Episode 6: Michael Turner discusses LIGO & the detection of gravitational waves

STEM-Talk

Dawn Kernagis and Ken Ford

Natural Sciences, Alternative Health, Science, Health & Fitness, Nutrition

4.7 • 706 Ratings

🗓️ 5 April 2016

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Michael Turner is best known for having coined the term “dark energy” in 1998. A theoretical cosmologist at the University of Chicago, Turner has dedicated his career to researching the Big Bang, dark energy and dark matter. He wrote his Ph.D. thesis on gravitational waves—back in 1978—and nearly four decades later—had a bird’s eye view of their recent discovery. Turner was assistant director of the National Science Foundation (NSF), which funded the development of LIGO, which stand for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. This large-scale physics experiment and observatory, which was led by researchers at MIT and CalTech, discovered, on September 15th, 2015, the existence of gravitational waves via a chirping noise signaling the collision of two black holes a billion light-years away. The scientists announced their discovery on February 11th, 2016. In this episode, Turner interprets this momentous finding, and talks about some of the big player scientists who worked on LIGO.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	I don't always listen to podcasts, but when I do, I listen to STEM talk, interviewing the most interesting people in the world of science and technology.
0:14.2	Stay curious, my friends.
0:20.8	Welcome to STEM Talk. Stem Talk, STEM Talk, STEM Talk.
0:23.6	Stem Talk.
0:25.6	Welcome to STEM Talk, where we introduce you to fascinating people who passionately inhabit
0:30.6	the scientific and technical frontiers of our society.
0:33.6	So today we have a terrific interview with Dr. Michael Turner, who will discuss gravity waves,
0:38.5	the effort to fund and build the LIGO instrument that actually did detect a gravity wave,
0:42.8	and much else.
0:43.8	Michael was the assistant director at the National Science Foundation, responsible for the
0:50.0	development and funding of LIGO.
0:52.3	And without Michael, it's not clear that would have been a LIGO.
0:56.0	And of course, this topic is of great current interest, as it was recently announced that
1:00.0	on September 15th in 2015, LIGO had indeed detected a gravity wave generated during the
1:05.3	final fraction of a second of the merger of two black holes.
1:08.9	100 years ago, Einstein predicted the existence of gravity waves.
1:12.6	However, until now, they had never been observed.
1:15.8	So what exactly is a gravity wave?
1:18.4	Well, our best description of gravity comes from Einstein's general theory of relativity,
1:23.9	which describes it not as a force, as is commonly thought, but as a consequence of the curvature of space-time caused by the uneven distribution of mass.
1:34.3	For example, the sun significantly warps space-time in a way analogous to a bowling ball sitting on a swimming cool cover.
1:42.3	Gravity waves are ripples in the fabric of space-time,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Dawn Kernagis and Ken Ford, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Dawn Kernagis and Ken Ford and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.