Sean Carroll
speaker
26,727 appearances
49 recordings
4 series
first heard Apr 2024
last heard 21 Sep
Sean Carroll’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 29 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 6.
Appearances
Basically, because gr two two reasons, actually.
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I gotta get two reasons because they're both sort of equally important here.
podcast-host
The most obvious one is that gravity is super duper weak, okay?
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When we detect signals at LIGO.
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uh the laser interferometric gravitational wave observatory, it's true that they're a billion light years away, so they're very, very far away, but they're created by two black holes, each thirty times the mass of the sun, spiraling into each other.
podcast-host
Okay?
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That is not something you're gonna build in a radio.
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You're not gonna have two thirty solar mass black holes in your radio, or even one solar mass black holes in your radio.
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It's very, very hard, said
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To um generate even a little tiny gravitational wave by moving around ordinary amounts of matter.
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You know, you could you could do the calculation if you wanted to.
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Go look up in a book, um, look up the quadruple formula and ask, you know, if I have a little, if I have a dumbbell and I move it back and forth really, really quickly, how much gravitational waves do I uh create and how easy would it be for them to be detected?
podcast-host
detected.
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Very, very, very, very, very hard.
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Remember LIGO, the amount by which the gravitational waves that they detect actually jiggles the mirror is much less than the size of a single proton.
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they're only able to measure the accumulated effect because they have many, many photons in the lasers, and they look for very, very tiny changes in the location of the crest of the um laser.
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So it's not, again, and that's a four kilometer long tube.
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You're not going to carry around a four kilometer long tube in your pocket either.
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So just as a practical reason, as a practical matter, it just doesn't work.
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But there's another the other aspect, which again is equally important.
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Showing 701–720 of 26,727 · page 36 of 1337
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