Gravitational waves, overflowing classroom Amaldi Professor Fulvio … – The Messenger

The Aula Amaldi is packed with students and colleagues. Professor Fulvio Ricci is to present the important results that saw him protagonist of the discovery of gravitational waves with a large international group. A place chosen not by chance saw that the wisdom of the Physics Department was involved in the seventies, thanks to Edoardo Amaldi and Guido Pizzella (in court), the first Italian group of gravitational wave research.

Before the ‘ event, Ricci replied to some question on the implications of such a discovery. How it will change the life of the planet Earth? And that concept of time we will have from now on?

 
 

“This allows us to see – explains Ricci – beyond the barrier of those phenomena that do not emit electromagnetic radiation. This is the fundamental issue: the fact that we can feel things through the messenger tractional – light and radiation elettomagnetiche – we could not see. and now we see in depth. the event we have discovered is a three billion light-years. by improving the sensitivity of the instruments at our disposal we will see even better what is It happened in the past and be able to reconstruct what happened so deep in the past. and if we succeed with a great effort to be able to measure the noise of gravitational bottom, the equivalent of the electromagnetic background noise, this would be a fundamental step.

Because when you take measurements with electromagnetic cosmic background radiation arriving about 300,000 years after the birth of the universe. If we instead we could see the gravitational signal, with more sensitive instruments anchora, we could go back up to fractions of a second after the universe was born. Something extraordinary. We would know what were the conditions of matter-energy at a time when there was a frightening concentration and then the explosion that created the universe and all of us. “

You can think of travel in time?

“I do not know. It is a projection that I leave to the most imaginative theorizing. I am an experimental physicist. We are still in its infancy. I often like to say (adds ironically) that surely the government we will place a tax on its own as it did for electricity. Seriously, there are two levels of discovery: on the one hand it’s twenty-year research developments. Now we can better understand the nature, be in harmony with it and thus enhance our lives. And then there are the technological implications. To do all this we made a frightening technological effort, made extreme conditions in the preparation of the experimental apparatus that already have big news event marketing. Such as mirrors of the interferometers: the mirror that reflects better in the world is to Virgo, who work mainly Italian and French and now also Dutch, Polish and Hungarian. The second thing is that we broke down the seismic noise. We are able to keep quiet the mirror regardless of the movement of soil. And this is an Italian success story. These are definitely some of the fallout. As it has happened in the rest of the Apollo mission to the moon for which they were invented the drill and the portable vacuum cleaner. And then a new type of markers. As well as the web invented by CERN. Today, however, you need more powerful computers to analyze data. Us to pull out of this result, we used 50 million hours of CPU. There were so many rumors before our discovery, but we expect to give it: because the real problem was to provide accurate data.

         

             Monday, February 15, 2016, 19:25 – Last Updated: 19:42
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