Gravitational waves detected 100 years after Einstein’s prediction – video folows
American University contributes to noise-reduction technology in LIGO detectors
For the first time, scientists have observed ripples in the fabric of spacetime called gravitational waves, arriving at the earth from a cataclysmic event in the distant universe. This confirms a major prediction of Albert Einstein’s 1915 general theory of relativity and opens an unprecedented new window onto the cosmos.
Gravitational waves carry information about their dramatic origins and about the nature of gravity that cannot otherwise be obtained. Physicists have concluded that the detected gravitational waves were produced during the final fraction of a second of the merger of two black holes to produce a single, more massive spinning black hole. This collision of two black holes had been predicted but never observed.
The gravitational waves were detected on Sept. 14, 2015 at 5:51 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (9:51 UTC) by both of the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors, located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, USA. The LIGO Observatories are funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and were conceived, built, and are operated by Caltech and MIT. The discovery, accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters, was made by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (which includes the GEO600 Collaboration and the Australian Consortium for Interferometric Gravitational Astronomy) and the Virgo Collaboration using data from the two LIGO detectors.
American University and partners fine-tune optics
American University is a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. AU currently is the sole university in Washington, D.C. to participate in LIGO and is led by Gregory Harry, assistant professor of physics.
“The detection of gravitational waves marks the beginning of a new way of observing the universe,” said Harry, one of the authors of the detection paper published in Physical Review Letters. “Now that physicists have evidence that LIGO detectors can detect gravitational waves, it is exciting to think about how much we will likely learn about the nature of gravity.”
At AU, researchers work to fine-tune the optical materials used in the LIGO detectors. Mirrors used in the detectors have reflective coatings. Over time, researchers realized the coatings limited the detectors’ sensitivity because of thermal vibrations. Harry’s team helped to develop improved coatings that allowed for greater sensitivity. Experimental research by Harry’s team will continue to focus on new and improved ways to further reduce noise.
Since 2011, more than 10 AU undergraduate students have participated in LIGO research at AU, including two who contributed research to the gravitational waves discovery and are now physics Ph.D. candidates working on LIGO at universities in Scotland and New York. The AU LIGO group is also involved in public outreach and is developing an “Optics Olympiad,” which will bring D.C. public schools students to campus to share in the excitement of LIGO research.
American University is proud to have worked with many outstanding scientists at other universities to have brought LIGO to the sensitivity to make this detection. The list includes Georgia Tech, California State University-Fullerton, Columbia University, Stanford University, University of Oregon, University of Maryland, University of Michigan, Carleton College, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Penn State University, Hobart & William Smith Colleges, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Trinity University, and Whitman College.
Teamwork leads to discovery
The discovery of gravitational waves was made possible by the enhanced capabilities of Advanced LIGO, a major upgrade that increases the sensitivity of the instruments compared to the first-generation LIGO detectors, enabling a large increase in the volume of the universe probed–and the discovery of gravitational waves during its first observation run. The U.S. National Science Foundation leads in financial support for Advanced LIGO. Funding organizations in Germany (Max Planck Society), the U.K. (Science and Technology Facilities Council, STFC) and Australia (Australian Research Council) also have made significant commitments to the project. Several of the key technologies that made Advanced LIGO so much more sensitive have been developed and tested by the German UK GEO collaboration. Several universities designed, built, and tested key components for Advanced LIGO: The Australian National University, the University of Florida, Stanford University, Columbia University of New York, and Louisiana State University.
LIGO research is carried out by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC), a group of more than 1,000 scientists from universities around the United States and in 14 other countries. More than 90 universities and research institutes in the LSC develop detector technology and analyze data; approximately 250 students are strong contributing members of the collaboration. The LSC detector network includes the LIGO interferometers and the GEO600 detector. The GEO team includes scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute, AEI), Leibniz Universität Hannover, along with partners at the University of Glasgow, Cardiff University, the University of Birmingham, other universities in the United Kingdom, and the University of the Balearic Islands in Spain. Significant computer resources have been contributed by the AEI Atlas cluster, the LIGO Laboratory, Syracuse University, and the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee.
LIGO was originally proposed as a means of detecting these gravitational waves in the 1980s by Rainer Weiss, professor of physics, emeritus, from MIT; Kip Thorne, Caltech’s Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, emeritus; and Ronald Drever, professor of physics, emeritus, also from Caltech. Virgo research is carried out by the Virgo Collaboration, consisting of more than 250 physicists and engineers belonging to 19 different European research groups: 6 from Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France; 8 from the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) in Italy; 2 in the Netherlands with Nikhef; the WignervRCP in Hungary; the POLGRAW group in Poland and the European Gravitational Observatory (EGO), the laboratory hosting the Virgo detector near Pisa in Italy.
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To learn more about the discovery, visit the official LIGO Scientific Collaboration website at http://www.ligo.org
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How many angels can dance on the point of a pin?
Modern physics is sad commentary on the death of Empiricism.
Wait… what?
“Exciting,” indeed.
What’s up with Phodges? Please explain yourself Madam or Sir.
What the scientists “observed” is a signal. They did not observe two black holes merging. They are interpreting the signal as a merger of two 30-solar-mass black holes spinning, merging, and ringing down in a fraction of a second. What’s more, this event supposedly happened over a billion light years away.
We must keep in mind that supernovas produce gravitational waves according to Einstein’s theory and that there have been thousands of supernovas since LIGO observatories (on the ground and in space) have been in operation. Not a single gravitational wave from a supernova has been detected.
We must also keep in mind that the LIGO observatory, including the space it resides in, the laser beam, and the path the laser beams traverse are all rooted in the fabric of space-time. When space-time ripples, so does everything else. What the LIGO experiment is trying to do, in effect, is change the path of a car in a movie by bending the movie screen.
They are jumping too far ahead in their conclusions in claiming this is a gravitational wave that was detected. It may be, but a lot more research needs to be conducted before drawing any conclusions.
The LIGO principle is old physics. Accelerometers in your mobile phone use a LIGO like system
– the tiny laser accelerometer in your mobile phone measures the warping of space time caused when you wave your mobile phone around. The accelerometer also detects the space time distortion caused by the Earth’s gravity, which is why the mobile phone always knows which way up it is.
LIGO’s claim is to have made device so sensitive, it can detect warping of spacetime caused by distant cosmic events. That claim might be open to question – not the claim that laser interferometers can measure changes in space time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerometer
Cell phones use simple 3-axis spring accelerometers etched in silicon, and they merely measure the local acceleration of gravity plus whatever acceleration you’re generating by waving it around or dropping it on the pavement. Laser accelerometers would be too large and expensive. There isn’t any warping of space-time other than the earth’s gravity, which is too uniform to measure locally.
