Hunt for Gravitational Waves

Einstein predicted in his General Theory of Relativity that dense moving objects such as spinning neutron stars or colliding black holes would send out ripples in space-time - gravitational waves. However, so far there has been no experimental evidence of this yet.

Part of the reason why this is so lies with the computing power necessary to crunch data from the large and relatively new gravitational wave detectors. Hence, scientists are enlisting anyone with an internet connection to help analyse data from two gravitational wave searches, through distributed computing. Called Einstein@Home (like SETI@Home), this program runs when the user's computer is idle, analysing 12-megabyte chunks of data from the US Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory (LIGO) and the British-German GEO-600 gravitational wave observatory.

Well, this might not sound exciting on face value, but if a signal is found in this way, "it would also be the first such scientific breakthrough that was enabled by public distributed computing" and "an exceptional moment for both theoretical and experimental physics". Now wouldn't you like to be part of it?

So those of you with unlimited broadband access and don't have much to do on your PC for most of the day (or even some parts of the day), why not help science by "donating" your computer's processing power to a good cause? I know I am going to, since downloading of *cough* stuff *cough* through a certain b*t *cough* torrent *cough* *cough* program has become not so popular with the authorities...

On Monday 14 March, the 126th anniversary of Albert Einstein's birth, over 50,000 people around the world are helping in the hunt for the gravitational waves predicted by the great physicist nearly a century ago.

These people have already downloaded the distributed-computing program Einstein@Home, which was only launched on 19 February 2005, and more than 1000 people per day are still joining.

Click here for the full article and here for Einstein@Home.