Last week, the science world was abuzz with the news that gravitational waves had been discovered thanks to the LIGO project and the team of international scientists that made it possible. At WUWT, I covered the story here, saying that it was a “triumph of science”. Indeed it was, and still is, and the effects of this discovery on science will ripple into the future for decades and centuries to come.
I woke in the middle of the night as I sometimes do, for no particular reason except that my brain doesn’t always cooperate with my body when it comes time to sleep, and the LIGO project was on my mind, partly due to an email I got from a fellow who wanted to tell me about a colleague in China who was talking about Gravitons and the LIGO announcement here. It got me was thinking about how wonderful it was that we could detect a gravitational wave from the merging of two black holes 1.3 billion years ago:
A computer simulation shows the collision of two black holes, a tremendously powerful event detected for the first time ever by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO. LIGO detected gravitational waves, or ripples in space and time generated as the black holes spiraled in toward each other, collided, and merged. This simulation shows how the merger would appear to our eyes if we could somehow travel in a spaceship for a closer look. It was created by solving equations from Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity using the LIGO data.
The two merging black holes are each roughly 30 times the mass of the sun, with one slightly larger than the other. Time has been slowed down by a factor of about 100. The event took place 1.3 billion years ago.
The stars appear warped due to the incredibly strong gravity of the black holes. The black holes warp space and time, and this causes light from the stars to curve around the black holes in a process called gravitational lensing. The ring around the black holes, known as an Einstein ring, arises from the light of all the stars in a small region behind the holes, where gravitational lensing has smeared their images into a ring.
The gravitational waves themselves would not be seen by a human near the black holes and so do not show in this video, with one important exception. The gravitational waves that are traveling outward toward the small region behind the black holes disturb that region’s stellar images in the Einstein ring, causing them to slosh around, even long after the collision. The gravitational waves traveling in other directions cause weaker, and shorter-lived sloshing, everywhere outside the ring.
Wikipedia’a article on LIGO notes that on 11 February 2016, the LIGO and Virgo collaborations announced the first observation of a gravitational wave.The signal was named GW150914.The waveform showed up on 14 September 2015, within just two days of when the Advanced LIGO detectors started collecting data after their upgrade. It matched the predictions of general relativity for the inward spiral and merger of a pair of black holesand subsequent ‘ringdown’ of the resulting single black hole. The observations demonstrated the existence of binary stellar-mass black hole systems and the first observation of a binary black hole merger.
These plots show the signals of gravitational waves detected by the twin LIGO observatories at Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington. The signals came from two merging black holes, each about 30 times the mass of our sun, lying 1.3 billion light-years away. The top two plots show data received at Livingston and Hanford, along with the predicted shapes for the waveform. These predicted waveforms show what two merging black holes should look like according to the equations of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, along with the instrument’s ever-present noise. Time is plotted on the X-axis and strain on the Y-axis. Strain represents the fractional amount by which distances are distorted. As the plots reveal, the LIGO data very closely match Einstein’s predictions. The final plot compares data from both detectors. The Hanford data have been inverted for comparison, due to the differences in orientation of the detectors at the two sites. The data were also shifted to correct for the travel time of the gravitational-wave signals between Livingston and Hanford (the signal first reached Livingston, and then, traveling at the speed of light, reached Hanford seven thousandths of a second later). As the plot demonstrates, both detectors witnessed the same event, confirming the detection.
This is indeed a wonderful and marvelous thing, as is the dual LIGO observatory itself; one in Hanford, WA and the other in Livingston, LA, two identical observatories separated by 3,002 kilometers (1,865 miles) so that this distance corresponds to a difference in gravitational wave arrival times of up to ten milliseconds, making it possible to do triangulation to determine an approximate location.
Wikipedia also had this note about the facility and it’s history:
The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is a large-scale physics experiment and observatory to detect gravitational waves. Cofounded in 1992 by Kip Thorne and Ronald Drever of Caltechand Rainer Weiss of MIT, LIGO is a joint project between scientists at MIT, Caltech, and many other colleges and universities. Scientists involved in the project and the analysis of the data for gravitational-wave astronomyare organised by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration which includes more than 900 scientists worldwide, as well as 44,000 active Einstein@Home users. LIGO is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), with important contributions from the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council, the Max Planck Society of Germany, and the Australian Research Council. By mid-September 2015 “the world’s largest gravitational-wave facility” completed a 5-year US$200-million overhaul at a total cost of $620 million.
