Michelle Thaller

speaker

577 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 21 Jul

Michelle Thaller’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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So, oh my God.

Let me just say how impressed I am with gravitational wave detection, because this is something...

When I was a postdoc at Caltech, it was a big deal.

The LIGO project, the Laser Interferometric Gravitational Wave Observatory, was something that Caltech was involved in.

And I honestly, I talk about my skeptical nature.

I was like, they're never going to detect these bastards.

I mean, this is really... So LIGO, at the time, there were two facilities.

There are now more.

You've got a laser that's about two miles long.

and another one going out in a 90 degree angle.

There we go, in a corner.

So two miles each direction.

And those lasers are supposed to be exactly the same length.

Imagine trying to calibrate that.

And so the lasers are going back and forth, bouncing around.

And then if a gravitational wave comes by, a gravitational wave is literally a wave in space and time.

And so space contracts in one direction and all of a sudden the two lasers are no longer the same length.

They're different because space contracted.

And so the person with the question is absolutely right.

That's what gravitational waves do.

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