
power.That’s where
Einstein @ Home enters the picture.The
screensaver-type program was released to the public on Saturday in conjunction
with the American Physical Society’s World Year of Physics celebration, marking
the centennial of Einstein’s initial theories on relativity and quantum
physics.Einstein @ Home
uses the same basic platform as SETI @ Home, which signed up more than 5 million
computers to sift through radio telescope data for signs of extraterrestrial
intelligence. In this case, users can search through data from the U.S. Laser
Interferometry Gravitational Wave Observatory, or LIGO, as well as the
British-German GEO-600 gravity-wave observatory. The program looks for the faint
signals coming from very dense, rapidly rotating compact quark stars and neutron
stars — prime candidates for the continuous emission of gravity
waves.Both observatories
have only recently undergone enough fine-tuning to detect the signals, if they
exist.What waves could
tell
Detecting the waves would allow for deeper testing of Einstein’s
theories and open up an entirely new avenue for research into the workings of
our universe, LIGO director Barry Barish said.“Does gravity
really travel at the speed of light, or is it different from electromagnetic
waves?” he asked. “That could be checked, for example, if we saw a signal from
these gamma-ray bursts. If we see light traveling a certain speed, you could
ask, ‘Does the gravitational signal arrive at the same time, earlier,
later?'”In the longer term,
gravity-wave study could provide a “completely different way of looking at the
universe,” Barish said. Such research could help unravel the mysteries of dark
matter and dark energy — features that dominate our cosmos but are not yet
adequately explained by Einstein’s theories.“The most romantic
goal is to be to able to see signals from the early universe with gravitational
waves,” Barish said. “They would be the most valuable of all, because they’re
not absorbed like photons or electromagnetic waves are. It allows you to probe
back to the very first instants after the Big Bang.”On the other hand,
if LIGO and GEO-600 do not detect gravitational waves, that would cast a cloud
of uncertainty over general relativity and our understanding of gravity
itself.Einstein @ Home’s
public unveiling came during the American Association for the Advancement of
Science’s annual meeting in Washington.The software has
been in beta testing for months, with 10,000 users signed up in advance of
Saturday’s public release, said the project’s principal investigator, Bruce
Allen of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. Allen hopes hundreds of
thousands of users will join the project.Versions are
available for Windows, Linux and Mac operating systems. Once the program is
installed — a process that should take no more than a couple of minutes — it
downloads data in the background automatically from a central computer, analyzes
the data while a user’s computer is idle, then uploads the results back to the
server.Each 12-megabyte
chunk of data will be analyzed three times, and the most intriguing signals will
be flagged for the project scientists. -
AuthorFebruary 22, 2005 at 10:44 AM
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