I listened to and watched a two year old lecture by Kip Thorne on geometrodynamics: the nonlinerar dynamics of curved spacetime. I was fascinating. I surprised myself by understanding about 80% of what he was explaining. I sort of lost it at first when he got into Riemamm Tensors but then when he described with some excellent graphics the violence of two types of black hole mergers, one head on and the other of two rotating black holes, it started to make sense. To say that I knew about the stretching and squeezing of space by gravity waves but had not realized that the collision also created twisting, torsional effects as well, puts it directly. But thinking about it, I wasn't surprised.
One a much smaller scale, the waves of the ocean stretch and squeeze but also visibly twist. So why shouldn't gravity waves do this, too?
Professor Thorne is easy on the ears. He takes his time working through the material, lets the listener know when he's about to take a deep dive into a more technical aspect and then when surfacing, gently explains the import of the parts people like myself have not yet learned. I appreciate that in a teacher.
There was much snow in Westchester this past winter and I had a new camera. These were taken during and just after a February storm. I was still learning.
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