That’s quite an endeavor, combining global collaboration, two large nearly identical facilities, and decades of research and construction. It struck me that it wasn’t just human energy that went into making LIGO a reality, but scads of real energy, to support design, construction, and operation of LIGO over that time.
Speaking of construction, here’s a photo from 2011, showing what looks to be a vacuum vessel being offloaded from a semi truck by a portable crane truck. Obviously, the vessel was built elsewhere and trucked in, and you can say that about essentially every aspect of the two observatories, as there was nothing but barren land in their place before.
It looks like one of these units:
Imagine the energy involved, not just in construction and transportation to the site by truck, but in maintaining a near perfect vacuum in the 4KM dual legs of the observatory, such as the one seen below:
The amount of power needed is substantial, and it must be clean and non-intermittent as this internal newsletter for the Livingston site suggests:
One of the challenges of our rural location is the availability of clean and stable electrical power. Initially we found our electrical supply experienced some instabilities. This prevented the proper operation of the air conditioning system and some of the vacuum pumps. As mentioned in Cecil Franklin’s article above, the local power company which supplies the observatory, DEMCO, has completed construction of a separate substation dedicated solely for LIGO use. This feature has dramatically improved the quality of electrical power and all electrical systems are now operational. In addition, this improvement significantly reduced power outages due to thunder and lightning storms. Thank you, DEMCO!
Imagine if the power goes out. How long would it take to re-establish the vacuum in that facility?
A quick look at DEMCO Electrical COOP in Louisiana says they use coal-fired power plants, such as:
The coal-fired Big Cajun Power Plant located in Pointe Coupee Parish was built jointly by Louisiana’s electric cooperatives in the 1970s to provide wholesale electrical power to cooperative members across the state. Today, the facility is owned by Louisiana Generating, a subsidiary of NRG Energy.
And, a plot of power generation sources in Louisiana suggests that fossil fuel (coal and gas) and nuclear power make up the lion’s share of power generation in the state:
For the Hanford LIGO site, the Washington state power generation balance is different, using more hydro than coal or gas:
The point here is that LIGO couldn’t operate without a stable power supply, and couldn’t run on a power grid fed primarily on solar or wind, but instead uses the most hated power generation methods of environmentalists; coal, gas, nuclear, and hydro. Try doing this sort of science with intermittent solar and wind power – you can’t.
This need for stable power to run LIGO may have been a factor as to why the Pasadena, CA based California Institute of Technology chose to put observatories outside of California, where the vagaries of wind and sunshine wouldn’t affect the grid, and they wouldn’t have to worry about environmental political issues as much.
And it seems, the LIGO staff are big fossil fuel enthusiasts themselves, where in Hanford, they have a hot-rod club at the Lab:
Don’t tell the EPA.
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here is a quick look at LIGO Livingston data
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LIGO-Liv.gif
Double systems are very common.
correction: Hanford data
Count on Vuk to get things wrong, again.
Really… you two ought not to bicker so much.
[Reply: Just like an old married couple. -mod]
However, in this case I agree with you: the LIGO signal is novel, is singular in its newly reincarnated ultra-sensitive state, and almost completely agrees with projections of what a similarly sized BH pair at the estimate distance might influence to the LIGO legs, here.
GoatGuy
Real science gets expensive validation effort. Climate science gets the expense and expensive PR treatment.
This is a milestone discovery. The accuracy needed to tickle out the results is mind-numbing but what truly boggles the mind is the amount of energy released by that event. The model of that merger indicates energy just in the form of gravitational waves was greater than the energy from all the stars in the universe (for that time interval).
Impossible to wrap one’s mind around.
It’s models all the way down…
i think there is a vast difference between models designed for a different purpose then bastardised for climate simulations where they are not fit for that purpose vs mathematical models designed specifically for the task in hand .
really looking forward to seeing this project expand when the european facility comes on line.
