Abstract
On September 14, 2015, the Earth was hit by a very brief and extremely weak signal, which was the only trace of a catastrophic cosmic event that took place 1.3 billion light years from our planet. That tiny signal recounted the last whirling moments of the life of a binary system of black holes, before the two bodies—of masses 30 times greater than the mass of the Sun—merged into each other at speeds comparable to the speed of light. Captured by two special experimental devices—the interferometric detectors LIGO in the United States—the radiation of September 14 represents the first gravitational signal ever observed by man and the first confirmation that binary systems of black holes exist. Einstein had predicted the existence of gravitational waves as early as 1916. Nevertheless, their reality as physical entities—and not just mathematical solutions of Einstein’s field equations—were still the subject of theoretical discussions in the 1950s, when the first ideas of how to detect them started to develop. Since the first detection in September 2015, an extraordinary new field of cosmic investigation is born: gravitational wave astronomy.
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Notes
- 1.
It is worthwhile recalling that Newton himself was unsatisfied by his own assumption, which we may consider motivated by a scientific pragmatism. In a letter addressed to the British philologist and theologian Richard Bentley on February 25, 1962, Newton argued: «It is unconceivable that inanimate brute matter should (without the mediation of something else which is not material) operate upon and affect other matter without mutual contact […]. That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else by and through which their action or force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters any competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an agent constantly according to certain laws, but whether this agent be material or immaterial is a question I have left to the consideration of my readers».
- 2.
In 1902, Lorentz shared the Nobel Prize with Pieter Zeeman, “in recognition of the extraordinary service they rendered by their research into the influence of magnetism upon radiation phenomena”.
- 3.
The amplitude of the gravitational wave is proportional to the second derivative with respect to time of the quadrupole moment Q. G is the universal gravitational constant, c the speed of light, and r the distance from the emitting source. In its turn, the quadrupole moment depends on the geometry and mass distribution of the system.
- 4.
- 5.
ESRIN was born in 1968 as an offshoot of the European Space Research Organization (ESRO), directed by Herman Bondi, one of the theoretical physicists contributing to the lively scientific debate on gravitational waves started during the so-called Renaissance of General Relativity. ESRO was a brand-new institution, founded just four years earlier. In the 1970s, it would merge with the European Launcher Development Organization to form ESA, the European Space Agency. The idea of ESRO, the first European space research centre, had originally been stimulated by Edoardo Amaldi, one of the founding fathers of the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN), the first European laboratory born in Geneva in the early 1950s. In Amaldi’s view, ESRO should have been modeled on the principles of CERN.
- 6.
This bumpy and emblematic path has been studied and analyzed for several decades by the English science sociologist Harry Collins, who has been collecting a huge number of documents and testimonies from researchers involved in one of the most ambitious scientific enterprises of all time. See Collins (2004).
- 7.
At the time, Edoardo Amaldi was about 60 years old and represented the greatest scientific personality on the Italian scene. A pupil and collaborator of Enrico Fermi, he had been part of the glorious group of boys from via Panisperna, contributing to the discovery of radioactivity induced by slow neutrons. The only researcher of that group to remain in Italy during and after the war years, he became one of the most active promoters of the reconstruction of science in Italy and in Europe.
- 8.
The SNAM-Progetti laboratories in Monterotondo were part of the ENI Group and were expressly dedicated to fundamental research. Its director was Giorgio Careri, a low-temperature physicist at the University of Rome.
- 9.
For the conservation of angular momentum.
- 10.
It is worthwhile noticing that the sound waves that our ears perceive have frequencies in the range of 20 Hz–20 kHz. Detectable gravitational waves have frequencies from 10 kHz dow.: There is therefore an overlap of frequency ranges, which means that sound simulations of gravitational radiation provide a natural way for physicists to “sense” gravitational waves (analogously, a false-color photo highlights the X-ray emitted by an astrophysical source).
- 11.
For more details about black holes and their detection, see in this volume the chapter: Gravitational Waves and Black Holes by MariaFelicia DeLaurentis and Paolo Pani.
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La Rana, A. (2023). Gravitational Waves: An Historical Perspective. In: Streit-Bianchi, M., Michelini, M., Bonivento, W., Tuveri, M. (eds) New Challenges and Opportunities in Physics Education. Challenges in Physics Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37387-9_8
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