World Science Scholars

1.6 From Einstein to LIGO

discussion Discussion
Note

Discussions are a place where registered users can click on Reply to share their ideas and questions that follow from the material we’re covering. All users can view the conversation and indicate their like or dislike for a specific comment.

Viewing 54 reply threads
    • In the fifth Office Hours video in this module, Dr. Weiss tells the story of how he came up with the core idea behind LIGO. He did not, in fact, conceive of LIGO as part of his research, but as a thought experiment, he found helpful when teaching general relativity, a subject he admits he did not understand well at the time. Do you find that teaching a topic to someone else helps you to better understand it yourself? Have you ever been inspired with a great idea by trying to teach someone else? Explain your answers.

    • I do indeed believe that teaching content to other individuals reinforces your learning. By being able to express your ideas and interpret what you have learnt, you often come to deeper realisations, new ideas, or better interpretations of the works that you have studied, leading you down a path of deeper research.

    • Teaching is the best way of learning . while we teach anything we are studying it once again and we will get a lot of ideas about it and much more. and sometimes it may change the whole concept.

    • Attachments:
      You must be logged in to view attached files.
    • Yes, but it’s not just formal teaching. I find that anytime I try to explain my thoughts to someone that has a slightly different perspective than mine (so almost everyone), my thought process is expanded. If you are trying to get your pint across to someone, you naturally force yourself to see things from what you believe to be their point of reference. I believe this is why teaching is among many activities that provides a deeper understanding.

    • It’s called the “casual observer” effect.

    • Yes I find that explaining topics to my peers helps me understand what I’m studying better

    • Thanks to all the take the time to put all of this together.

    • Yes, many studies claim that teaching something helps you understand it better, it is the most effective way to learn something. From my own experience, it is a very good way to learn and help others.

    • Yes indeed, I myself have experienced it when I helped one of my friends to clear their backlog in phy by helping then to understand the course better

    • I definitely think teaching others is a great way of delving deep into a topic. I am a curious school student and often engage in discussions with my fellow-school mates who often have no idea about black holes or general relativity say. While explaining them, they ask many questions that I haven’t thought of which makes me research more about the topics and it is REALLY FUN TO MAKE OTHER PEOPLE CURIOUS ABOUT THE COSMOS.

    • Teaching challenges oneself to continuously search for the limits of understanding.

    • Yes, Indeed! Einstein says “If you can’t simply explain it, you haven’t understood it well enough”. I am very fond of giving lectures to my classmates about these theories and often i don’t have much a grip on one specific topic and while explaining it, it becomes more insightful to you and you can think of it as a whole new idea and that is when one finds inner peace”

    • Of course. While discussing the topic on can deepen his knowledge and perhaps the questions are the best part of it.

    • It’s a total ‘Yes’.
      There are so many unanswered question which we get in our mind while teaching or even explaining a simple concept of idea to someone, that our brain starts to think in the right direction to get such answers. this leads to enormous amounts of self learning and thought clarity

    • When explain a problem-solution to some one it forces me to give a more complete explanation and put it into words. Sometimes I get better understanding.

    • Yes! Teaching a topic to someone else, makes our understanding in that topic to be more developed. In my experience, when i tend to recall some topics,which i have learned quite long ago,i would teach that topic to myself. It will seems to be funny but, it works for me all time. this peculiar activity, made me to sum up more topics with better understanding and doesn’t make me tried of studying.

    • yes teaching does help, as Richard Feynman said it if you want to be expert in something, teach it.

    • Most definitely! I was in an advanced language program which was conducted completely in the target language. In a rotating order, each student had to discuss and teach a topic for one hour. The most difficult thing was teaching the meaning of a new vocabulary word in that language, not falling back on English. By doing that I found ways to better describe very difficult, esoteric concepts in a foreign language and not rely on my native tongue.

    • if gravitational waves formed due to distortion or we can say “disturbance” in space-time and it carries some energy so one can conclude that the time between the following steps of a single “graviton” has some relation with energy and also if it do have….. “it feels the time”

    • Sure, teaching is a way to deepen once view. Sometimes ones view even changes when taught.

    • It is import to review new knowledge you have gained later in time as you then have the chance to apply different concepts you may have not previously known to the problem also explaining something invites you to explore your understanding of it.

    • I agree that teaching reinforces our knowledge because we need absolute concept clarity to make someone truly understand it and answer all their questions.

