Priyamvada Natarajan Quotes

Gravitational waves will bring us exquisitely accurate maps of black holes - maps of their space-time. Those maps will make it crystal clear whether or not what we're dealing with are black holes as described by general relativity.

I always found it satisfying that gravity was described by Einstein's geometric theory of general relativity.

Einstein had two new predictions from general relativity. One was that light would bend. That was tested in 1919, and basically, he was proven right. The second prediction was gravitational waves, which took us 100 years to prove. The theory itself, which is thought by most to be rather obscure, you use every day, probably.

The key to proving that there's a black hole is showing that there's a tremendous amount of mass in a very small volume. And you can do that with the motions of stars.

Similarly, many a young man, hearing for the first time of the refraction of stellar light, has thought that doubt was cast on the whole of astronomy, whereas nothing is required but an easily effected and unimportant correction to put everything right again.

The key to proving that there's a black hole is showing that there's a tremendous amount of mass in a very small volume. And you can do that with the motions of stars. The way the star moves around the center of the galaxy is very much like the way the planets orbit the sun.

We look at distant exploding stars called supernovae, and we've developed techniques to measure how far away they are and how fast they're moving away from us.

Wormholes are a gravitational phenomena. Or imaginary gravitational phenomena, as the case may be.

When general relativity was first put forward in 1915, the math was very unfamiliar to most physicists. Now we teach general relativity to advanced high school students.

Proof of the black hole is a tremendous amount of mass inside a very small volume. There's 4 million times the mass of our sun within a region that's comparable to the size of our solar system.

Black holes destroy any objects that happen to fall victim to their gravitational pull.

A lot of the things you see in science fiction revolve around black holes because black holes are strong enough to rip the fabric of space and time.

I don't know how to have a normal relationship because I try to act normal and love from a normal place and live a normal life, but there is sort of an abnormal magnifying glass, like telescope lens, on everything that happens.

Black holes do not emit light, so you visualize them through gravitational lensing - how they bend light from other objects.

It's very, very exciting that it worked out in the end that we are actually detecting things and actually adding to the knowledge, through gravitational waves, of what goes on in the universe.

The existence of dark matter and dark energy are inferred from observations! They are not theoretical constructs. Though invisible, both reveal their presence through the effects that they exert on motions of celestial bodies and in the case of dark matter - the bending of light as well.

We cannot explain the phenomenon of gravitational lensing without general relativity, and this is where MOND spectacularly fails.

Do not Bodies act upon Light at a distance, and by their action bend its Rays; and is not this action (caeteris paribus) [all else being equal] strongest at the least distance?

Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time.

In curved Einsteinian space we are at all times, technically, looking at the back of our own head.

The ordinary adult never gives a thought to space-time problems ... I, on the contrary, developed so slowly that I did not begin to wonder about space and time until I was an adult. I then delved more deeply into the problem than any other adult or child would have done.

Evidence in support of general relativity came quickly. Astronomers had long known that Mercury’s orbital motion around the sun deviated slightly from what Newton’s mathematics predicted. In 1915, Einstein used his new equations to recalculate Mercury’s trajectory and was able to explain the discrepancy, a realization he later described to his colleague Adrian Fokker as so thrilling that for some hours it gave him heart palpitations.

Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backwards in time and exist in two places at once.

Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.

If a medium is representational by nature of the realistic image formed by a lens, I see no reason why we should stand on our heads to distort that function. On the contrary, we should take hold of that very quality, make use of it, and explore it to the fullest.