Mass curves space, but to generate waves, you have to move the mass. The earth warps the sun’s gravitational field as it orbits, but not much (only 1° in 24 hours) and at a snail’s pace cosmically. A supernova has much greater mass, but it’s still moving outward at only a few thousand km/sec, next to nothing relativistically, and it’s just a single pop at that.
The suspected black holes were spinning around at a tremendous rate, alternating between tandem gravitational fields and side-by-side fields, and at the end were travelling near lightspeed before they popped out of the universe and left their fossil gravitational fields behind. Gravitational waves are generated by changes in gravitational fields. Supernovae may have the mass, but they don’t move it fast enough to reach a detectable level.
The LIGO arms are long enough to span and detect a short ripple, but their orientation limits the direction they can watch.
In an electro-magnetic Universe, one tiny electro-magnetic pulse does not verify an observation of Einstein’s Gravitational Theory. To date, this same equipment can only detect gravity on Earth and in the solar system to a mere 19% reliability. If they can’t find it here on Earth, well…….? This program needed a “success”, as all do, even if success is perceived, to continue. Give a listen to Dr. Spolter. Be sure to listen to at least #3 in this series. Then ask yourself what is up with Phodges? http://youtu.be/T3pU5BT-lPY
The gold standard for wave form has historically been constructive and destructive interference. Besides references to “interferometers”, it is not clear from the press release level explanations that this standard has been met.
Read the paper and find out. That things are not clear to you does not mean that they are not met.
True; ok.
Electromagnetism has nothing whatsoever to do with gravitation, so detectors for one are unaffected by the other. The electromagnetic forces are much stronger than gravitational forces.
For two electrons the Coulomb force repelling them is 41 orders of magnitude larger than the gravitational force attracting them.
g
george e. smith: “Electromagnetism has nothing whatsoever to do with gravitation”
Except that they are now apparently related by the speed of light. Light is a quantized (filtered), self propagating electric field. If it’s square is going to be common to mass and energy, gravity will be what, it’s square root as well?
There’s no laser LIGOmeter in anybody’s cell phone; no laser either. The accelerometers that may be in your phone (none in mine) are simply a chunk of silicon that rattle if you shake it.
Single crystal silicon is a very strong material, it’s closely related to diamond. You can etch very thin layers of it that support thicker and more massive layers, which then can move relative to the bulk of the silicon chunk, typically they twist. You can then build that as part of a parallel plate capacitor, so when it rattles the charge on the capacitor moves around, and gives electrical signals that relate to the mechanical motion of the slab that is supported by the thin bridges.
By an accident of good luck in addition to clever design, you can build a microprocessor on the same piece of silicon. How convenient; why not use that microprocessor which isn’t doing anything much anyhow to calculate how much acceleration would cause that much electric charge movement.
And in between time, you can be sending idiot text messages to anybody crazy enough to listen, while you look around to see if the traffic cops are watching you while you are driving.
Where do people get these fanciful ideas, of how common toys work ??
g
PS it is very damn hard to integrate any kind of laser on to an integrated circuit and make it do anything useful.
Silicon is an indirect band gap semiconductor and the chance of building a laser on a silicon chip, is about as remote as finding gravitational waves in your coffee cup.
G
Say what?
At last real science by real scientists. Something to believe in.
Congratulations Albert Einstein and the wonderful people who made this possible.
I don’t believe in it, I don’t believe in black holes or two black holes or gravitational waves.
I do believe that LIGO is a black hole for a $billion of taxpayers money. Of course they have to find something.
“I don’t believe in it, I don’t believe in black holes or two black holes or gravitational waves.” Or AGW?
Absolutely. In his time Einstein was a sceptic but his Relativity theory has turned out to be one of the most successful in the history of science. It has succeeded because, probably without exception, all the predictions made by the theory have been confirmed by empirical scientific observations, often to may decimal points of accuracy. The comparison with AGW is stark.
The Daily Telegraph printed a piece by Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal who is, I believe, a fully paid-up global warming believer. He wrote:
“It is not unknown for hyped-up scientific claims to be mistaken or exaggerated.I count myself a sceptic, but…”
He calls himself a sceptic – how ironic! And his statement about hyped-up scientific claims is, sadly, so very true, though not in the way he probably meant it.
So, in comparison with Relativity, how do the scientific predictions made by AGW compare with scientific observation?
AGW makes many predictions embodied in the climate models relating to future global warming, rainfall, changes in water vapour, the amount and sign of changes in globally emitted infra red, the global average ice extent and, of course, the infamous tropical hot spot.
All of these predictions are completely refuted by the data. I’m not sure if a single significant long term prediction by AGW actually came true.
If climate science had not been corrupted by money, politics and green extremism then AGW would have been killed off years ago and today our understanding of how the climate *really* works would have been greatly improved.
Still, it is indeed very nice to see another branch of science working well. Presumably, at least for now, gravitational waves and the nature of space-time don’t offend the sensitivities of the Green Blob – but give it time!
Chris
they have a website.
https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/
Science daily does a good job with this.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/02/160211103935.htm
Einstein may have been skeptical about Planck’s assertion that BB radiation came in integral chunks whose energy was hF, F being the wave frequency , which evidently Planck asserted out of thin air, and found that it led to his previously empirical formula for the black body radiation spectrum.
But it was Einstein himself who later on working on the Photo-electric effect declared that EM energy such as light only came in such integral chunks; i.e. photons.
So far as I know, to this day, there is no form of classical Physics explanation for the photo-electric effect.
You can calculate the energy density in an EM wave from Maxwell’s equations, and hence calculate how long it would take for a target such as an atom of known cross-section to collect enough energy from that wave to eject a photo-electron. Problem is that time increases the weaker the EM wave is.
Yet photo-electric materials kick out an electron almost instantaneously, no matter how much you attenuate the EM wave. Only the number of electrons follows with the intensity of the EM wave.
And the electron emission drops to zero even for strong waves, if the wavelength is too long.
Einstein’s E = hF truly was the breakthrough in the PE effect.
