Alien Intentions

Who doesn’t love a good conspiracy theory? From Bigfoot to area 51’s spaceships, our tinfoil hats quake at the mere thought of there being more layers and mystery to this world than the people in charge would have us believe. Like a really mystical onion.

And the crème de la crazy of these theories is, of course, aliens! With so many reports of aliens abducting people and putting stuff waaaay up their butts in the name of science, you’d be forgiven for fearing the little green men which so frequently grace the less credible among us with their presence.

But these “encounters” do bring to light an important question. The line between science fiction and fact is becoming increasingly blurred as time goes on, and with projects such as the James Webb space telescope, we may even uncover evidence of extra-terrestrial life as soon as a few years from now. So, on the off chance they decide to drop in on us first, what will they want?

Let’s get the big one out of the way, Earth becomes the target for an alien civilisation hell bent on expanding their empire like the Romans or Vikings, they gun down all the humans with futuristic weapons and claim Earth for its resources or whatever. Okay so ignoring the fairly evident fact that a civilisation this warlike would probably tear itself into pieces before it ever made it to space anyway, what the hell is the point? Unless they take an obtuse pleasure in mass murder, there is literally no reason for them to risk so much against the millions of guns and missiles that would be pointed at them. Let’s face it, if there’s one thing humans are good at, it’s senseless violence, and it just wouldn’t be worth the risk for the measly amount of minerals that would be available to them.

In fact, they’d be able to acquire larger amounts of these minerals in the asteroid belt without the hassle of Earth’s gravity field. As far as we know we’re not in an important position in the galaxy either, our planet is an average size and age surrounding a perfectly normal star with minimal amount of an extremely ordinary amount of resources in our atmosphere and crust. Even plate tectonics probably aren’t anything special! It can’t be anything about the physical structure of Earth that’s significant to them.

So, let’s ask, why does anyone ever go to a new place? Exploration always has a motive of some sort, be it financial or scientific or something else, and we must assume that what would inspire aliens to come to Earth would be unique and specific to Earth. The only thing that logically makes sense is the life on Earth and its intelligent creations. So, if aliens came to Earth it would have at least something to do with us and our culture.

If they are interested in us, then we can assume by balance of probability that it is probably scientific. Despite what Hollywood would have you believe, we could not be used as breeding partners for them easily due to the genetic rifts rendering the DNA unable to fit together properly. Although it’s worth noting they could probably use us as a host for eggs, like in the Alien and Predator films, species doesn’t really matter for that. But that opens up a whole new can of worms on the types of creatures than can be born by such methods and if they are capable of evolving for intelligence, which as a physics student, I am entirely unqualified to give an accurate opinion on.

However, a species able to travel interstellar distances is far more likely to be interested in the science of our planet, learning about millions of species and possibly entirely new geologies, psychology and chemistry than they would be used to. Although they’d probably surpass us in physics and maths, scientifically speaking, there is no downside to exploration. You only gain more knowledge and data, expanding your horizons with new accomplishments.

If they do come, it would be almost certainly due to their desire to see our science and culture and learn as much as possible. However I feel obligated to point out that my optimistic outlook on this may be largely due to my human… nature.

Thanks for reading!! I’m hoping to post on a monthly schedule once I’m back at uni so this blog should get pretty regular again with any luck, Talk to you guys soon!! 😊

Black Panther - The Significance

So here's the other part of my Black Panther post, if for some reason, like me, you're interested in the cultural accuracy, then I recommend you go and look at my last post in which I deconstructed the trailer, but for this section I'm going to look at the cinematography surrounding this incredible character, I'll also explain why it is such an important film in the western world, so let's get on with it.

Although the trailer for Black Panther showcased the thought that went into the film beautifully, it didn't do a fantastic job at drawing in the audience, throughout we see a lot of mystery and a lot of conflict, but very little explanation on either account. Even the reference to El Dorado in the first scene of the trailer would need a decent sized scene to explain the parallels of lost cities and precious metals (Vibranium as opposed to gold), which the trailer just doesn't supply. Now I understand that the fact that Wakanada is a mysterious place is a major theme and the trailer is trying to mirror this, but it's very easy to give a film mystery and explain a necessary amount as well. Then again this is a teaser trailer and only establishing the overall theme so maybe I'm being too harsh here.

