Gravitational waves Discovered !

That's funny. Farmerman posted a very similar thread about gravy waves the other day......
http://able2know.org/topic/310509-1

Wow ! It seems I am lagging behind...

not so fast. It needs to be repeated several times and the calcs compared . BICEP did it 3 years ago but couldnt be repeated Im more of an opinion as to what this opens.

I know...I am just excited Farma !

So this confirms it. It seemed rather obvious that they should be there, and Einstein has been right about everything else, so this wasn't really much of a surprise to anyone (or it shouldn't have been), but there it is.

Now the question is what can we do with it? I've heard that it heralds a whole new age of astronomy because it gives us another way to look at things besides EM waves, but given that the sensitivity of the devices needs to be so extreme and the perturbations so phenomenal I'm having a hard time imagining how to get much of a detailed analysis of the Universe out of this.

Anyone know?

Well the promise is there on the long run and this talk gets more funding going on for Science which bottom line is good. Anyway given the low frequency of these events and the measurable difficulties they pose coming from distant galaxies I am having my own doubts about short term practical uses for this.
Nonetheless the confirmation of gravitational waves throws yet another rock at the old vision of space as pure emptiness...from my pov the more rocks against that kind of vision the better. (Gravitational lens effect and Quantum foam was not enough)

I understand a little bit about rocks, because I used to throw them in lakes to see how many bounce I could get. Quantum foam is another thing all together; nada, zilch, end of discussion.

Vacuum energy, virtual particles, Hawking's radiation, are a parallel subject but they strike at the heart of the same old problem of people tending to think of space as empty which is absolutely wrong period.

My analogy of throwing "rocks" at the idea of empty space had nothing to do with the analogy of throwing rocks at a lake to explain gravitational waves ripping through the fabric of space time.