The black hole itself is a model. Just recently a few papers have been published, including one by Stephen Hawking, saying that the event horizon does not work. This stuff is unverifiable, so who knows what else they got wrong.
A meaningless explanation for a meaningless problem that they could have solved by realising that electricity is important.
LIGO’s Path to Victory:
http://www.leif.org/EOS/LIGOs-Path-to-Victory.pdf
Wow, those Gravitational Waves must have really warped our space/time…the pdf is dated…262 | NATURE | VOL 530 | 18 FEBRUARY 2016….weird..LOL
Oh wait, never mind, I forgot you don’t get humor !!
Here is another good explanation:
http://www.physicsmatt.com/blog/2016/2/11/ligopalooza
If the event happened 1.3 billion ly away and 3 solar masses were converted to gravitational waves in 0.1 second, then power flux density of radiation here was 2.8 mW/m², which is huge. EM radiation power flux density is about the same 0.1 ly away from the Sun, which would make it very visible.
That’s how hard to detect gravitational waves.
The event delivered 360 GW to Earth for 0.1 seconds, next to none of it was absorbed.
However, I wonder what would happen, if it occurred nearby, let’s say 1300 ly away. In that case power flux density of gravitational radiation would be a trillion times higher, that is, 2.8 GW/m². Which is 2 million times more than power flux density of EM insolation at ToA. If only a tiny fraction of it gets absorbed, we are doomed indeed. Is the universe that dangerous a place after all?
It is very possible that the Universe is a dangerous place. A nearby Gamma Ray Burster would also sterilize the Earth. Perhaps the dangerous and violent Universe explains why Extraterrestrial Life has not been detected: We are alone.
And very likely a gamma burst was observed http://gammaray.nsstc.nasa.gov/gbm/publications/preprints/gbm_ligo_preprint.pdf as the result of this GW-event. It’s NOT due to the BH-collision itself ( no ecelctromagnetic waves can escape) but due to the impulse rising horizon with a sudden inflow of interstallar matter.
Thanx, that’s reassuring 😉
But I wonder at what distance the clicking sound of this black hole merger event would get audible? It generates mechanical waves in bodies after all, in the frequency range of hearing.
peter, you want to know in what distance one can hear a crunch with the ears as response to this event? Sometimes in the minds of some follower here, I’m afraid. 🙂 When one reads the arguments full of ignorance… 😉
Leif, don’t you think the far more likely explanation is threefold?
[1] Space is HUGE
[2] Signal intensity is a function of 1/huge² … which is ‘preposteriously small’.
[3] Right conditions → life → intelligence → communication … window … is short.
Combine those, and for no other reason that statistical probability, the likelihood of us being close enough to hear a civilization, at the right window of time and looking the right direction(s) is vanishingly small. Even if one posits that there is a communicating-style civilization utilizing EM waves of some assortment of wavelengths that we just happen to be able to intercept … one per square arcminute of the sky, uniformly distributed EVEN if you assume that, all but one or two in the entire observable sphere will be close enough to have a discernible signal even with all our radio-telescopes and other sensors pointed the same direction at the same time.
Which… produces the terribly depressing result: N (close enough) in 47,000,000 chance of actually detecting one, today, right now.
Since we’re only scanning some 1% of the whole sphere any given year, and since we’re NOT concentrating on every square arcminute of the heavens with terribly much time (in order to integrate a discernable result), it stands that we’re looking with rather stark futility.
Then there’s that darn communications window. Mankind’s is nearly closed. We might have started out with large and fairly few AM transmitters, and then thousands of FM, VHF and UHF sources … but at this point we’re heading toward a kind of “noisy mixed emission” that might be broad spectrum anomalous from afar, but hardly discernable as the emission spectrum of a (barely) advanced civilization. The trend-line on this is just as depressing as the 1/huge² problem. As we covet ever more bandwidth, ever less power will go into beaming the bandwidth around – per channel. Externally, we’re evolving into a ball of noise.
Just saying.