African culture has been criminally underused throughout Hollywood. (Ooh topical with the many recent racism claims!), to see this just think about what we see in modern films! The Greek myths have been done to death, with films involving various gods, heroes, legends and the like taking centre stage over the past few years, most recently being Wonder Woman featuring her amazon origins (brilliant film by the way). Also in the process of being milked are the Norse myths, you'd be hard pressed to find someone who hadn't heard of Odin the all father or Thor these days. Native american burial ground are such an overused trope that they're now a joke in pop culture and looking back a couple of generations we see the enormous overuse of Asian culture with ridiculous amounts of marital art and samurai movies (okay maybe not all of Asia is equally represented either). And of course, European and American history has been run into the ground over and over again.

But one of the most notable exceptions to this list is THE WHOLE FUCKING CONTINENT OF AFRICA!!

T'Challa is not amused

Being the second largest and second most populated continent on Earth you'd think it would attract a bit of attention. With 10% of the population following traditional religions and an estimated up to 3000 tribes, one would assume that Hollywood would be able to find a hell of a lot of inspiration among its incredibly diverse culture. However, possibly due to remaining stigmas from hundreds of years of racism, or the European purge of African history, extremely few films take any inspiration from Africa and this is the point in time where that could change.

The ridiculous amount of unexplored concepts makes for a goldmine of original ideas, something which Hollywood and Western media is severely lacking currently, and there are several points about this film which dramatically increase its appeal to a far larger audience. Firstly the inspired fusion between the enormously popular sci fi genre with these underused concepts means it could be everything Indiana Jones 4 tried to be!

Secondly, it has what I like to call the nostalgia factor. Several decades ago there was a boom in adventure films, when the classics such as Indiana Jones and The Mummy rocked the world of our parents. If this is done correctly, the parallels of El Dorado could make for an adventure like concept in the film and the atmosphere of mystery and intrigue similar to what was inspired by the greats. The fact that it's also drawing inspiration from the current geopolitical mess that is our worldwide political system should also make it an interesting watch.

Finally, the fact that it's a Marvel film alone should make it extremely successful. In order to prove this, I took the data from IMDb on gross income for all marvel films since phase 1 (in USD) and compiled it into a handy chart of estimated budget (I couldn't find actual figures for budgets or breakdowns anywhere), profit and the profit to budget ratio.

So the black line is the average profit : budget ratio, scaled so that 400 million is breaking even (1:1). Although it's skewed because of the gaps between the phases and my Microsoft Word refusing to ignore them, it's still pretty obvious how successful, with the only loss being on The Incredible Hulk. And it's also worth noting that Guardians of the Galaxy 1 and Ant Man, which featured far more obscure characters than Black Panther did ridiculously well. Anyone who's seen them knows that if there's one thing that Marvel do well, it's pull off the unusual incredibly. Also worth noting that Captain America Civil War, where they introduced the character, has extremely high profit and therefore viewers.

And so that's basically everything I have to say, if this film is a major success, it could be a major turning point in Hollywood inspiring films with origins in lesser known cultures and a far more interesting world of cinema than the endless cycle of remakes and indie films that it seems to be tending towards at the moment. Thanks for reading!! Au Revoir!

Image credit goes to Marvel.

Black Panther - A Cultural Perspective

Long time no read! On the off chance that I had any regular readers beforehand, and on the even offer chance that any of them are still around, I'd like to apologise but what with university, I've barely had time for anything for months now. But from this day forth, that changes!

Thanks to an interesting debate that I had with a friend, I've decided to make my extraordinarily grand return a two part series on the upcoming Black Panther film. The first part (this one), will be on analysing the cultural accuracy and inspirations of the black panther film from the posters and trailers we currently have. The second part (not this one), will be to analyse the cinematography and hopefully will give a broader view on trends throughout the marvel universe, although that one need a lot more research so I've decided to do the easier one first!

So lets dig in, although if you haven't seen the trailer yet, I'll embed it here so you can have some idea what I'm on about.

