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LIGO detects most massive black hole merger to date

(www.caltech.edu)
360 points Eduard | 1 comments | 14 Jul 25 20:06 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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phtrivier ◴[15 Jul 25 16:14 UTC] No.44572695[source]▶
I'm in dire need of good news, so help me see it in an optimistic lens: can you imagine a path (even very indirect) where this kind of discovery ends up having a practical use that makes real life better here on Earth ?

(I'm not in the age-old debate about "is research useful ?" - I agree the answer is yes ; I just have a failure of imagination that prevents me from answer the question "how is this research going to be useful in the long run ?")

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1. outworlder ◴[15 Jul 25 17:42 UTC] No.44573823[source]▶
> "how is this research going to be useful in the long run ?"

We don't know.

However, black holes are close to the limit of our scientific knowledge. We don't know what happens on the other side of an event horizon (and we may never know, at least not experimentally). Learning more about them means learning more about the universe, and every once in a while we make a breakthrough that leapfrogs our technology. There's nothing else that we can do with so much potential.

Most of the time though, the progress is quite 'boring', at least if you are not in a related field.