GoatGuy
That would be the case if those civilizations were at our level. But most of them would be billions of year ahead of us, and possibly engaged in reconstructing the stellar environment [Dyson Spheres] or in war fare [Galactic Empires]. Turn the question around: the occurrence frequency of Gamma ray bursters in a galaxy is one very 500 million years, and if one happens all surface life would be gone. So any given galaxy would sterilize surface life every 500 million years, just about the time it takes higher life to emerge from the oceans and evolve to where we are now…
Here’s who can hear us:
http://40.media.tumblr.com/5789d123b95aec03ceff40317ac347c9/tumblr_nlad05LxGv1qaityko1_1280.png
lsvalgaard says:
Life has not been detected: We are alone.
Seems possible at galactic scales. I am continually amazed at how many favorable “goldilocks” events had to occur to end up with “us”. The list is too long to post…..
dbstealey, your image forgot the “Howdy-Doody” show. 🙂 That’ll impress ’em.
Nice piece to keep the echo chamber full. Energy is nice including all that required to make the cement and steel needed in the LIGO construction. You can’t roller skate in a buffalo herd and you can’t make commercial quantities of cement and steel from solar and wind.
Fermilab just outside Chicago ran the Tevaton for many years discovering the top quark (1997?) as powered by nukes (70%) and dirt burners (30%). You can still see a huge capacitor bank at the property boundary (Google Earth) used to condition the electric power flowing into and out of the facility.
A bit more cautious publicity claims by the LIGO fraternity could be preferable to many people; the next event would increase degree of certainty enormously but even then not absolutely. Next event may occur any day now, or we may not see another one in our lifetime.
Fundamentals of science could not built on a single event, in religion yes, they call it miracle.
As usual, you do not know what you are talking about. Up to the end of January, four events have been found already, and singular events do happen, e.g. life on Earth, creation of the Moon.
life on Earth, creation of the Moon.
============================
one time events are one time because they don’t happen very often. finding gold the first place you dig is never convincing.
except when you find it.
And the gravitational events are not rare. They happen somewhere in the Universe every second. We don’t see most of those because most are too far away and we are not in the orbital plane in most of them, but there are enough to make observation every few weeks a reality.
Isn’t this kinda like the CAGW alarmists argument ? : ..” We don’t know what else it could be, so it must be CO2 “….and this : ” We don’t know what else it could be so it must be a Gravitational Wave ” !
No, Marcus. It is like this:
General Relativity [which we all use every day] has met all tests thrown at it. From the theory we can compute what the signal of two colliding large masses should be. When we finally build an instrument sensitive enough, it is no surprise that we actually see such a [and more] signal right away. It gives us even more confidence that GR is correct.
I have absolutely no problem with General Relativity or Special Relativety at all..It’s the scientists I no longer trust !
Relativity…dang sticky fingers….D’oh !
Isvalgaard said, “General Relativity [which we all use every day] has met all tests thrown at it.”
Couldn’t the same be said of quantum theory? And yet as I understand it, quantum theory and relativity theory are not consistent: as it stands, both cannot be true, despite (many) decades of attempts to reconcile them.
If both seem like successful theories, yet both cannot be true, how do we choose which is correct, or whether either is?
Every theory has a ‘domain’ of applicability. General Relativity is valid in the very large, while Quantum Mechanics is valid in the very small. Normally there is no conflict between the two. During the Big Bang when the very large was also the very small we do have a conflict that is not resolved. Perhaps one day it will be resolved. It is good that Physics has some unsolved problems.
“Isn’t this kinda like the CAGW alarmists argument ?” Marcus- you have hit the nail on the head! It is very similar.
Vukcevic,
Reflecting on the inadvertent discovery of the background radiation by Wilson and Penzias (though predicted by others), and reflecting of the many blunders made by scientists (Cold Fusion, slowing expansion rate of space), one would think that the discipline of science and caution would preface claims for the Nobel prize or egg on face.
“Fundamentals of science could not built on a single event, in religion yes, they call it miracle.”
Science is no longer knowledge. It is the religion of modernity. You know it when you are criticized for being curious and critical. Being curious and critical are essential to practicing good science. Curiosity and criticality are frowned upon by the purveyors of blind religious adherence to sciencism and their demigods. Can you feel the frown?
..Well said, thank you !
I’ve about had it with site, sorry to say … the man-worship going on here is just intolerable to me . .
…..Man worship ???
