Alexander21
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Hello science forum!
I've been active in other science forums, but this is my first post in scienceforums.net and my question has to do with gravitational waves.
The strain of a gravitational wave is at the order of magnitude of 10^-21 meters as shown in the diagram from wikipedia.
I'm wondering how is this posible, when the smallest existing particle is at the order of magnitude of 10^16 (quarks)?
Is it posible to detect such a small strain?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIGO#/media/File:LIGO_detector_sensitivity_curve.png
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Strain of gravitational wave
in Modern and Theoretical Physics
Posted · Edited by Alexander21
Thanks for your answer, which helped me a lot. When posting my question I had in my mind a wrong understanding about strain. I found out that strain is given by the formula (l-L)/L where l is the final length and L is the original. So if the original length is huge, we can measure extreamly small strain. And it is wrong to compare the strain with a physical length, like the dimension of a quark.