> Just as a child can swing their legs at the resonant frequency of a swing to pump up their sinusoidal amplitude, a very weak gravitational wave can pump up a ring oscillator if it's oscillating at the ring's resonant frequency.
So is it possible that a passing gravitational wave could initiate some natural process that otherwise might have not happened?
I was thinking more along the lines of a chemical or nuclear reaction (or some yet-to-be-conceptualized space-time reaction) at near an initiation point, but not quite there.
I assume the gravity wave could push the reaction to initiate by warping a subatomic element (like an electron orbital) into an otherwise impossible configuration on a scale of picometers for a split second.
The nuclear and electromagnetic forces in the vicinity are stupendously stronger than gravity at small scales. One could imagine that some electromagnetic or nuclear process might be heavily suppressed by some symmetry such that it could only be unlocked by gravitational forces (which would break that symmetry), but nothing like that comes to my mind. Basically, anything that gravity could do could be done by electromagnetic and nuclear forces vastly faster.
These gravity waves aren't strong enough to pull us off Earth. Everything on Earth is already subjected to gravity, and it doesn't cause nuclear reactions. Gravity waves won't cause impossible configurations to become possible.
Well it depends. How big a wave are we talking about? The ones so far have been very distant. But when to 100 solar mass black holes merge and form a 90 solar mass black hole they release 10 solar mass of energy (E=mc^2 strikes again). Being close to such a merge would be lethal.
However there's nothing that we know of that could happen close by, so the risk is near zero. Apparently the black hole at the center of the milky way is going to merge with another super massive blackhole in Andromeda in 4.5 billion years or so.
I think you are overestimating the amount of power in these gravitational waves by several dozen orders of magnitude.
To even detect these, we need to observe multiple pulsars over long periods of time in order to find minute effects only visible at galactic scales due to the nanohertz frequency of these waves. In other words, spacetime is being stretched and compressed at subatomic scales on a sinusoidal wave with a period of a month or so.
It’s a bit like asking if cosmic rays from the Pinwheel Galaxy are affecting cancer rates.
Makes sense. I am a bit of a drive by tourist on this; such that the only reason I asked this was the analogy of a kid pumping their feet stuck on me and messed up my assumed scale on effects.
I don't see it as impossible... Cosmic events frequently give rise to events that might not otherwise happen.
The real question is, is the change meaningful? If you have a tsunami but it doesn't change anything meaningful, is it an interesting observation outside of the event itself?
So is it possible that a passing gravitational wave could initiate some natural process that otherwise might have not happened?