When two black holes spiral towards each other and collide, they produce powerful gravitational waves. Scientists do not know much about these waves right now, but within about a decade, they will have collected pictures of the waveforms produced in many black hole collisions. These waveforms give us information about the properties of black holes and about oscillations of space and time. Anticipating a library of waveforms to be analyzed, CalTech physicist Kip Thorne is using computer simulations to create a waveform dictionary.

Recorded June 2010; Posted August 2010