SAMPLE post DO NOT COPY: A sample blog post based on a news story *First I intro

SAMPLE post DO NOT COPY: A sample blog post based on a news story *First I introduce what I found in the world that relates to waves* I found an interesting news story one summer: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/black-hole-circling-wormhole-weird-gravitational-wavesLinks to an external site. The headline mentions black holes, wormholes and gravitational waves. *Next step is to identify the interaction* Black holes relate to gravity, which we will cover in Forces. Wormholes relate to one my favorite childhood books, A Wrinkle in Time and gravitational waves are, well, waves! In this case, a moving black hole creates a gravity wave that propagates through space. *Next I identify relevant class concepts* From the waves unit, we learn that a wave is a disturbance that moves, carrying energy. There are three components to a wave: a source, a medium, and a mechanism. The medium does not move with the wave, it just gets temporarily displaced. Watching the displacement of the medium is one way to detect a wave. The direction of the displacement relative to the path of travel tells us whether a wave is transverse (like waves on a string) or longitudinal (like sound). *I then connect the dots by explaining how the concepts mentioned apply to this situation.* The article mentions “ripples in space-time”. Ripples must be the disturbances that travel through a medium called space-time. In the article the ripples are caused by a black hole spiraling into a wormhole. Therefore, the source must be the movement of the black hole. When the article mentions ripples, it sounds like they are talking about transverse waves. Given that the waves are traveling through outer space where there isn’t much material for compression waves like sound, that makes sense. Since gravity waves have been detected, there must be a way to actually see the ripples in space-time. A ripple in space would cause a physical distortion of space itself — and the objects in it. *Finally, I conclude, tying everything back to the original observation.* Gravity waves have a lot in common with surface water waves! *I could be done there, but because I’m the teacher, I will add some additional information in case anyone is curious* One of the predictions that came out of Albert Einstein’s model of general relativity, which was published in 1916, was that space and time (Einstein put the 3 spatial dimensions together with time as a fourth dimension to create “spacetime”) would vibrate in response to a large mass experiencing a large acceleration (that is a large rate of change of speed). Another prediction was the existence of black holes. Black holes are regions of extraordinarily dense mass that warp spacetime in such a way that even light is attracted to them. Since all mass attracts all other mass, if there were two black holes close enough, they would start to accelerate toward each other in a spiraling pattern until they collided. If that were to happen, the vibrations that event caused would ripple out into space. By the time those ripples reach earth, the deformations or disturbances are smaller than a single atom, which helps to explain why it took nearly 100 years before humans had the technology to detect such small movements. High tech lasers, mirrors, electronics and computer power were all needed along with a massive world-wide collaboration. In 2015, in a matter of weeks after increasing the sensitivity of the equipment, the first gravity wave was detected by LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory). The result was announced to the world in 2016, and the research earned three of the principal investigators the Nobel Prize in physics the very next year. While it is true that physicists do enjoy having their predictions proven wrong, because it leads to new and exciting physics, the strange predictions that have come out of General Relativity are new exciting in and of themselves, and every time one of Einstein’s remarkable predictions are proved correct, people celebrate.