    • I just think that the very essence of gravity is not contain in a gravity particle like the graviton. Instead, it is the same notion of feeling the force of gravity by entering the system that continues the gravitational pull would surpass the object being affected by it. For example, if there was no gravity on earth, then like in the moon, the closer we get to a greater object that has a gravitational pull like the sun, the more gravity influence we would perceive the closer we get to the sun. However, since we do have gravity on earth, we don’t perceive the gravitational pull from the sun, for instance tangible to Schwarzschild radius. To verify this, scientist can simulate the absence of gravity on earth, and what would happen if they place the earth closer to the sun, then the gravitational pull of the sun should then overcome the little gravity the earth has in the absence of such gravitational system that we currently have on earth.

    • Do you find that teaching a topic to someone else helps you to better understand it yourself?
      Yes, teaching does help better understand a subject or a specific topic. Teaching acts like a lab experiment where you are executing the parameters of the experiment and measuring the impact on the subject. You have to adjust and react to the feedback you are getting from students, whether verbal or non-verbal. In the example from Dr. Wiess, it can be furthering your understanding and helping you truly understand a subject. The craft of knowledge is one that requires teaching, learning, experimenting, and analyzing.
      Have you ever been inspired with a great idea by trying to teach someone else?
      All the time. It comes from hearing and observing through their eyes. What you knew to be true can be tested and tried over and over by students and when you think you have it your great idea can be how to demonstrate the complex topic in simple terms for the room to understand. Formulating precise calculations for complex problems so that you get precise answers needs peer group review and your students act as that peer group review. They are also your feedback loop on experimenting with what will work and not work.

    • Indeed,it is true. At some point while teaching it is kind of seeing the thing from other perspective,while studying or researching is commonly the notion of experiencing and explore knowledge, as in teaching phase the objective is to give clarification to the learners, teaching role somehow dissociate oneself from the in-direct participatory phase and thus create a distance from knowledge thus making the entire process of learning more elastic. Thus in the mode of clarification phase explanation deviates from the mainstream framework, and gap that is generated is then filled with something, that if it has a primary strong premise can have high probablity of turning out to be a great idea.

    • gravitational waves are really amazing and is a way to travel time in the upcoming future

    • i would suggest a litle more of basic mathematics of gravitational waves be introduced
      mathematic is a wonderfull tool, we need your help to learn to start using it again .

    • Entirely agree…having had a long career teaching media studies and communication, often did I create a course to learn and understand a topic that seemed important to me…for example, early in my teaching years, I wanted to understand system’s theory and cybernetics, two subject matters that stimulated my curiosity…so I created two courses on these topics and it sure worked…My motto…I remember reading somewhere this sentence: We teach best what we most need to learn. Indeed.

    • Entirely agree…having had a long career teaching media studies and communication, often did I create a course to learn and understand a topic that seemed important to me…for example, early in my teaching years, I wanted to understand system’s theory and cybernetics, two subject matters that stimulated my curiosity…so I created two courses on these topics and it sure worked…My motto…I remember reading somewhere this sentence: We teach best what we most need to learn. Indeed.

    • Trying to teach X to someone forces you to tailor your words to that person’s psyche, which then causes you to see it from a new perspective. Holding the two perspectives together to ensure accuracy forces you to question that accuracy as a subroutine of the teaching effort. Answers of “no” can lead to new insights.

    • Yes. Teaching is a great way to learn. It allows for us to correct our own understanding. In the words of Oppenheimer, “the best way to learn is to teach”.

    • I would say that thought experiments are definitely underappreciated, and teaching others as well. It’s important to expose yourself to other opinions and questions and that’s what usually happens during teaching.

    • yes

    • Teaching is the best way of learning . while we teach anything we are studying it once again and we will get a lot of ideas about it and much more. and sometimes it may change the whole concept.

    • Yes. Teaching is a great way to learn. It allows for us to correct our own understanding. In the words of Oppenheimer, “the best way to learn is to teach

    • Yeah obviously. The feynman technique also says that the best way to learn is to teach.

    • Undoubtedly, teaching is one of the better ways of expanding your own horizons.

    • In the fifth Office Hours video in this module, Dr. Weiss tells the story of how he came up with the core idea behind LIGO. He did not, in fact, conceive of LIGO as part of his research, but as a thought experiment, he found helpful when teaching general relativity, a subject he admits he did not understand well at the time. Do you find that teaching a topic to someone else helps you to better understand it yourself? Have you ever been inspired with a great idea by trying to teach someone else? Explain your answers.

      I think so, teaching or talking to someone else often make us think about the stuffs we are teaching or talking about a bit more, and it often leads to a realization, we may end up noticing the things we missed, like simple details that will improve our understanding regarding that matter significantly.

