Michelle Thaller
speaker
1,835 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 28 May
Michelle Thaller’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Going all the way back to the mid-90s, I was a postdoc at Caltech.
I wasn't working with this department, but people were starting to measure something called gravitational waves.
And gravitational waves, again, I never thought they'd be able to actually detect these.
The universe is constantly, I mean, every time we move, remember how I said time is different from the top of your head to the bottom of your feet?
As I move, I create gravity.
Gravity actually goes out as a wave into the universe at the speed of light.
Can you detect a wave of gravity?
Well, gravity is actually a curvature of space and time itself.
So you're trying to say, could we detect a wave that's actually made of space and time?
And this project is called LIGO.
And LIGO stands for the Laser Interferometric Gravitational Wave Observatory.
And it started out with two facilities, one in Oregon and one in Louisiana.
And LIGO has two extremely long lasers at a corner, at a right angle.
The lasers, I believe, are four kilometers on a side.
They're huge, right?
A four-kilometer laser.
They want them to be as perfectly the same length as they can.
And then there's a laser beam that bounces back and forth.
And as the laser beam bounces back and forth, if it's exactly the same length, the signal kind of cancels out.
But what happens if there's actually a wave of space and time coming by?
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