G
@ur momisugly
“Einstein may have been skeptical about Planck’s assertion that BB radiation came in integral chunks whose energy was hF”
I believe your comment is historically wrong, but is the prevailing urban legend. It was Planck who refused to believe the implications of his own work – that his black body radiation was inherently quantized – waves are continuous and can’t be quantized … everybody knows that! (consensus). Einstein stood as the “odd man out”, insisting that Planck’s work did in fact show the quantization of radiation in a bounded system.
http://www.math.lsa.umich.edu/~krasny/math156_article_planck.pdf
“Max Planck looked for a solution, during the course of which he was forced to introduce the notion of “energy quanta”. With the quantum hypothesis, a perfect match between theory and experiment was obtained. Voila! Quantum theory was born. The story is a myth, closer to a fairytale than to historical truth. ”
“If Planck did not introduce the hypothesis of energy quanta in 1900, who did? Lorentz and even Boltzmann have been mentioned as candidates, but a far stronger case can be made that it was Einstein who first recognized the essence of quantum theory. Einstein’s remarkable contributions to the early phase of quantum theory are well known and beyond dispute. Most famous is his 1905 theory of light quanta (or photons), but he also made important contributions in 1907 on the quantum theory of the specific heats of solids and in 1909 on energy fluctuations. There is no doubt that the young Einstein saw deeper than Planck, and that Einstein alone recognized that the quantum discontinuity was an essential part of Planck’s theory of black-body radiation. Whether this makes Einstein “the true discoverer of the quantum discontinuity”, as claimed by the French historian of physics Olivier Darrigol, is another matter. What is important is that Planck’s role in the discovery of quantum theory was complex and somewhat ambiguous. To credit him alone with the discovery, as is done in some physics textbooks, is much too simplistic. Other physicists, and Einstein in particular, were crucially involved in the creation of quantum theory. The “discovery” should be seen as an extended process and not as a moment of insight communicated on a particular day in late 1900. “
How many angels can dance on the point of a pin?
The theological answer would be as many as god deems necessary at the time. Neither more nor less.
The theological answer would be: question is wrong as angels are not material entities.
The theological answer to that question depends on the theological answer to the question “what kind of ‘stuff’ are angels made of?” If it’s essentially physical, zero or one. If it’s completely non-material, an infinite number. Gradations would be in between. That was the point of it originally.
I agree, when you see the universe through a set of conventions, no deviations can be made from expected results.
A huge hydrogen gas cloud passed the alleged super massive black hole in the centre of the Milky way recently, and it was not consumed, it passed right by.
The stars orbiting that same alleged SM black hole never show any light distortion or scattering as they pass in close orbit, which should be impossible according to Einstein, well actually Einstein thought the idea of black holes was completely wrong.
Black holes only exist because someone divided by 0. Lets be totally honest here. The theory has been modified but it took decades for the mainstream geniuses to accept you cannot divide by zero, and that infinity is not a number, you can’t use in calculations of physical phenomenon. A hyperbole on an axis sure that is OK.
We have not seen a black hole, no one has ever found one. So that irks me when people talk of them and build theories on their effects, forgetting the black hole they are using for the basis of their study exists only in mathematics.
To provide an example, Hawking said the singularity at the very start of the universe was infinitely dense and infinitely hot and 0 volume.
Yes this brilliant mathematician, left the reservation, and people loved it! He abandoned the laws of physics, 0 volume in 3 dimensional space is nothing but a coordinate, logical not physical. Let along stuffing all of the mass of the universe in there.
Both hawking and Einstein state you cannot create energy out of nothing, but that is exactly what they did with the big bang and dark energy\matter.
There should be trillions of Einstein rings in our skies, yet there are ? 12 or 15 candidates for Einstein rings? My above about the SM black hole, shows that Einstein rings do not exist, and what we are seeing are most likely similar effects to when the sunlight hits ice crystals in our own atmosphere creating sundogs. Refraction not bending.
Lastly, given Einstein states gravity is geoces in space time, then by that same reasoning, every object will bend light as it is not Newton’s force that bends light. This means there should be a detectable disturbance of light around every object, other than refraction that we usually see.
Remember the mass is irrelevant, if there is a mass it affects space time supposedly, so every object must affect the path light travels. Yet there has been no such discovery.
It’s amazing what can be done with mathematical equations when you use the miracle of renormalization when that that “0” pops up and then eventually this finding
leads to a scientific dogma.
Bingo Earl, that was kinda my point.
Black Holes, Dark Energy, Dark Matter, etc…
Empiricism has died a long slow death in our culture. Few today can distinguish between theory and reality, the map and the territory. The vast majority of both lay and professionals simply accept as dogma whatever small sample of research is bought, paid for, and propagandised.
At least folks who work in quantum physics don’t try to say what is physically happening. Sure some folks try to sell one interpretation or another, but for the most part they realize that they are working with mathematical models that make predictions. And this is the physics upon which our civilisation is built. That and Electrical Engineering. Almost nothing of value has come out of the mess that is classical physics today.
Classical Physics went of the rails after Gauss, Weber, Faraday, etc.
“How many angels can dance on the point of a pin?”
One.
So the very same interferometer principle Michelson and Morley used in 1887 that led (eventually) to Einstein’s 1916 prediction of gravitational waves turns out to be the crucial method leading to the detection of such waves exactly a century later.
Yep.
I would have thought that if space was stretching the light would have stretched with it….?
From the answer here http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/235356/how-is-it-that-distortions-in-space-can-be-measured-as-distances/235487#235487
“It’s quite true that a change in the metric does stretch light (i.e. red or blue shift it) but remember that the lasers are continually shining new light into the arms. The length of the arms is 4 km so the light makes the round trip in about 27 microseconds. However the highest frequency of the detected wave was 250 hz, making the shortest period 4 milliseconds. So the length of the arms is changing more than a factor of a hundred times more slowly than the light is measuring that length. The end result is that the frequency of the light is not affected to any significant extent by the gravitational wave, and that’s why it can detect the change in the length of the arms.”
That’s why the lasers are arranged in an L-shape.
Well The MM experiment perhaps led to the Special Theory of Relativity, which doesn’t have anything to do with gravitation.
So I don’t think you can claim that MM leads to gravitational waves.
G
I had to read the article 2 times. There is a whole lot of collaborators getting their names out in THAT article. So and so collaborating with whosit etc etc…blah blah
I want to know HOW they did it.
I want to know the underlying principle of physics and detection methods used. I’ll watch the videos next.
Can anyone write a synopsis?
They saw a wobble in a laser ??
Why do they think the collision of those two black holes caused the waves they have detected?
Exactly. There is a confusing cocktail of fact, speculation and self-aggrandizement. I don’t think they have a clue about the source of the pulse or how far away (how old) it was. It was a single event. Gravity waves from the Higgs field in the CERN collider?
PW, this time probably wrong skwpticism.. The LIGO experiment has been expalined elsewhere. The new sensirivity enhancements have been explained elsewhere. Ans now we have gotten unambiguous results at both sensors, seperated correctly by the spped of light. QED.
They didn’t even see the 2 black holes either by proxy or directly. This sounded like another of those “lets invent a scenario which will bring in more funds”
Sorry for the tardy response.
The reason that they “believe” (weak word – “understand” would be more correct) the signal is that of two black holes spinning into one is the fact that the observation matches so closely the predicted signal.
The mathematically predicted wave as compared to the two observed signals is shown here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/science/scientists-chirp-excitedly-for-ligo-gravitational-waves-and-einstein.html
VERY basic explanation.