Yes, marcus, complete with Prophesy;
“At WUWT, I covered the story here, saying that it was a “triumph of science”. Indeed it was, and still is, and the effects of this discovery on science will ripple into the future for decades and centuries to come.”
..So JohnKnight, are you saying you hate Humans as a whole….or just the male part ? You are not being very coherent !
It’s either hate or worship?
????
“You are not being very coherent”
I don’t understand what you’re having difficulty with . . I’m skeptical of big science . . What’s the problem?
JPL new all about it:
“Numerous recent blogs and web postings are erroneously claiming that an asteroid will impact Earth, sometime between Sept. 15 and 28, 2015.”
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4692
/sarc
..Knew ??
I noticed that they quote a red shift factor,presumably a dispersion relation linking wavelength and wave velocity similar to that em waves means that any phenomenon characterised by a wavelength will be affected by the expansion of the universe. As the technology is refined could it provide another way of determining the Hubble Constant in addition that obtained from radio and light astronomy. This is far more exciting than the Higgs boson ,IMO.
Maybe they will finally figure what gravity is and how it works ..?
Or not.
It’s not gravity that matters, that’s just wave energy propagation in something else. The discrete physical properties of that something else is the holy grail. Gravity provides key clues to an underlying material we call space.
In space no one can hear you scream … it’s indifferent to rants … handy stuff. 🙂
..That’s what I said !
” Imagine if the power goes out. How long would it take to re-establish the vacuum in that facility? ”
The effort must really suck mightily. (bu-dum … pa!)
Nah, they are going to get astronauts to collect jars of vacuum during spacewalks outside the ISS.
Vacuum doesn’t weigh all that much so they can store them in hand-luggage on the return trip, without having to pay a charge for excess baggage weight.
Once we have those jars of pristine vacuum back on earth then they can just open up the LIGO laser tube and tip them in… 🙂
Yea, but customs fees will be a beetch !
Numerous earthquakes reported on Sept 14, 2015.
http://earthquake-report.com/2015/09/14/earthquakes-in-the-world-on-september-14-2015-m2-9-or-more/
just so y’all know
So is there an earthquake filter to view somewhere? If they are screening out so many noise factors, they must have sets of filter logs.
Micro earthquakes ?
Having read the paper I can now tell who has not, by when they make by cynical comments like this.
In the paper they discuss that they have access to the earthquake database and analyzed it for earthquakes that happened at the same time.
Same goes for a pile of other stuff that they’ve been measuring over the years. They have a really darned good idea of the signal to noise ratio of their equipment. There’s even of a graph of noise spectrum that points out root causes for various noticeable noisy areas of the spectrum are (e.g. like 60Hz). Their best signal noise ratio is between 100Hz to 200Hz, right in the range of this collision signal.
Go on, read the actual paper already. They do an excellent job of discussing all the ways they could be wrong, and then debunking all those possibilities. You know, like a real science paper should.
If you want to be a skeptic instead of a cynic, read the paper, and cite chapter and verse where you think they are wrong.
Peter
I don’t practice cosmology. I do practice acoustics. I have had the pleasure of creating real-time noise cancelling devices for very sophisticated clients. 10Hz to 24kHz range. The devices are a mixtures of hardware and adaptive software. So I have had to engage the subject analogously and cope with significant non-periodic events. So I am neither cynical nor skeptical. Rather sensitive to the scope problem. Further, I believe I know how difficult the “filtering” is. I also know how much easier it is to not have the burden of real time response. Running analysis on data file for weeks/months at a go, provides a contemplative framework that I seldom experience.
I do know that the extremely varied nature of seismic events and of their extremely broad spectral content, and am aware that the detector itself and various components have response behavior and modalities. I know for a fact that certain bolts used in the vacuum chamber itself can suffer resonances in the ~150Hz range. It is not reasonable to presume that all step inputs to a system have been modeled with non-idealized boundary conditions. eg a seal ring bolt under torque spec…or a non idealized weld.
The detector was made. It does not live in a modeled world. It has a “personality” so to speak that is a reflection of the man, materials, measurements, methods, that put it together. So. dDo you really believe that every earthquake scenario is accommodated for in the filtering process? No of course not. Do you believe that the detector and the thousands of parts (in all modes) are design perfect and understood?
