<p>ok..i will be doing my senior project next year and I am planning to come up with something that will increase my chances for a good grad school. .I am an EE/Physics major in my junior year.</p>
<p>my idea is a project on a spacecraft powered by gravitational waves. it is going to be highly theoretical but i think it will be my one way ticket to grad school if i succeeded. What do you think??</p>
<p>Is it rigorous enough that it can be published in an academic journal? If yes, they’ll care. If not, they won’t care.</p>
<p>What CFB is true, and I am personally curious how you would make this design work - true gravity waves are so weak that they have only been theorized and never been directly detected, which does not bode well for using them for propulsion. Have you done any “back of the envelope” calculations that suggest this is possible?</p>
<p>Also, are you aware that the term “gravity wave” refers to two different phenomena? The first is a propagating ripple in spacetime, the second is a perturbation of the atmosphere caused by masses of air oscillating vertically after passing over obstacles. I mention this only because it is easy to misjudge the support in literature for the first phenomena by lumping in articles on the second.</p>
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<p>Wasn’t there some giant interferometer experiment recently that purportedly measured gravity waves or am I imagining things?</p>
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I am aware of several interferometer experiments searching for gravitational waves (LIGO, most notably) but am not aware of any successful measurements - while detector sensitivity is now supposedly fine enough to make the measurements, nothing has yet been seen.</p>
<p>Also, I am curious as to how the OP intends to use gravitational waves for propulsion.</p>
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<p>I was wondering the same thing. Then again, I am not familiar enough with gravitational waves to postulate a propulsion mechanism based on them.</p>
<p>I think the Higgs boson, the particle equivalent to the gravitational wave, has been found with something like 90% experimental certainty. That falls short of what is needed to declare a discovery, but many experimentalists expect it to be confirmed in the next year.</p>
<p>Is the Higgs boson equivalent to gravitational waves? I thought gravitational waves would be represented by waves moving through the Higgs field.</p>
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While this is certainly not my field, I thought that the particle equivalent to the gravitational wave was the “graviton” and that the Higgs Boson occupied a different niche in particle physics.</p>
<p>I also thought that the most recent results from CERN were that they had found many places where the Higgs boson did NOT exist… which does not on its own prove that it DOES exist. They are assuming that it exists because theory says it should, but it is always possible that the underlying theory is wrong.</p>
<p>I think at the very least we can all agree that we are clearly not particle physicists or astrophysicists, haha.</p>
<p>See this:
[Le</a> Chat Noir Boutique: Far Side - We’re Not Rocket Scientists 1993, Far Side, FSRS](<a href=“http://www.lechatnoirboutique.com/proddetail.php?prod=FSRS]Le”>Le Chat Noir Boutique: Far Side - We're Not Rocket Scientists 1993, Far Side, FSRS)</p>
<p>Yeah, I think you’re right about the gravitron. Never mind.</p>
<p>I realized that my project title goes beyond the scope of a college level engineering project provided that scientists haven’t even detected gravitational waves yet!! therefore, I changed it into developing a gravitational wave detection system to carried by an interplanetary or an interstellar aircraft.</p>
<p>So your plan is to craft the title then think about the content?</p>
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<p>I was wondering the same thing. Scarily, you would be surprised how many people do crazy things just like that, though usually I see shady researchers crafting the content and then carrying out the experiments and getting confused when it doesn’t match their preconceived notions.</p>
<p>I think you need to go get a job before you even consider going to grad school. I think you are crossing over into the relm of being so theoretical that you are useless!</p>
<p>So you’re saying that Theoretical Physics (or theoretical anything) is useless?</p>
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<p>It’s a good thing you aren’t making everyone’s life choices then.</p>
<p>yes I craft the title and then think about the content. because it makes it easier to focus that turn myself into a scatter. so you guys think this title is realistic??</p>
<p>you are irrelevant…I am not asking for life advise…keep it to yourself mister know nothing!</p>