Physicists Amaze Me

So I’m reading this article about how melting ice in Antarctica is raising the sea levels. Pretty scary stuff, but I got distracted from fretting about global warming when I read how they measure it:

The study, published in the journal Science, results from a new way of investigating Antarctica’s ice sheet by measuring changes in the gravitational pull of the continent – which corresponds to the total mass of its ice sheet – on a pair of orbiting satellites.

Emphasis added. They’re measuring changes in gravitational pull? Wow! We’ve come a long way since Galileo (allegedly) dropped stuff of the leaning tower of Pisa.

A couple months ago I was lucky enough to have dinner with one of the CU researchers whose team contributed to the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2005. (He was senior enough to have gone to Sweden for the ceremony.) He said that within 50 years or so the technology would be so advanced that a satellite would be able to determine whether someone or something is in a cave – like, for example, a bunch of jihadis hiding in caves in Afghanistan – by measuring changes in gravitational mass between orbits. Yowza!

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.