 

From what we know so far, the film deals with the immediate aftermath of Captain America Civil War including a power struggle in Wakanda as with T'Chaka dead, several of the local tribal leaders challenge T'Challa for the throne and also how Wakanda interacts with the rest of the world as it goes from a country that keeps to itself (think super badass Switzerland), to being forced into the spotlight after recent events, note the trailer song.

This is almost definitely what will lead others to fight T'Challa for the throne as African culture is usually very tradition focused and so such a large change in such a powerful country could not go unchallenged, but I'm getting off topic, back to the matter at hand.

Western pop culture (I'm looking at you Hollywood) almost exclusively forgets that Africa has an incredibly rich and diverse culture. This isn't exactly helped by the overshadowing nation of Egypt, or the atrocities committed against African culture by settling Europeans, but provided that Marvel pulls this off perfectly, they may well be in a position to change all that and put Africa into the spotlight, giving its incredible culture the recognition it deserves.

In order to understand the film's inspiration, we should first understand the inspiration of the character, the character originated in the 1960s at the heart of the black rights movements in America. One group in Alabama took the panther, to be their mascot and became known as the black panther group, and when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby read about this group in a newspaper article in 1966, they made the choice to take a black superhero that they had been toying with the idea for, the coal tiger, and incorporate him into The Fantastic 4 #52 under the new name - Black Panther.

But how does the film compare to actual African culture? Well in order to do that we should look at the trailer in more detail. Firstly we get this stunning scene of T'Challa disembarking his jet, surrounded by people in vibrant outfits and frankly incredible scenery. And all of this is accurate to real life! The costumes were designed by Ruth Carter (known for Roots and Malcolm X) who has in interviews commented that she looked to the Masai and the Suri tribes for inspiration.

Of course the fact that Wakanda is a significantly more advanced country than any that exist today adds another element of challenge, especially since the designs all seem to be drawn from very old cultures, but it looks like the costume designers did a fantastic job of preserving the vibrant colours and traditional forms of clothing while using futuristic looking materials. We can also see they still have futuristic but familiar looking spears as the weapon of choice, just like may of today's African tribes.

In a shot further on in the trailer, we see a gorgeous aerial view of the city, and honestly the design is flawless, as well as looking like the sort of high rise you'd see in Japan or Korea, it's complete with the African propensity for circular structures which we see in tribal huts and buildings today, along with even having traditional straw roofs on some of these high rise buildings! Even the infrastructure is laid out in a way so that it is efficient and away from the ground, which appears to be covered in plants, looking almost like a rainforest, echoing the huge respect for nature prevalent in African culture.

In addition to this, there is evidence in the trailer and descriptions that it is a nation ruling over several tribes who occupy different regions of Wakanda, echoing the African social structure of old and finally we have the poster released for the film. This poster caused the internet to reel with stupidity even more so than usual when it was released, with racist conspiracy theorists running rampant, claiming that it looked overly militant and that white genocide was coming.

As entertaining as it was to read about, I personally think that it's on the same level of stupid as flat earth theorists. Because while it has also been compared to images of American black rights leaders, which is at least a bit less insulting, I would like to point out that there are only so many ways to sit on a throne. Personally I think that it looks similar in style to portraits of monarchs from European history. This is also pretty likely as there is a lot of inspiration to draw from in these easy accessible images of kings and queens, and also it would be a nice nod from the designers of the poster to the associations of these sorts of portraits with royalty and developed societies.

I'd also like to point out some more examples of the incredible attention to detail in this poster. The juxtaposition of the beautifully designed hall to the dirt on which the throne sits implies a certain level of humbleness and connection to nature. The throne's large prongs resemble claws and finally the text on the throne and walls appear to be a more modernised version of the traditional Adinkra symbols used throughout Africa (also worth noting they are carved on stools for rituals).


So I hope you all enjoyed this whistle stop tour of African culture in what's sure to be a great film. Next week I'll try to analyse the cinematography of this and what it could mean for the Marvel universe and for cinema itself (cue ominous noise). Anyways - Peace out!

So that I don't get sued - All image credit goes to Marvel Studios/Disney and no copyright infringement intended, thanks to my debate buddy Adam for the idea.

