Understanding gravitational waves offers a new cosmic perspective, while Britain's calendar change highlights history's ability to disrupt the mundane.
What does the universe sound like? You’d imagine the vastness of space would be a sanctuary of silence. Yet famously, on 14th September 2015, the LIGO detectors in the United States picked up a curious sound—a chirp that signalled a cosmic event from over a billion years ago.
The Chirp Heard Across a Billion Years
LIGO’s Louisiana and Washington State observatories captured gravitational waves for the first time, validating a hundred-year-old prediction by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. This was no ordinary echo. The source? Two black holes colliding 1.3 billion light-years away. Their dramatic merger transformed three solar masses into pure energy, rippling across space-time until it reached us. This discovery did more than just scoop a Nobel Prize in 2017; it introduced a new frontier in astronomy, allowing scientists to observe the universe through the lens of gravitational wave astronomy.
Britain Loses Eleven Days
While our friends at LIGO were busy making scientific history, let’s take a step back to a time when simply keeping track of days was a bit of a challenge. Flashback to 14th September 1752 when Britain, after 170 years of thumbingly holding onto the Julian calendar, finally realigned with the Gregorian calendar. This change required that the citizens of Britain jump straight from 2nd to 14th September, effectively losing eleven days.
The realignment was dizzying: contracts, rent due-dates, and everyday life schedules were thrown into a state of chaos overnight. And while stories of riots by citizens demanding “Give us our eleven days back!” colour the tales from this era, historians approach these stories with some scepticism. What isn’t disputed is the administrative headache that ensued.
A Tale of Timing
Two stories, both deeply centred on time and its consequential tinkering. One about a chirp that travelled 1.3 billion years to reach us, the other about an eleven-day vanishing act forced by a calendar correction. Listen to how these seemingly disparate events illuminate human endeavours and the cosmic dance of our universe.
Join me as we delve deeper into history’s curious cases of cosmic and human timing in today’s episode of The Daily Time Drop. It’s a tale of two timelines you won’t want to miss out on.