Two tunnels that are the same length, at right angles to each other. Shoot a laser beam down each one, bouncing them off of mirrors at the other end. When they come back, use other mirrors to “merge” the two beams.
Now, when everything is undisturbed (by gravity, vibrations in the ground, etc.) the two beams will end up being in exact phase.
When a gravity wave comes through, it “shrinks” and/or “expands” the two tunnels, per Einstein’s theory – and by different amounts (unless it comes in at EXACTLY the 45 degree angle, very unlikely). So the distance traveled by the laser beams now differs – and when you recombine them, they are slightly out of phase. (The amount that they are out of phase tells you the direction and strength of the gravity wave.)
Oh, actually, come to think of it, the “undisturbed” state of the detector should leave you with the beams exactly out of phase (resulting in a “zero” signal). Much easier to detect a change from zero than from full strength.
The devil, of course, is in the details – see the bit about ground vibrations above. The tiniest tremor, natural or man-made, produces a “signal” that is far greater than the gravity wave you are trying to detect. We’re probably talking angstrom-level sensitivity here…
That is helpful. Thank-you.
but I am thinking that the blink of an eyelid would create sufficient noise to shake the mirrors 1/1000 of a proton wide.
The devil is of course, in getting to an undisturbed situation. Resolving a gravitational wave signal from many other perturbations that could cause the length of one arm or the other to change. My Ph.D work was in the field of optical coating, specifically losses due to absorbtance, so I was very interested to read the improvements to sensitivity was due to improving the coatings.
To characterize the sample coating fully for reflectance and transmittance at normal incidence I used a photometer, and to remove any systematic errors caused by substrate and optical path differences, each wavelength data point was measured 16 times, covering all permutations of optical path. And my optical paths were at most a couple of meters long.
So I greatly admire the ability to recover a gravitational wave signal from an interferometer with 4km long arms!
“According to Einstein’s theory, the distance between the mirrors will change by an infinitesimal amount when a gravitational wave passes by the detector. A change in the lengths of the arms smaller than one-ten-thousandth the diameter of a proton (10-19 meter) can be detected.”-http://www.sciencenewsline.com/news/2016021121020052.html
I’m glad that they think they can remove the background noise from all the jackhammers, pile drivers, freight trains, seismic exploration, gravity bombs falling in Syria, snowflakes falling in Antarctica, volcanoes erupting in Kamchatka … color me skeptical that the attribution to a conjectured source (Black holes) is correct. Kudos on their claimed precision, but I understand that Einstein himself disbelieved in the possibility of black holes.
The way they combine the beams produces an interference fringe pattern. A shift in the phase of a beam shifts the fringe pattern.
“but I am thinking that the blink of an eyelid would create sufficient noise to shake the mirrors 1/1000 of a proton wide” (Paul Westhaver February 14, 2016 at 7:39 pm, http://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/02/14/a-triumph-of-science-first-detection-of-the-gravitational-wave/comment-page-1/#comment-2145170)
A blink of an eyelid, near one mirror, may, perhaps, create a huge detected signal. This signal was detected thousands of miles apart. Definitely not caused by an eyelid blink, nor by a butterfly wing flap.
I need more. I watched the videos and they are wanting.
How does anyone know what the source of the pulse was and where it came from.?
The detector is blind in the mutually orthogonal axis (vertical), right?
Why doesn’t spacial distortion also, and simultaneously effect the laser. Light is attracted to gravity. Wouldn’t this null the response?
I get the interferometry part.
How is terrestrial motion nulled out?
I have more questions…
Yeah, they didn’t talk much about error bars….
The opportunity for confirmation bias on this one is massive.
Not that I dispute Einstein, that’s a couple of order of magnitude beyond my brain level, but I’m not yet sold on this.
oh yeah… and judging by the line-up of “collaborators”, there are plenty-o-peeps wanting to be in on the Nobel Prize. I really am trying to suppress my innate skepticism but the numbers are so freaking small.
Paul just go to the LIGO site they have a full discussion of how the interference sources are removed by a very multilayered system which is both active and passive. Yes they have error bars on the results and yes the numbers are really small. There are funny stories on the LIGO site about employees riding loud motorcycles that they could detect. Most of the story of LIGO is about the fight to remove all sources of error they track the most amazing array of things.
I’m with you….I need more…and with the detection being so miniscule…*SMH*
I’m going to the LIGO in Louisiana this weekend for a tour (Public). The daughter of one of my High School friends is on staff there (Physics degree from Abilene Christian University and Louisiana State University), so I may get to understand it better. As was mentioned above, “Get thee hence and learn”, don’t just disparage what you do not understand.
A predicted signal, detected thousands of miles apart, by two detectors.
See the extremely tight correlations here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/science/scientists-chirp-excitedly-for-ligo-gravitational-waves-and-einstein.html
All very suspicious, see the end of the this web page
Any direction that will be equal angles between the two arms will produce no signal. But that is a very small part of the entire spherical possibilities. (Actually, there is almost certainly a “cone” around each of these axes that will not produce a detectable signal. No idea of just how large that cone is; maybe it will be in the final paper.)
Now, there are two detectors, not just the one. The delay between the two LIGO sites tells you the direction of the pulse. (But no idea of the distance – I will be interested when they get a third one up and running and have another event, when it will be possible to triangulate the actual source. Although the error bar on that is almost certainly going to be very large…)
..Why don’t I believe them ??
I know, lol, I know, Marcus. I am CHOOSING to believe them — this time.
..Maybe their grant money was about to be cut off..how can we check, they have the only tools to measure what it is they are measuring !!
Hey, Marcus. Just posting this as a “good bye, for now.” I need a looong break from WUWT after just now reading Rud Istvan’s and Anthony’s gross mischaracterization of my (and some others’) only wanting an investigation and some answers about Justice Scalia’s death (see 2/14/16 Justice Scalia thread toward the bottom) as an assertion of a “conspiracy theory.” Not once did I assert or described a “conspiracy theory.” And yet, that is how my logical response to this situation was described.
Take care, Marcus. I’ll be praying for you in the years to come.
Your former WUWT ally for truth, but your pal, always,
Janice
P.S. I am not going to return here, so, if you reply to this, please don’t be hurt if I don’t respond.
Hey, Marcus. Just posting this as a “good bye, for now.” I need a looong break from WUWT after just now reading Rud Istvan’s and Anthony’s gross mischaracterization of my (and some others’) only wanting an investigation and some answers about Justice Scalia’s death (see 2/14/16 Justice Scalia thread toward the bottom) as an assertion of a “conspir@cy theory.” Not once did I assert or described a “conspir@cy theory.” And yet, that is how my logical response to this situation was described.
