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Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings
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Mini lectures: gravitational waves
This animation describes how gravitational waves were first detected, in 2015, at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), 100 years after Einstein predicted them. Newton’s theory of gravity and Einstein’s theory of General Relativity are briefly described. Taylor and Hulse showed indirect proof of the existence of gravitational waves, through the energy lost in a binary pulsar system they discovered in 1974. The direct evidence came from LIGO, an interferometer 144,000 times the length of Michelson’s original interferometer.
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