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Ask a Spaceman!

AaS! 180: How Does Pulsar Timing Work?

Ask a Spaceman!

Paul M. Sutter

Astrophysics, Science, Cosmos, Holes, Black, Astronomy, Natural Sciences, Universe, Cosmology, Space, Physics

4.8853 Ratings

🗓️ 19 July 2022

⏱️ 34 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

What is a pulsar? How can we use them to map gravitational waves? What kind of technology does it take? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!

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Thanks to Cathy Rinella for editing.

Hosted by Paul M. Sutter, astrophysicist and the one and only Agent to the Stars (http://www.pmsutter.com).

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

If there's something you can bet on in life that will guarantee a win,

0:14.0

it's betting on the cleverness of a scientist.

0:18.3

There's this perception that scientists are uncreative, unimaginative, just focused on

0:26.7

numbers and methodology. But this couldn't be further from the truth. Folks, science is hard.

0:33.7

It's really hard. Making predictions, testing against observations,

0:39.4

developing hypotheses.

0:41.1

This is all hard and requires an insane amount of creative work.

0:47.4

Like think of quantum mechanics and superposition and spooky action at a distance and all the weirdness of quantum mechanics.

0:58.8

Do you think an uncreative person or a group of uncreative people came up with quantum mechanics with

1:06.3

how nuts it is? No, it takes a truly imaginative, creative person to come up with quantum mechanics.

1:16.6

And then to test these ideas, if someone just walked up to you and say, by the way,

1:22.4

by the way, I think there's fusion happening in the core of the sun. First off, that's a crazy thought. That's a crazy

1:30.7

creative, ingenious idea. And then how do you test that? How do you know if that's true? How do you

1:37.2

know if that's accurate or not? Think of how creative you must be in order to come up with a way to determine if the sun is fusing

1:49.0

hydrogen into helium in its core or not. How do you test that? How do you figure that out?

1:54.6

That requires an enormous amount of creativity and cleverness.

2:05.4

As another example, today's topic, the pulsar timing array. We've got a problem here. Gravitational waves. Einstein developed the concept of the theory

2:15.8

of general relativity, an astounding leap of imagination and

2:20.5

insight into the natural workings of our world. I've said it before and I'll say it again.

2:26.2

When Einstein developed special relativity in 1905, there were a few other people that were

2:32.6

sniffing along similar lines and probably would have come up with it if Einstein had never existed.

2:39.4

We would still have special relativity.

...

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