Pulsars are fantastically stable clocks, with spin periods measured to 15 significant figures in some objects. They spin down steadily over millions of years under the action of electromagnetic torques. However, roughly 5% of known pulsars also experience “glitches”, which are tiny, randomly timed, discontinuous spin-up events. The physical origin of glitches remains a mystery after 40 years.

Recent radio pulsar timing data, drawn primarily from the Parkes Multibeam Survey, has quadrupled the glitch database and effected a sea change in our ideas about the glitch phenomenon. In this talk, I present the latest data and discuss their implications for the long-standing superfluid vortex paradigm as well as for current and future experiments with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO). It is shown that the gravitational-wave signal following a glitch, once detected, can be inverted to infer the compressbility and viscosity of bulk nuclear matter. The results of such a detection will be comparable to experimental data from terrestrial relativistic heavy-ion colliders.