Robert Evans
Cardiff School of Social Sciences
The two answers were
A: Yes, but you should analyse the sum of the strains in the two arms, rather than the difference. In fact, you don’t even need two arms of an interferometer to detect gravitational waves, provided you can measure the round-trip light travel time along a single arm accurately enough to detect small changes in its length.
B: It depends on the direction of the source. There will be no detectable signal if the source lies anywhere on the plane that passes through the centre station and bisects the angle of the two arms. Otherwise there will be a signal, maximized when the source lies along one or other of the two arms.
Can you tell which answer is given by the sociologist and which by the physicist?
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Last updated on 13 July, 2006