How did we Get Here? Mk.2 (Part 1)

After a stretched out and stressful exam period I'm finally back!! Hi again guys!

I realise I've kept you all waiting for far too long since the last post and so I've spent a few days reading up and researching to make this a good one, some of you may remember that a few months ago I released a post called "How did we get here" which told the story of how humans reached all the far corners of the Earth. Now this was back when I was revising for exams and I had no time so honestly, although the routes and general information is right, there's probably one or two mistakes, and I personally feel that it was a bit weak and lacked something.

But today I will correct that. Having spent days reading and watching various YouTube content, I'm fairly proud to present How did we Get Here Mk 2: Evolution.

To call the story of human evolution long is one hell of an understatement. Because technically our story starts as soon as the big bang happened. But let's fast forward a little to Africa in the Miocene era, a brief 13 million years ago, because this is where the story of the homo genus begins.

A lot of people say that we evolved from chimps, which is completely wrong. However, we did evolve from monkeys, somewhere between 13 million years ago (the Miocene era) and 4 million years ago (the Pliocene era), an ancient monkey species split into different species, the most notable of which are the homo (human) genus and the pan (chimpanzee) genus. So we didn't evolve from chimps, we merely evolved alongside them. It is thought to have been a long and difficult process but eventually resulted in the two species diverging largely by the time that the Pliocene era rolled around, but first, an important ancestor. Sahelanthropus.

Sahelanthropus is an important discovery because it is such an early point on our timeline. We have found extremely few parts of it, a partial skull (called Toumaï, "hope of life" in the dialect indigenous to the region of Chad where it was discovered), some jawbone and some teeth. While this isn't much to go on, we have managed to discover that it had a brain around 4 times smaller than our own and it has so many chimp - like characteristic that some experts argue that it should be classed as a member of the pan genus.
(see right - a cast of a Sahelanthropus skull)

At the moment Sahelanthropus' role remains a mystery mainly because we don't know when the human - chimp divergence occurred. Therefore, there is the possibility that it could be an early homo, an early pan or a common ancestor of both of them. As there is no general consensus yet, there's very little that I can say so let's fast forward to the late Miocene 6.1 million years ago to Orrorin, a controversial and disputed potential human.

Orrorin tugenensis (or just Orrorin) was postulated to be a species of homininae. Generally, the australopithecines are considered to be the human ancestors, but recently this has threatened their position by being a viable candidate for an even earlier ancestor of humans between the australopithecines and the human - chimp divergence. The fossils which we have discovered (pictured left) are currently being held in a secret bank vault in Nairobi, Kenya.

Now let’s get back to people, specifically, Australopithecus afarensis. This is one of the longest lived species of early human - like apes lasting from 3.85 to 2.95 million years ago. It is also extremely famous because of its discovery in 1974 where it was instantly assumed to be the missing link between the homo genus and the monkey like ancestors. The fossil discovered was nicknamed "Lucy" by Donald Johanson, after the Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds". This fossil turned out to be several hundred pieces of bone, making up 40 percent of the Australopithecus's skeleton and has been toured around the US although it now resides in the National Museum of Ethiopia.

This early hominin species lived primarily in Eastern Africa, and although it may have ventured a little according to fossil record, it didn't really seem to be in any hurry to colonise the world. This however changed with later species as Australopithecus Africanus (the first early apelike species to be classified as hominin) was discovered at 4 separate sites in southern Africa, the most famous of which being Taung in 1924 at which the "Taung Child" was discovered. A large variety of Australopithecus species eventually evolved and spread out around Africa where they continued to develop. However, it is important to note that these creatures were nothing like the humans we see today or even the cavemen that we picture, being our evolutionary predecessors, they were still much closer to apes than the homo genus.

So this seems to be where I'm going to leave off, to summarise, creatures like Sahelanthropus existed before the homo - pan divergence, although as we don't know exactly what species diverged or when it happened, we have trouble pinning down the exact time and saying what came when for this time period. Eventually, the species did in fact separate and evolved into animals such as Orrorin tugenensis which might have been a direct ancestor of humans and also the Australopithecus genus who we currently think were our direct predecessor. Eventually the Australopithecus genus spread out across large sections of Africa as the Pliocene era was coming to a close about 3 million years ago.

