Palmer on her interactions with technologists/tech workers:
“These are people who are obsessed with maximizing their impact on the world, she says, but who aren't sure they're going about it the right way. They ask her how they can foresee the repercussions of the things they will do. 'How would the inventors of glitter have imagined that they would poison manatees?' she asked. 'You feel this kind of paralysis.'”
All microscopic creates are kosher. It must be visible to the naked eye to be non-kosher.
According to Kosher law you are supposed to check your water after drawing it, to make sure it has no insects in it. This is the backstory for the test in Judges 7 BTW.
Now in modern times people expect drinking water to be clean. So it was quite a surprise to find visible insects in New York water.
Not true! NYC does not have "famously good water". I found that out when I had to change my counter-top water filter after about one year of use.
It was more than gross. Imagine having to drink that water without the benefit of a water filter. By the way, I don't think water people drink in many restaurants are filtered.
True, "all water filters get very funky after a year", that funkiness is an indication of the true quality of the water that reaches your house or apartment.
That's how you tell what you'd have been drinking without filtration.
You seem really bothered by this. What did you see in your filter after a year? Some tiny amount of algae? Some mineral deposits? Do you prefer your water taste like a chlorinated pool?
> Imagine having to drink that water without the benefit of a water filter.
We don't have to imagine it. Plenty of people do.
Concentrate a year's worth of tiny impurities and you'll wind up a bit of sludge, yes. You'd probably get it even with pure distilled water from dust and microbes in the air.
Chances are you're breathing a lot more nasty in from taxi exhaust and human feces from farts than you're getting from that water.
The water towers on top of NYC buildings tend to not be maintained especially well:
With their quaint barrel-like contours and weathered
cedar-plank sides, rooftop water towers are a constant on
the New York City skyline. And though they may look like
relics of a past age, millions of residents get their
drinking water from the tanks every day.
But inside these rustic-looking vessels, there are often
thick layers of muddy sediment. Many have not been
cleaned or inspected in years. And regulations governing
water tanks are rarely enforced, an examination by The
New York Times shows.
That the water at the source is clean may be true, but you judge the water by its nature at the final destination, because in the final analysis, that is where the grade of quality matters to those who'll be drinking it.
As the end of the article discusses, this means that scientists have a whole new way of observing the universe. What we saw before was mostly along the EM spectrum—radio waves, visible light, etc. This is a way of looking at distortions in the actual fabric of spacetime.
Hard to say what the practical applications will be, but it's akin to asking Galileo what the practical applications of a telescope are. There probably aren't any if you're a 17th-century merchant or something, but a few decades down the line…
It seems to my understanding that the power needed for us measure the gravitational waves needs to be enormous - so big in fact that these colliding events only happen once every 10000 years. Can we use gravitational waves also to measure other stuff and not just super powerful rare events?
The waves are produced by mass accelerating through spacetime, so in theory everything produces them—you, me, a black hole, a neutron star. As physicists learn to tune their instruments, more sources of the waves will be within reach. But you're right: the odds of detecting a signal this strong and clear right off the bat were low. If LIGO hadn't happened to be on when the waves reached it, after 1.3 billion years of traveling through the cosmos, they would've been missed completely. So this was a mix of extraordinary science and extraordinary good luck.
> so big in fact that these colliding events only happen once every 10000 years.
If you read the article you would see that they expect to see events daily within a few years. It will become similar to optical observations with telescopes.
Exactly, and the big thing there is that these accelerations happen conveniently before the interesting events.
When 2 neutron stars circle each other, they'll start sending out gravitational waves. This will start to occur centuries before they collide, but they increase exponentially until the collision happens. Today they cross the detection threshold a few minutes before the actual collision, depending on their size. If we can get that up to a few hours or a few weeks we can use this to point every telescope in the world in the right direction before the flash of the collision happens.
So an immediate application is simple : it gives us advance warnings of large events in the cosmos. This means a lot of instruments dedicated to studying huge-energy events no longer has to look at the entire night sky, or get lucky, but we can actually get a signal before they happen.
In theory, if we can get the instruments accurate enough, we should be able to detect even smaller events like a supernova. A gravitational wave should be generated a few hours before the flash.
“These are people who are obsessed with maximizing their impact on the world, she says, but who aren't sure they're going about it the right way. They ask her how they can foresee the repercussions of the things they will do. 'How would the inventors of glitter have imagined that they would poison manatees?' she asked. 'You feel this kind of paralysis.'”