    • Teaching is the best learning

    • For some people sometimes it works

    • Teaching something to a person not only helps them understand the topic but also helps us gain better understanding of our knowledge.

    • Do you find that teaching a topic to someone else helps you to better understand it yourself?
      I do find that teaching a topic helps to cement the understanding in my brain. There is a saying that says if you can teach a subject that means you have begun the steps to mastery, and so teaching is the true mastery of understanding.

      Have you ever been inspired by a great idea by trying to teach someone else?

      I have come up with several ideas while teaching, and have learned so much more than what meets the eye. It is so vital to my development that I couldn’t even begin to describe the understanding that has come about from it.

      Just not a week ago, I was teaching a young gentleman how to do a muscle-up, except I learned about the physical and biochemical reactions and circulation of surfaces and friction on the bar and a multitude of other factors just from that single interaction. It connected all of these together, and all of a sudden it just clicked in my brain, these understandings, seeing the molecular structures of energy released the friction of electrons between surfaces, the neural interactions in the brain, and the phenomenon of the human body lay before me. It was beautiful and it happened all at once but was built up in my subconscious through the lifetime of development. and so it was at that movement I was ready to have these realizations.

      And it shame that most people never get to experience this kind of information flow, because few get the opportunity to study and teach at that level.

    • I am just a high school grad right now and my knowledge is quite limited, so please bare with my question – in J. Weber’s experiment, if I got it correctly, he was expecting the metallic rod to vibrate and ring when the GW pass through and distort space at the coordinates of the rod; however, why would this even be hypothesized? From what I can understand, when GW distort space, they strain the fabric of space-time itself, so technically, the coordinates of the metallic atoms in the rod never change, hence, despite the distortion of space, the metallic rod would not ring, because this is not a physical distortion of matter where the atoms in the metallic rods come close/move farther apart to collide and ring (since the distance between the individual atoms is still the same), instead the entire space-time fabric itself is being distorted, right?

    • If I try to teach something to someone else ,I find that any feedback or questions help me to think more deeply about my own knowledge and understanding of a subject

    • Teaching someone a topic or subject is the best way by which one can find out the shortcomings in the understanding of the topic.

    • It makes me formulate my understanding into common sense intuitive English so that someone else understands easily as my understandings fill with how I describe them in everyday words.

    • If you are not able to teach something then you don’t fully understand it

    • Hello Ladies and Gentlemen,

      We only find out what we know when we try to teach.

      While the proverb each one teach implies a value of democracy, we have to care about what we teach to teach it well and in the right way so it is understood.

      I have tried to teach the differences between terrestrial swamp gas northern lights and Van Allen Radiation Belts that are very high high altitude material. This material is visiting and dropping into polarcusp areas.

      I lived a while in Nunavut, and it had a very unique biome. This caused a ton of baffling questions.

      Circumpolar regions are what we almost never visit, and where things escape from the sun itself, when we consider polar regions of the sun.

      Polar outflow also occurs on black holes, allowing for a parallel of a solarwind concept to be considered.

      How can the sun have polar regions? How can Mercury have 42% oxygen levels? The sun polar regions are slower to turn than equitorial areas of the sun. And so, on rocky earth, we can think the air on terra-firma could also turn slower in polar regions.

      So the topic is baffling, but then after considerations, things get sorted out.

      Attatched is my topic I would like one day to take to a Doctorate level and develop.

      Here is my first book, free online- ICE LIGHTS:

      http://www.clgurbin.weebly.com

      Enjoy!

      P. S. – I am a fan of the magazine called Sky & Telescope. Thanks to Prof. Turner for enduring what was necessary for all the charts we now see from LIGO about collisions and 3-5% loss of mass after collisions. Where does the energy go?

      Attachments:
      You must be logged in to view attached files.
    • I apologize again for sleep deprived state- thanks to Prof. Rai Weiss for this course, not Prof. Mike Turner.

    • I strongly believe teaching really matters in questioning that was already created and established. It more over is platform paving ways for creating new ideas, new knowledge when the teaching is serious, sincere and objective and spirited enough.

    • Yeah

    • I really enjoyed this good recap of gravitational waves

    • Most definitely, not only in scientific pursuits, when you teach anything formally or even in casual conversation your mind gets activated, and once activated in this way it also activates the minds of those listening/learning who then give feedback to your mind and you get an exponential increase in Thought Force. Thought Force increases the gaining of knowledge.

You must be logged in to reply to this discussion.

Send this to a friend