This post is getting fairly long and I still have about 2 or 3 million years of human evolution to cover so I'm going to leave this post here for now and hopefully release part 2 in the next day or two. I hope you guys enjoyed reading this, it feels pretty great to be back!

See you soon!

Daredevil

Superheroes are designed to be idols, I mean that's the whole idea right? They are characters able to do impossible things that exceed normal human ability and so we all think "Woah I'd love to be like that " and suddenly they become an aspiration, an idol.

And its pretty evident how trial and error has been used and new characters have been created to refine this process. I mean back at the dawn of comics you've got superman in 1938 - A man who is today criticised as overpowered simply because he can do everything, fly, shoot lasers, move fast, super strength; if you think of a power, odds are that he could manipulate his own extensive powers in one way or another to have that power. So there we have the prototype, appealing to a large audience.

Of course as time went on you get more and more superheroes made and each one is made to appeal to a particular audience so their morals, backstory, costume, weapons of choice and such are all moulded and designed to resonate with particular people. I mean you've got characters like the fantastic four for those who like science, more gothic characters like batman and punisher, and Deadpool to appeal to that little bit of crazy in all of us.

But one which I think is possibly my favourite character and origin story in the marvel or DC universes is Daredevil. I mean this is a superhero who is completely BLIND! Now that is an interesting choice.

Before I go any further with this I just want to make clear that yes this post is because I just finished watching daredevil season 2, no I am not just saying that he is awesome because I am currently obsessing over it and I am going to explain where necessary as if the reader has no knowledge of the subject so sorry to any seasoned marvel veterans reading!

So the premise of daredevil is that he loses his sight in a horrible accident when he pushes a man out of the way of an oncoming lorry. However due to radioactive exposure and the fact that he has gone blind, his other senses are heightened extraordinarily. 

Now this is all well and good but I want to ask just how realistic is this idea? You hear stories of people being able to hear better and use clicking like sonar to see after sight loss but how much science is there really behind these cases.

Lets get into it then.

So firstly this heightening of the senses is not fiction, it is 100% fact. In fact a paper published in the journal of neuroscience also provides an explanation.

It is shown that when a person goes blind, the part of the brain that would normally process visual data doesn't just go to waste, it is effectively rewired in order to process information from the other senses. So people without sight gain a greater capacity to use their other senses right off the bat thanks to this phenomena known as cross-modal neuroplasticity.

Then there's the fact that humans are nothing if not adaptable. Anyone can relate that after doing any one task for a time, they pick up small things about it and learn how to do that task better, improving at it as they practise. This is called learned behaviour and is how we learn how to do anything. It also means that even people blinded in later life will still learn to use their their other senses more acutely.




And this effect isn't even one way! People who go deaf experience a similar effect which makes them less susceptible to optical illusions and gives them better processing of visual information.

But what is the extent of these abilities? It is hard to say for certain because everybody is different and few large scale studies have been done to test this. There are however several spectacular cases in which people are actually able to navigate in a similar way to bats and dolphins by using clicking noises to create a sort of sonar, I'm including a video below of a man called Daniel Kish who has improved his ability enough to actually be able to ride a bike. 

So there you have it! That is why daredevil isn't as completely bizzare as it seems, even if it is a little exaggerated, it is based on hard science. Even if blind people can't her people's heartbeats or fight crime with their super senses, they are still able to train themselves even to the extent to being able to see with sound, which is a pretty incredible thing.

Once again thank you all for reading now if you'll excuse me Game of Thrones beckons....

How did we get here?

People are everywhere. Seriously we're like a bloody ants nest, every continent, every mountain, every habitable area. We're all over it. Even in place where humans really shouldn't be able to survive like the icy depths of Siberia or the scorching dunes of the Sahara, there's always a group of humans to be found just hanging in there at the limits of survival.

But how did we get here? It's an age old question that has perplexed even the greatest minds among us, with some looking to nature, some looking to religion and some even looking to the expanse of space above us! So today I'm going to talk about how humans spread all across the world from our humble beginnings in Africa! (You weren't expecting that were you?)

