Uncertain Dots, Episode 9

In which Rhett and I chat about the hot new discovery of primordial gravitational waves (maybe) very briefly before segueing into talking about LIGO, and Cosmos, and why “theory” is a terrible word, and the memorization of constants, and standardized tests, and time-lapse videos. You know, as one does.

Miscellaneous items:

— I’m a little pixellated, as if I’m concealing my identity. I forgot to shut Kate’s computer down, so it may have been doing online backups that chewed up bandwidth.

— The von Neumann quote I butcher at one point is “The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models.”

— The gravitational wave detection that almost certainly wasn’t was the Weber bar experiment.

— The magnetic monopole detection that may or may not have been real was reported in this paper by Blas Cabrera.

— The time-lapse video I made at Union is this one:

And that’s it for this week. Tune in next week, when we’ll talk about who knows what?