Peter or Paul, your more learned response to my question/assertions on this thread articulated here would be appreciated.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/02/17/the-detection-of-gravitational-waves-a-triumph-of-science-enabled-by-fossil-fuels/comment-page-1/#comment-2148903
I am considering the possibility that within the noise of these super fine instruments, we may be recording literally thousands or millions of micro movements of different arrival times from micro quakes of vastly different strength frequency and location, never before recorded, resulting from Lunar and Solar affects on the earths crust, and or build up of tectonic stress to conventionally recorded quakes many magnitudes larger Millions of these may occur, and we may be simply data mining for one which mimics the Black Hole signal. Is this possible?
They didn’t just model the noise. They measured it. Over periods of years to decades. There isn’t a noise spike at the frequency you’ve mentioned. Look at the graph.
If you think you have two identical seal ring bolts under torque spec resonated exactly speed of light time apart at two detectors and they’ve only done it exactly once in a decade of data gathering…I think that would be in cynic category.
Peter,
Surely you accept the general assertion of ignorance of the breadth system response given the myriad of possible inputs from spurious sources. A tedious criticism of an almost arbitrary example for purposes of explanation isn’t all you are relying on to assuage the obvious fact that the detectors are artifacts of human creation? Including the filtering algorithms? I suspect that the filtering systems, therefor the 2 filtered results, will be similar. You may want to jump all over the algorithms, or the next of 1000s of objections to avoid the central proposition of what I am saying. Ok. so forget the algorithm, a human contrivance, and state for the record then, that this assemblance of machinery, occupying 2 locations is perfect and with no defects either in its contemplation, its conversion to design, its conversion to materials and systems, and hardware, its operation by people, on a variable platform. It therefore is perfect. It is not cynical for me to assume in all levels of implementation that perfection has not be achieved. It is likely.
Rather than assail the metaphors and straw men, deal with that inevitable truth.
Better you ask the systems engineers who are responsible for the detectors maintenance and calibration testing who will reveal to you their reservations.
Hubble’s mirror flaw. A famous example of a perfect, expensive, well-designed and well-engineered flaw. And a perfectly repeatable flaw. If 2 machine s are designed the same, and built the same, the same flaw’s they will give the identical flawed results. It is the nature of repeatability.
eg Lexus floor mats and software, ford pinto gas tank, audi accelerations, neon head gaskets etc. All cases where different cars failed identically given the same conditions. Machines designed and built the same will exhibit the same behavior given the same inputs.
The two LIGO detectors did not register the same signal, but almost opposite signals [not exactly opposite, because the two detectors have only approximately opposite directional sensitivity]…
Educate yourself a bit by reading http://www.leif.org/EOS/Noise-in-LIGO.pdf
“We have ruled out environmental influences and non-Gaussian instrument noise at either LIGO detector as the cause of the observed gravitational wave signal”
and LEARN from it.
There is series of prominent ‘noise’ spikes on Hanford data spaced at 20msec just before the main event.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LIGO-3.gif
Similar spikes are also present in the delayed and inverted Livingston data, coincident with Hanford’s spikes along time scale, but not so prominent within the rest of noise
Since the spikes are of much shorter duration (less than 1 msec) than the BHs expected spectrum signal, I would suspect they are electromagnetic nature, external to the system and most likely from space.
I may be “pissing into the wind”, but seriously folks: conspiracy theories suggesting that somehow there’s been a coincidence of seismic signals at the pair of LIGO sensors is just wickedly off-kilter. It would be one thing … if the signatures looked like seismic signatures. They don’t. Neither of them. It would be another if they were substantially different in envelope, duration and spectral content. They aren’t. It would yet another if they were seconds or minutes apart (WAY more than likely for coincident seisms) … but they aren’t. The ‘distance’ is almost exactly that predicted by a gravitational wave propagating at “c”, at the time and distance of the event, relative to the position of the LIGO sensors, here on Ball ‘o’ Dirt.
Point is – the increasing amplitude PLUS increasing frequency PLUS millisecond delay PLUS relaxation-of-impulse trail-off has no other reasonable explanation outside the obvious, simple, and mathematically supported one.
