What with dark energy and dark matter - the discovery of which seems to have been in the last couple of decades - seemed to coincide with my long held but ignorant belief that somehow gravity was “different” than the other forces, and that the failure to find gravitational waves would validate that hunch, and that DE and DM would “disappear” once we had a more informed view of gravitational forces and be explained away as sort of “background misperceptions” of gravitation effects over large distances we hadn’t predicted or understood. This turns out not to be the case! These are amazing interferometers and the math involved on such tiny perturbations must be astonishing. The more astonishing/disturbing thing is thinking about how much gravitational energy is being “held” right now as propagating waves.
I still feel like i have some weird ignorant leap-of-faith hunch about gravity due to “potential energy” in gravitational fields, but i don’t have the skills nor career to pursue that hunch.
Right now they discovered - possibly - the existence of an enormous “drift” in all of the visible universe toward a direction. It’s very very possible we could use this angular pull to calculate the actual size of the universe (rather than the visible universe) which would be pretty incredible in and of itself!
One thing about this is rotation of th galaxies. Apparently galaxies rotate like a “record” as seen from above and this wouldn’t be possible (as I’ve read) without dark matter within the galaxy pulling everything else along. Supposedly what they should see is everything rotating at the same speed (more or less) and therefore the “arms” of galaxies being ripped apart as the “ends” trail the “heads”.
I suppose this could also go in the “What Could Possibly Go Wrong” thread since an obvious application is for stealth surveillance or even assassination. But it’s a pretty awesome technology with promise for less terrible things, like studying animals in natural surroundings or placing beneficial technology where people haven’t been willing to accept it for aesthetic reasons.