One thing that most people agree on in this area is that we came from Africa. Even among deeply religious people it is often accepted purely due to the extensive fossil evidence that shows our ancestors living there 2 million years ago. So humans popped up in Africa, and by humans I mean something like Australopithecus which wasn't really human but was nearly there.

Now as anyone who has been out in the wilderness or played a video game will know, humans have a tendency to explore. Whether its because they got hungry, curious or there just wasn't enough room, these early humans began to spread out and settle all over Africa. At the same time there were a lot of potential candidates for humanity existing at the same time, three of the largest being homo erectus, homo neanderthalensis and of course, homo sapien.

Homo erectus did quite well for itself, although it was really more of a stepping stone to more advanced species. Despite the fact that its brain wasn't enormous and it was only the first species to walk on two legs, it still managed to inhabit basically all of Africa and then eventually spread to what are now Saudi Arabia and Spain. From Saudi Arabia, they spread all throughout the middle East and Southern Asia, eventually even managing to get about halfway through Indonesia which is a pretty mazing achievement. This map shows their progress:


Next up is probably the most famous other human - the Neanderthal (homo neanderthalensis). These guys were much closer to modern humans in terms of evolution, in fact their DNA is less than 0.5% different to ours and there was a lot of cross breeding between the two species. In fact they are so close to our own species that they are often classified as a subspecies of homo sapiens. Ultimately, however, the dominant genome of homo sapiens caused the Neanderthals to die out either through absorption by interbreeding or maybe violent conflict. Either way they're not about any more and nobody is certain as to why.

But how far did Neanderthals get? They left Africa through Saudi Arabia much like homo erectus, but they took a completely different direction afterwards. Instead of sticking to warmer climates around the equator, they headed for what is now central Europe and north western Asia. However there is one catch that didn't really effect our upright amigos in the equatorial regions, the Earth was in the middle of a little cold period at that time. An ice age in fact.

This ice age limited the distance that the Neanderthals could go North as even areas further south than Russia could have been completely uninhabitable due to the cold. This pushed them further West towards the popular holiday destinations of Spain, France, Portugal and the like. They did this a long time before humans were even considering it and were habiting a big section of Eurasia  This is the sort of region they ended up in:

So homo erectus did surprisingly well for such an early species and Neanderthals probably could have done better if it wasn't for the pesky glaciers all over the place, but what about homo sapiens? How did we get here and there and everywhere?

We started off just like everyone else, in Africa. And in what was probably some sort of tradition at this point, we took the route out though the middle east and Spain. However instead of going anywhere really new, we just sort of hung around with our relatives in the areas already established as habitats, south Eurasia, Africa and the Philippines.

However shock and horror, about 60000 years ago there was another cold snap, but this one was pretty big and effected everything. It is thought that this cold snap reduced the population of humanity to under 10000, meaning we were hanging by a thread. However this ended and conditions eventually began to finally improve.

Branching out from the Philippines, humans made the next big leap in migration by managing to get to Australia and Indonesia, forming colonies about 50000 years ago.

When the ice age finally began to recede, a little after 50000 years ago, settlers finally began to poise themselves to explore and settle in the cold climates of northern Europe and Asia, A feat that was previously impossible due to climates that would freeze everyone really really fast.

However, a group of Asian homo sapiens then made the next great leap about 20000 years ago where they discovered an enormous ice bridge in north East Russia. In crossing it they became the first people on Earth to reach the Americas and colonies formed either side of the Rockies, eventually stretching down through Mexico to South America as well.

Of course there are places like Madagascar and New Zealand which we didn't colonise for a long time later until society had developed enough to invent boats, However from then on out, humans had colonies and civilisations on every continent except Antarctica. They which thrived and grew and squabbled and divided themselves with religion and politics and war and finally became this divided mess that we're living in today.

Humans used to be united, maybe not on an individual scale, but as a species, they would devote themselves to the cause of survival even managing to bounce back from being reduced to a few thousand in a cold, perilous world with nothing but their own brains to keep them alive. One day maybe we will put aside the borders and selfishness that divides out world currently and learn to live live this again but for the moment, lets just enjoy the good in this strange, broken world.

