In March 2014, while I was writing this book, the CMB imprint was discovered by a team assembled by Jamie Bock (Figure 16.10),[30] a cosmologist down the hall from me at Caltech.
It was a fantastic discovery, but with a cautionary note: the imprint that Jamie and his team found might possibly be due to something else and not gravitational waves. As this book goes to press, intense efforts are underway to find out for sure.
If the imprint is really due to gravitational waves from the big bang, then this is the type of cosmological discovery that comes along perhaps once every fifty years. It brings us a glimpse of the universe a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the universe’s birth. It confirms theorists’ prediction that the expansion of the universe at that early moment was exceedingly fast, “inflationarily fast” in cosmologists’ jargon. It ushers in a whole new era for cosmology.
Having indulged my passion for gravitational waves, having seen how they could be used to discover
V
EXPLORING GARGANTUA’S ENVIRONS
17
Miller’s Planet
The first planet that Cooper and his crew visit is Miller’s. The most impressive things about this planet are the extreme slowing of time there, gigantic water waves, and huge tidal gravity. All three are related, and arise from the planet’s closeness to Gargantua.
In my interpretation of
Space there is warped like the surface of a cylinder. In the figure, the cylinder’s cross sections are circles whose circumferences don’t change as we move nearer to or farther from Gargantua. In reality, when we restore the missing dimension, the cross sections are spheroids, whose circumferences don’t change as we move nearer or farther.
So why is this location different from any other on the cylinder? What makes this location special?
The key to the answer is the warping of time, which does
At the inner balance point, the planet’s orbit is unstable: If the planet gets pushed outward a tiny bit (for example, by the gravity of some passing comet), the centrifugal force wins the competition and pushes the planet further outward. If the planet is pushed inward, the gravitational force wins and the planet is pulled into Gargantua. This means Miller’s planet can’t live for long at the inner balance point.