The practice of keeping time hinges on stable oscillations. In a grandfather clock, the length of a second is marked by a single swing of the pendulum. In a digital watch, the vibrations of a quartz crystal mark much smaller fractions of time. And in atomic clocks, the world’s state-of-the-art timekeepers, the oscillations of a […]
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Everything, everywhere all at once
The way Morgane König sees it, questioning how we came to be in the universe is one of the most fundamental parts of being human. When she was 12 years old, König decided the place to find answers was in physics. A family friend was a physicist, and she attributed her interest in the field […]
Read MoreLIGO surpasses the quantum limit
The following article is adapted from a press release issued by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) Laboratory. LIGO is funded by the National Science Foundation and operated by Caltech and MIT, which conceived and built the project. In 2015, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, made history when it made the first direct […]
Read More3 Questions: A bigger, better space-ripple detector
The search for space-shaking ripples in the universe just got a big boost. An MIT-led effort to build a bigger, better gravitational-wave detector will receive $9 million dollars over the next three years from the National Science Foundation. The funding infusion will support the design phase for Cosmic Explorer — a next-generation gravitational-wave observatory that […]
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