Take care, Marcus. I’ll be praying for you in the years to come.
Your former WUWT ally for truth, but your pal, always,
Janice
P.S. I am not going to return here, so, if you reply to this, please don’t be hurt if I don’t respond.
{Second attempt using “@” in that word…}
Hello Janice,
I noted your decision to leave WUWT thinking a comment was directed at you. it wasn’t. I hadn’t even seen your comment. In my comments admin window, I only see comments that need approval.
Another comment, not published, but sent to the bit bucket, was what I was directing it at. It suggested the CIA killed Scalia on Obama’s orders. That’s the sort of crazy stuff we don’t need.
I’m sorry you thought it was directed at you.
Anthony
I found that strange also !! Oh well !
I’m sure you ( and your librarian mind ) will be missed by many !!
JM, I have no idea about what could have given offense as you state. If so, apologize. Please cite specifics so I can better understand, as surely did not intend to..
I do not comment on nonsense, ever. A matter of personal policy not to play the warmunist game. See a couple of belated comments on the SLR thread for examples.
Rebut false JPL ‘science’ and such, sure. Always specific and factual. Else, never even comment. Were you ‘spammed’?
@ur momisugly Janice Moore
Janice, I hope you will reconsider. Yours is one of the more rational voices here and you are always skeptical enough of the “accepted wisdom” to suit me. (not that I matter in the least)
I did not read the thread in question due to the fact that my take would be misunderstood here no matter how I worded it. The very short version is that anytime a very important person to the state dies, there should be an investigation that is as open and transparent as possible. (the family’s privacy does need to be considered.
A last thought is that I have learned over the decades that we don’t communicate with each other as well via text as we do in person. So much of the conversation stream is impacted via body language and tone of voice. Saying something with a big grin often means something very different from the written word. (not saying that happened to you, only using an example)
I hope you will reconsider.
~ Mark
Watch the 2 videos at the bottom.
You mean their self promotional video’s ??
I believe them. However do not confuse gravitational waves with gravity waves. The latter is in a local planetary environment.
Everybody stand up and cheer for the wave!
There is a good ongoing discussion of this development at Lubos Motls blog, The Reference Frame http://motls.blogspot.com/ .
It is a somewhat demanding read, no surprise as Motl is a Harvard theoretical physicist. He ran afoul there of political correctness and the global warming cult, so he is no longer at Harvard, but still a superb science observer/participant.
etudiant
Thank you for the link.
I spent some time there. Glad I did.
michael
And so……………….what will this discovery allow us to apply it to. Volcanic cycles on earth ? The past angles of our planet’s axis ? the life span of the Sun ? I want to share in the excitement…..How would Spielberg make this exciting to the rest of us?
@ur momisugly jeff:
IF gravitational waves have been detected (and we still await confirmation by independent research regardless of LIGO’s findings), and IF we can perfect the instrumentation and observational & data processing methodology (think of the current LIGO set-up as the rough equivalent of Galileo’s “telescope” vs. the Hubble Space Telescope), we will then be able to “see” high-mass/high-energy astronomical events no matter where they occur in the observable universe.
For instance:
* Much more precise measurements could theoretically be made of the amounts of energy released when giant stars burn out and then collapse, as well as a profile of the process over time. A detector 100x more sensitive than LIGO could theoretically detect every supernova of EVERY kind that happens within our time bubble, and differentiate between them in a way that current EM observations simply can’t.
** We will be able to “see” the merger of galactic nuclei (and many other events) that would otherwise be invisible due to their distance &/or obscuring interstellar dust & debris, since GW propagate regardless of the presence or lack of intervening material or radiation.
*** Most exciting to me, if this method of GW detection is confirmed and can be fine-tuned, it is now theoretically possible to probe the distribution of mass INSIDE the event horizon of a black hole, because even though light does not escape, gravity clearly does. This could help us determine whether or not the objects we currently categorize as “black holes” truly ARE singularities, just another form of degenerate matter (e.g.), or perhaps a totally separate phenomenon that we as a species haven’t even pondered yet.
It is also entirely possible that your idea of SUPER-sensitive seismology is also a potential use for the technology… again, IF the findings can be verified and validated.
You seem only sceptical of scientific consensus when it comes to the climate issue Anthony.
If these are gravity waves, why are they so un-sinewave-like and irregular? If they are created by orbiting black holes why does the envelope of the amplitude drop off to 20% of it’s original value? Black holes suddenly stop orbiting?
Rough envelope in yellow is mine: http://i835.photobucket.com/albums/zz278/CarbonFooledYa/Gravity%20waves2_zpscezmgvwj.png
Modern cosmology is one of the weakest areas of present science. Their explanations that include dark matter and dark energy are clearly epi-cycle-like patches on a failing Newton’s theory of gravity of attraction of mass for mass.
To get rid of dark matter etc, all you have to do is accept that forces of repulsion, not just attraction, exist at cosmic scales — forces of electricity & magnetism. The electric plasma currents discovered in the last few decades in space aren’t for show. Why is that so hard for consensus-believers to understand?
Space-time can not have ripples. Gravity is nothing to do with time and time is not a dimension. Einstein was wrong about light speed being seen as same from all reference frames, & therefore special relativity is also wrong.
You have to understand that lying has become standard for most present-day scientists. They have to lie to gain more funding, prestige, career advancement, etc.
Blind worship of scientists like Einstein & Newton is another prominent feature. It’s better to be sceptical than always accepting of these people and their consensuses.
Black holes suddenly stop orbiting?
Yes, because the two black holes collided and became one.
I see. They’re measuring something. But gravity waves?
And the center of mass was stationary the whole time.
You mean the speed of the center of mass was constant the whole time?
You’re an ignorant fool. The signatures match the predicted waveforms for two black holes orbiting, colliding and coalescing into a single black hole. This is the scientific event of our lifetimes and you’re too stupid to see it for what it is!
Um, no. Einstein’s theories of both special and general relativity are put into practical use every day in the global GPS system. The constancy of the speed of light in all reference frames, special relativity, leads to the understanding that makes moving clocks run slow. General relativity predicts that clocks run faster in weaker gravitational fields. Both effects have to be accounted for in the GPS clocks orbiting the earth, otherwise the positioning accuracy would degrade to uselessness within a day. The total correction required is exactly as predicted by Einstein’s theories.
re Paul Clark, Phodges
What the modern-physics-is-all-wrong-and-I-am-right-based-solely-on-my-assertions crowd invariably fails to understand is how interlinked is all of physics.
Modern GPS has to take into account both Special Relativity (SR) and General Relativity (GR) effects
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_analysis_for_the_Global_Positioning_System#Special_and_General_Relativity
in order to work.
