Physicists will have a laugh about it for years to come

Dec 19, 2008 14:38 GMT  ·  By

Basically, a gravitational wave is a “ripple” in the universal space-time continuum, which occurs when an establish magnetic field, let's say somewhere far away in space, is disturbed by a wandering giant star, which makes the field “wobble” and sends the ripples in all directions. Theoreticians, back in the day, hypothesized that an interplanetary spacecraft could, potentially, use these waves to travel far distances in short periods of time. The idea was deemed as “not too bright,” and all research into it was stopped.

However, it seems that not all were so keen on letting this one slide, so the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) decided to further investigate the matter, and asked a panel of scientists to find out if these waves posed any kind of threat to the national security. Mostly, the DIA wanted to know if man-made gravitational waves could be used for unbreakable telecommunications.

The JASON Defense Advisory Group was in charge of conducting the study, but, as expected, it came up empty, because any sane physicist could tell you that all the power plants in the world would take about forever – literally – to come up with sufficient energy to produce just about one ten millionth of a Joule, which is basically nothing.

On the other hand, in order for a spacecraft to have a successful lift-off and escape the gravitational forces that pull it to the Earth, it would require more than 1025 times (a 1 with 25 zeros after it) the electricity output of the world. And the timeframe we're talking about for this major gathering of energy is until the Universe ends.

"The proposal is utter nonsense. I'm a bit surprised the agency bothered to commission an investigation – it would probably have been enough to just ask an in-house science advisor," says GEO600 project member Karsten Danzmann, from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Hanover, Germany. Maybe, having reached this conclusion, the Pentagon will stop spending millions or even billions of taxpayers' money on such useless “scientific research.”