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	Podcast:		UC Science Today
	Episode:		Looking to black holes to test a theory of time
	Category:		Science & Medicine
	Duration:		00:01:03
	Publish Date:		2016-10-27 19:00:00
	Description:		Could it be that time is expanding because space is expanding? That’s a new theory of University of California, Berkeley physicist Richard Muller. And there’s actually a way to test this hypothesis using LIGO, the world’s largest gravitational wave observatory. LIGO recently saw two black holes, 30 times the mass of the sun, coming together in a collapsing event and making one huge, big black hole. This, Muller explains, makes gravitational waves and we can see these waves coming. "When this happens, you are locally creating millions of square miles of new space. And so if you’re creating new space, you’re creating new time and I calculated how much this was and it turns out to be a thousandth of a second." So if Muller and his collaborators at CalTech are right, when two black holes merge and create new space, they should also create new time and that would delay the gravitational wave signal that LIGO observes from Earth. "I’m looking forward to getting a phone call from them saying, either Gee, Rich, your theory is wrong, sorry. Or congratulations, you’ve just explained the flow of time.”
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