The detection of gravitational waves only one in a long line of tests of GR:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity
GR has successfully passed all experimental tests to-date. That it why it continues to be the leading theory of how
“Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve.”
~ John A. Wheeler
Physics has always been an interplay between theory and experiment. Physics would not be science without either one. Electrical power and wire/wireless communication is based on Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism. The transistors and other solid state devices in our computers are designed based on condensed matter-quantum mechanics theory.
These modern-physics-is-all-wrong-and-I-am-right-based-solely-on-my-assertions types are so common that physicists have developed a scale to rank them:
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
As for the cost, I’d say that compared to most projects the US taxpayers got a great deal: $1 billion to detect gravitational waves compared to, say, $1.3 billion in farm subsidies to people who don’t farm or $1 trillion plus for a plane that can barely fly.
Paul:
Actually, the signal is very much as expected for a “black hole” merger: increasing frequency and amplitude as the “black holes” spiral into each-other, and abruptly “rings down” upon actually merging.
Have you ever checked out what th expected waveform would be for various gravitational wave sources? I know the LIGO collaboration (and many others) have done so, for many decades.
David
There are no black holes. Time is not a substance. There is no relativity.
And no rational thought on your part either.
Well the center of mass is always stationary in center of mass space.
g
It’s only just been published. Peer review. Might want to keep that Champagne on ice. “There’s many a slip ‘twixt the leap and the couch.”
Can someone correct me here (if I am wrong)….
The distance the universe contracted/expanded due the grav wave was 1 x 10 -21 (0. with 20 zeros then 1) meters. There is no way to actually measure this because of all the background seismic activity which is many orders of magnitude higher. Even a car driving several km’s away produces more seismic activity (therefore affecting the interferometer) than the grav wave stretching/contraction. Wind, temperature changes etc all produce so much noise that that it is impossible to actually measure the grav wave on Earth.
The way I understand they came up with the measurement was to use COMPUTER MODELS to remove the background noise of the first -20 decimal places and presto, they found the evidence for gav waves.
Is this correct ???
Now I’m not saying they didn’t achieve it (I believe they did) – but I always get nervous when I hear scientists using computer models to “prove” things.
Almost nothing today is done without using computer models. They almost always work beautifully.
I use a whole hierarchy of computer models every day. They range from absurdly simple to absurdly complex (all for the same thing). I use the simplest ones that get me the information I need (where is light going). If that is not sufficient, I pull out another stop, and turn on some more pipes to see if that gets closer to what I want.
I could start with the grand daddy of them all first; but that would take for ever to run, and create so much information that I might not be able to find what I was looking for.
But then my computer models are based on solidly founded experimentally verified Physical phenomena; reflection/refraction/polarization/dispersion/diffraction/whatever.
Trouble seems to be that planetary climate models do not seemed to be based on planets.
G
My guess. I think of it as similar to beat frequencies, the generated tone when two violin strings are just barely out of tune. The two paths of the laser beams are in phase, therefore no beat tone is generated. Something sends them out of phase for a moment then they fall back in phase. The “chirp” is the resultant beat tone.
Hi Janice. Made you look!
OK OK wasn’t the detector lit up by a pulse? Not a wave? If it was a wave, it would still be waving.
So.. waves have NOT yet been detected. A pulse was detected ( and don’t give me that superposition of all waves constitute a pulse excuse)
waves have NOT yet been detected.
Educated yourself a bit before putting foot in mouth. Waves were indeed detected during the in-spiralling of the black holes, culminating in a crescendo when the holes collided. During the collision the system radiated away more energy than 50 times the radiation of ALL the stars in the observable universe.
P.S. It is so sad to see the many demonstrations of willful scientific illiteracy on display at WUWT. This discovery is up there among the most important ones in a lifetime, opening up a new window on the universe.
This discovery is up there among the most important ones in a lifetime, opening up a new window on the universe.
Why?
Where can we now go (from a science perspective) that we could never go before?
Whenever we open a new window on the universe we learn wonderful things. The gravitational waves let us see [and hear!] the violence our universe is so full of. Just like the window opened up in radio waves, ultraviolet light, neutrinos, etc.
Ls, agree. Sadly, that is part of the price of engaging the resolutely, willfully permanently ignorant.
@Isvalgaard: “P.S. It is so sad to see the many demonstrations of willful scientific illiteracy on display at WUWT. This discovery is up there among the most important ones in a lifetime, opening up a new window on the universe.”
I have followed WUWT including your comments for years, this was as far as I can tell a one time event, I found your comment condescending, sorry!
So, you count yourself belonging to those unwashed masses and take offense at being found out. Your loss.
tobias smit February 14, 2016 at 9:56 pm
The event was followed by a gamma ray burst picked up by Fermi telescope .04 seconds later. Also they have two more events after the September event.
It always helps to read a little,
etudiant February 14, 2016 at 7:34 pm
There is a good ongoing discussion of this development at Lubos Motls blog, The Reference Frame http://motls.blogspot.com/ .
There is probable two to three weeks non stop reading on the subject.
michael
@Isvalgaard – I think you are being rather harsh on skeptics here. Leaving aside the physical science behind this discovery for the moment and considering the scientific profession from a sociological perspective in our modern society, there is a lot that we can (and probably should) be nervous and skeptical about. On a general basis we know that science has a very problematical funding basis that unfortunately does tend to incentivise scientists to ‘discover’ things and ‘justify’ the political investment. Science has always had, and always will have, a problem with human bias and expectations from research, but found effective ways to counteract and minimise it. Aligning funding incentive (quite probably unconscious) with pre-existing bias may be a challenge that the scientific method will struggle to deal with or cannot overcome – I don’t know. This has been spoken about often in the climate sphere and it pertains to many (the majority I suspect) fields of science today. Many in science, who are honest with themselves, would acknowledge this fact. The behaviour of some scientists and many scientific institutions in the GW imbroglio has shattered many people’s confidence in the honesty and impartiality of the scientific method as it is practised today. This may be an over reaction but it is, nevertheless, an understandable one. It is the responsibility of the scientific community to re-establish that confidence.
In the case of this discovery, I for one ‘accept’ it insofar as I accept these highly complex modern cosmological theories and proofs that I don’t understand. Like most people I haven’t studied them in any detail so I am not in a position to affirm they are true or assert they are false. Really, all I have to go on is the probity of the scientists that are saying it is proven. That is a new challenge for scientists that they really didn’t have in previous eras where their ‘correctness’ was much more self-evident and understandable by the ordinary non-specialist person. Noting that research facilities like this have cost upwards of USD0.6bn and the probity perception problem science has now in some quarters, complex scientific fields such as this have a major problem to convince significant sections of the public that their results are not just correct and true but also worth huge amounts of tax payers money when there are collapsing education and health services in many western countries. The fundamental issue here is human psychology not modern complex relativistic theories (proven by experiment or not).