Thanks again for reading guys :) see you soon!

Why Gravitational Waves are Relativily Amazing!

Today I'm going to write about gravity. And not the ironically scientifically inaccurate film of 2013, but the enormous scientific breakthrough that was announced earlier today.

For those of you who haven't heard yet, it was announced earlier today that gravitational waves have been picked up by the LIGO detector in The United States. I was originally intending to do a post on either how we learn or why plants are green today but lets face it, I'm not just going to sit around and write about biology while my favourite science has made what is debatably the biggest discovery since the Higgs boson.

So I guess I should start by explaining what gravitational waves are and why they are so important? Okay. 100 years ago a pretty smart guy called Einstein realised why nobody could detect variations in the speed of light no matter how hard they tried, because it was a universal constant. And he postulated that that in order to keep it constant, even time and space would bend. And so, the theory of general relativity was born.

The theory that says that space and time are one thing called space-time, like the fabric of the universe and we're all like little bugs wandering around on our speck of dirt. However space-time isn't constant, as I said its like a big piece of fabric, and as a result, it is able to stretch, contract and twist. The thing that causes it to stretch and contract is mass. Yeah that's right, anything with mass, even you, warps the space around it. When it warps this space, things around it are drawn towards it and so it gives the illusion of gravity.

So what has this got to do with gravitational waves? Einstein predicted a lot of amazing things with his theory of relativity, gravitational lensing, Frame dragging, time dilation etc. And amazingly each one of these has been tested and proven experimentally one by one. Except for gravitational waves.

Gravitational waves are when an enormous amount of mass disturbs the fabric of space-time enough to cause what are effectively ripples of physical space. This can only happen however, if the object moves in an uneven way. A circular object spinning doesn't produce them, but a non uniform supernova explosion does. They are in the form of what are known as quadrupole waves, waves which oscillate in a similar way to a slinky, except its in three dimensions and instead of a string stretching, its space. So gravitational waves are like ripples in a pond, but in the universe itself.

So why can't we detect them? Even the biggest gravitational collisions caused by neutron stars merging, super massive black holes and even hypernova explosions, produce waves which only change the size of our space on Earth by a factor of 10^-21. And such extreme events are enormously rare across the universe! So in order to detect these, we need an extremely long piece of space to measure, and something to measure it against which is smaller than the fluctuation in space, as well as a really rare powerful event to happen a long time ago in a galaxy far far away (they travel at the speed of light but still might take millions of years to reach us).

How did we do it then? We're physicists so lasers are the obvious go-to answer. So physicists in America built the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) with two detectors, one in Washington, and one in Louisiana. In each one, a singular laser beam is split into two and travel down two tunnels which are perpendicular to each other. At the end of the tunnel they are reflected off a mirror and come straight back. As the waves have travelled equal distances, they should come back together to make a wave which  exactly the same as the initial one, however if a gravitational wave passed through the system, it would mean that the space would contract in one direction more than the other and so the resulting beam would be different to the one that set off to begin with.

On September 14th 2015, a signal was measured which, looked promising, and various observatories were consulted to look for astronomical events which could have been the cause. This signal is now known to coincide with  the collision of 2 super-massive black hole which produced more than 500 times the energy of the starts in the visible universe. The statistical evidence also shows that the chance of it being a fluke are roughly 1 in 6 million. So in summary well done them!

This marks a new age for astronomy, now that we know that gravitational waves exist and can be detected, it could pave the way towards gravitational telescopes which would let us image our universe in entirely new ways! In fact the LISA project is currently looking at how to build  gravitational wave detector in space because, although the eventual goal for these devices is astronomy, they have  long way to go yet.

It is a true demonstration of human perseverance and intelligence that, 100 years after we predict something, we are still searching for it until we find it. Personally my favourite quote is by Isaac Newton - "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." and this has never been more evident than now. The work we do today was inspired by Albert Einstein, a Giant, like Newton and Pythagoras before him, and we can only hope that one day, maybe even we may be held in such regard.

Once again thank you all so much for reading and see you next time :)