My advice to you is to spend less time name-calling and ridiculing people who display, in your view unreasonable skepticism, and to spend more time trying to make the ‘obviousness’ of this result more ‘obvious’ to those who haven’t the background or inclination to study the whole corpus of knowledge as you or others have done.
I think you are being rather harsh on skeptics here
Most people here who think themselves skeptics are simply ignorant. Now, ignorance is no shame, but willful ignorance is. And that is what I see here. It is like the cardinals who didn’t even want to look through Galileo’s telescope for fear of seeing the truth.
“Scientists” are just glorified bondfangere.
Oops the gamma ray burst was .4 seconds not .04.
memory plays tricks.
michael
Um..
..
If they radiated that much energy, why are they ‘black’?
And with your usual precision,…,could you explain the difference between gravity waves and gravitational waves?
Can I paddle with you in your canoe Dr. S ??
This achievement has my flabber gasted.
Having in my time played with some apparently crude interferometer tools (Fabry Perot Etalons) I have seen how picking out the noise nuisances one at a time can lead to measurements of exquisite precision.
I have not yet got a clear picture of just exactly what they actually did; but in good time I will, but I give this a great deal more credibility than I gave to the Higgs boson; and I was not particularly skeptical about that. Not quite sure exactly what they found (seems like they aren’t either) but I believe they found something.
Same for this. Now I just wonder what follow up ” observations ” might be doable with this setup or a successor.
The trouble with Einstein’s theories of whatever; although some are mathematically quite challenging; none of them seems to have a whole gamut of twiddle knobs to be fudged until the experiments agree with the theory. Basically one knob to zoom into the correct scale, and that’s it.
Planck’s BB theory is the same way. So a new … h … appears on the scene but then everything else is comprised of well established experimentally verified fundamental Physical constants. That’s what is so amazing about those theories. They aren’t hand whittled to fit the facts.
G
Lief is such a snotty old crank. The PULSE was a whole 110 milliseconds long. It contained time varying periods and varying amplitudes. Here is an image of it:
Sure looks like a pulse to me.
Here is an ULTRA SHORT pulse profile…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrashort_pulse#/media/File:Ultrashort_pulse.svg
Here is a definition of PULSE:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/pulse
see definition 6.
And…exactly where were these two black holes you are referring to? Or is it an inference?
Gad…pull your own two feet out of your senile toothless mouth after you pull you head out of your prolapsed a$$. Nasty old fool.
Can’t have a civil conversation can you?… you blowhard.
A black hole orbiting another one is losing energy [carried away by gravitational waves] which causes the orbit to shrink which in turn increases the loss until the two holes collide, after which there is a short period with vibrations dying away. All of that gives you exactly the strange form of the signal. It is not a pulse, but an extended wave ‘train’. A pulse is a single and abrupt emission of radiation, not an extended train, so, no pulse. Just colliding black holes.
Black holes are a mass and because mass is heavier than no mass they are attracted to each other, two black holes falling into eachother will break that mass apart forming two new galaxies… it’s awesome everytime I think about galaxy formation… if you only knew…
First part right. Black holes have a lot of mass.
Second part, provide some theoretical or experimental support. I call bunkum.
Young galaxies move toward each other and old galaxies move away from each other, why is that?
It would be a cute observation if only black holes existed. There are many models for black holes and all have problems when faced with real observations. The black hole advocates prefer to ignore these (critical) problems. Einstein even pointed out that black holes could not exist as they would fly apart from radial forces long before reaching neutron star size. Black holes are part of the Big Bang construct that supports black energy, matter, and focus, all false and fantasy.
yet another illiterate puts foot in mouth…
I don’t think illiterate means what you think it does.
I also notice that you are full of name-calling in this thread on the order of the alarmists pounding on people for not seeing the “obvious” fact that CO2 will fry us all unless we dismantle our industrialized society.
Physics has often been dead wrong and could well be dead wrong now. There is no special field that one should drop his skepticism in looking at the results. The fallacy you are hanging onto is that there can only be one cause of what we observe via our instrumentation. Our instruments have fooled us before.
~ Mark
let me just slip herein, to the illiterate’s corner – if only to promote a wee bit of Luddite dry humour.
The Parallax Effect on Short Hair
The light emission of black holes (Hawking radiation) has been observed.
Black holes are real.
Deal with it.
“The light emission of black holes (Hawking radiation) has been observed.”
Very interesting. Dr. Google only alluded to simulated “white holes” in laboratories.
Would appreciate a link or two..
A Black Hole is mass so great that light can not escape from it, they have even been observed, our own star, the sun bends light a certain amount due to it’s mass.
Other article and info…
http://www.astronomy.com/bonus/gravity
And of course CSIRO was there too
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/csiro-hailed-contribution-to-gravitation-waves-find–for-work-done-by-axed-unit-20160214-gmtmhu.html
Gravitational wave or not. I remember the side effects of the 60’s space program. Faster computers, new materials to be able to survive the different temps in space. New metals, new propellants , foods and the list is long. This program was ( according to the video’s) build from the ground up. Lenses so pure you can barely see them, new ways to align lasers and I presume the list is longer.
Why don’t they hoopla all of that? Stuff that can actually help in areas like medicine ( lenses), laser guided trains? Gravitational waves that tell us what happened 5 billion years ago, I doubt if that stays on the news longer then 24 hrs. ( I realize there are patents involved and I don’t doubt those are on the minds of all of the people involved more than the waves themselves so maybe that is why there is all the hoopla in the first place).
What do you mean faster computers.
How about just computers for just about anybody who wants one.
g
This is really earthshaking news!
Groan…
This is not a “triumph of science” it is a triumph of delusional groupthink and funding pressure.
After all the blogs on here about error margins being greater than changes in recorded temperature anomalies, one would have thought this site would be a bit more cautious in hailing a measurement of something 1000 times smaller than a proton!!
$1Billion has been the cost of this project. How many people want to see the funding continue? Time to face up to the real innconvenient truth. The peer review system is broken in all areas of science. Not just on the global non warming issue.
We encounter a lot of patently cargo-cult science here in this forum.
But then it seems to become habitual for people to lazily call bullshit on every development in science.
And I am surprised that so many comments here are critical of this result with no real analysis or evidence.
For the sake of balance, I would like to say that I have no evidence which would lead me to doubt the conclusions of the researchers involved.
And it would therefore be wise for me to maintain a working hypothesis that this is a genuinely successful experiment and a valid result.
People may question whether such accuracy was possible using the apparatus and computer analysis available. But I have no reason to doubt that the experiment was designed specifically to produce that degree of precision and to eliminate other sources of disturbance by measuring them and cancelling them from the detector result. A big challenge, yes. But not implausible.
I don’t have any evidence that this result is valid. And I don’t have any evidence that the result was invalid.
I don’t see my lack of evidence as good reason to call B.S.
So congratulations from me to all the scientists involved in this project.
That’s all that I have to say. I’m only posting so that a non critic is represented.
“I don’t have any evidence that this result is valid. And I don’t have any evidence that the result was invalid.”
Exactly! The default position of the scientist (or scientifically thinking person) is that any new discovery is in fact possibly heifer dust until there has been independent conformation and until many people have tried to poke holes in the theory or discovery.
Did Karl Popper live in vain?
Sure, I am familiar with the scientific process and I agree that all purported discoveries are worthy of skepticism. But, skepticism based on informed analysis and in depth understanding.
What I am criticizing in this thread are the comments that rail against the possibility that this result may be valid from a standpoint of complete ignorance of the physics and the technology involved.
And there are many such comments.
I don’t deem myself qualified to criticize this experiment. And yet at least I sat and passed exams in which I had to analyze, explain or reproduce the physics of Michelson Morley and then basic study of Relativity.
At least I got to find out that physics is surprising and often counter-intuitive.
Some of the comments here seem to amount to – “it just don’t seem right to me. So I say BS”.
I’m happy for now that hundreds of extremely smart people seem confident that this result means something.
Maybe later we will learn that some critical factor has been overlooked.
I must leave such analysis to people who are smarter and more well informed than I am.
This is not the same as the widely supported and yet ultimately untestable and implausible claims that specialist assessment of the activities of sailors with buckets and thermometers on sparsely located shipping routes in the late 1800’s can be used to deduce a global mean SST for those dates with a precision of a few tenths of a degree.
Let’s focus on total bullshit and grant that gravity waves may well have been detected by this experiment on this occasion.
PLUS – at least the discovery of gravity waves will not be used to justify a massive shift in energy provision and economic policies which will lead to the needless impoverishment of the people of planet earth!!
Or similar bunk that we should really be concerned with here.
“independent conformation”
That was built into the experiment. Two different set-ups, thousands of miles apart.
“And I am surprised that so many comments here are critical of this result with no real analysis or evidence.”
I am not.
If an announcement of a group of people at the end of $1Billion in funding detecting something a trillion times smaller than the accuracy of the instrument supposedly measuring it for a total of 1/5th of a second from two hypothetical objects millions of light years away that no longer exist (even hypothetically) to reproduce the experiment on, doesn’t give you a reason to doubt their findings; why doubt anything at all. Santa is real. So is the tooth fairy. Don’t believe me? Give me a billion dollars and I will prove it to you with a 1/5th of a second’s worth of data!
Will someone please explain to me why the ocean tides are not produced by the same gravitational waves observed here? Different wavelength, certainly.
Will someone please explain to me why the ocean tides are not produced by the same gravitational waves observed here? Different wavelength, certainly.
You just answered your own question. Different wavelength. With the length of those interfereometers, they get really good frequency resolution.
Would someone please explain the difference between the gravitational waves observed here and the gravitational waves that produce ocean tides? Vastly different wavelengths, certainly. Thanks in advance.
the gravitational waves that produce ocean tides
The cause of tides is not gravitational waves, but is simply the fact that the gravitational force [in the Newtonian sense] of the Moon is different on the nearside and the far-side of the Earth.
Somebody asked what the use of this wonderful finding is. What use is a Mozart Symphony? Both expand our humanity. What practical use? A GPS would not function without General Relativity being correct. What marvels would be invented in the future based on Einstein’s theory?
Of course Leif – but this discovery did make me wonder if varying orbits would result in gravity waves. In simple terms, if the distance between planets is changing then the gravitational force between them would be changing also? Could this kind of slow gravity ‘pulsing’ result in tiny gravitational waves, or , from theory, are they only expected from humungous size events?
gravitational waves, or , from theory, are they only expected from humongous size events?
If you accelerate any charged particle it radiates electromagnetic waves. If you accelerate any particle with mass it radiates gravitational waves. Wave you hand in the air and YOU generate gravitational waves. Their amplitude is a function of the gravitational field which has to be extremely strong in order for the waves to be measurable with the sensitivity LIGO has achieved. So, yes, you need humongous events.
The purpose of music is to manipulate a target audience into an emotional position before exposing them to a poetic truth about the universe. e.g.:
@Kev-in-Uk:
Of course Leif – but this discovery did make me wonder if varying orbits would result in gravity waves. In simple terms, if the distance between planets is changing then the gravitational force between them would be changing also? Could this kind of slow gravity ‘pulsing’ result in tiny gravitational waves, or , from theory, are they only expected from humungous size event
The orbiting of the Earth around the Sun DOES (in theory) produce gravitational waves; these waves are also RIDICULOUSLY TINY compared the the near-light speed orbiting of two ~30 solar mass objects about one another which then merge. For this reason, GW observations are (for the moment) only being contemplated for large-energy/large-mass events, such as the merger of black holes.
Thanks, just wanting to make sure I remember old physics correctly. I was under the impression (probably wrongly) that Einsteins gravity theory was largely confirmed by the lunar ranging results. So, in reality this detection of actual gravity waves is presumably the final confirmation? I must confess that I cannot see how this will change much unless better detection apparatus is feasible?
One other thing, a query about the computer models to analyse the data – presumably, these are designed based what we expect (if the theory is correct) – and hence, is there not a certain amount of confirmation bias built in? Just wondering…..
The way science works is to make a prediction from the theory. If the observations match the prediction, we gain confidence in the theory.
“Wave you[r] hand in the air and YOU generate gravitational waves.”
Wouldn’t those be AGW?
Without getting too technical Kev-in-UK, there are many solutions to the equations of GR it is not a singular answer. That is why discussions about black holes, worm holes etc have raged for years. What the result does is exclude some solutions and refine others. The device itself is like the birth of a telescope, the start of a new way to see space which will give hundreds of events per year each giving up new data. We are told there are 7 more smaller events still to be published from the first run and it is likely there will be 4 advanced LIGO’s operating from January 2017.
The Fermi telescope has an event which is in the right area and time for the LIGO event on it’s scanning array but unfortunately it wasn’t looking at the area so it doesn’t say anything more than it is likely.
http://gammaray.nsstc.nasa.gov/gbm/publications/preprints/gbm_ligo_preprint.pdf
If LIGO has achieved detection sensitivity then it will see hundreds of events per year and many of them will be able to be aligned to conventional radio and optical telescopes and so worrying about what layman think is not high on the priority.
Feel free to believe whatever you want it won’t change the reality for science.
don’t forget Louis de Broglie and Poincaré
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controverse_sur_la_paternit%C3%A9_de_la_relativit%C3%A9