GoatGuy
GoatGuy February 17, 2016 at 2:31 pm : “Really… you two ought not to bicker so much.”
GoatGuy have you ever been pursued by a wasp?
Only when you poke the nest.
..Touche’…
Yep, we see that all over climate science, touch their well feathered nest, they’ll attack you with everything they can master, and when it doesn’t work, you are crackpot, lunatic, imbecile etc, etc
Or some kid has a bit of honey on his mucky fingers.
Vuk,
You have admitted that what you do isn’t science but a hobby of looking at things differently. I think you get pleasure from poking the Svalgaard nest.
Point taken… But… your wasp produces so many interesting viewgraphs!
Anthony Watts stated above …
“Think about radio astronomy, we didn’t think stars emitted more than light less than 100 years ago, The initial detection of radio waves from an astronomical object was made in the 1933 when Karl Jansky of Bell labs observed radiation coming from the Milky Way interfering with long distance telephone communications and published his paper on it. Once we figured out how to listen to what Jansky observed, we discovered a cacaphony of radio signals and radiation signatures in the Universe.”
Anthony, here is the part of the story you have left out, from radio astronomer, Gerrit Verschuur’s “The Invisible Universe” …
—
“2.1. Caught between Two Disciplines
In 1933 John Kraus, then at the University of Michigan, attempted to detect the sun by using a searchlight reflector to focus the radio waves. He failed because the receiver was not sensitive enough. This was the first use of a reflector-type radio telescope. At the Serendipity meeting, Kraus stated that meaningful accidental
discovery occurs only as the result of “being in the right place with the right equipment doing the right experiment at the right time.” Another noted astronomer, R. Hanbury Brown, added that the person should “not know too much,” otherwise the discovery might not be made!
This summarizes a very interesting phenomenon. Many research scientists, especially the theoretically inclined, “know” so much that their chance of making a lucky or creative discovery may be severely curtailed. If we know too much, our vision is sometimes narrowed to the point where new opportunities are not seen.
Jansky knew a little astronomy, but not enough for it to get in his way and cause him to reject the possibility that radio waves originating in the cosmos might be real.
Grote Reber, a professional engineer and radio ham in his spare time, was one of the few people who recognized the interesting implications of Jansky’s discovery. Reber was certainly not hampered by any astronomical prejudices about whether or not the cosmic radio waves could exist. Instead, he was interested in verifying their existence and followed up on Jansky’s work. To this end, Reber built the world’s
first steerable radio dish antenna (Figure 2.1) in his backyard and mapped the Milky Way radiation during the period 1935–1941. Figure 2.2 shows an example of Reber’s data. He pointed out that the newfield of radio astronomy was originally caught between two disciplines. Radio engineers didn’t care where the radio waves came from, and the astronomers
‘. . . could not dream up any rational way by which the radio waves could be generated, and
since they didn’t know of a process, the whole affair was (considered by them) at best a
mistake and at worst a hoax.'”
—
I do believe that the lesson you have somehow generated is very different from the lesson that radio astronomer, Gerrit Verschuur, conveys. The actual historical lesson seems to me more about the failure of expertise and “knowing too much” to actually follow the evidence where it leads. It is the fact that stories like this are so common, actually, that is the reason why I pay attention to the Electric Universe.
I’ll try anyway, as is my wont.
Just watch. Vuc will find a way to match this observation with a coffee-filtered string of temperature data.
Faking Data for a Good Cause
http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/01/ligos_fascinating_trial_by_fake_data.html
“A thousand or so scientists work on LIGO. Out of this group a handful are chosen for a special mission: the injection team. They are allowed to manipulate the raw data from the LIGO instruments. They may choose to hide fake detection signals in that data without telling anyone else. The rest of the project operates entirely in the dark. Unaware, the whole collaboration may find the signal and believe that they are on the verge of a scientific breakthrough that will earn them a Nobel Prize. They may also realize that the detection is a fake or else fail to catch it at all.” —> Why actually it was done?
“The fake is introduced in a particularly smart way: the injection team is allowed to directly wiggle the mirrors in the detector to imitate the movement caused by a true gravity wave flowing through the detector. Hence, the only way to know if a signal really came from black holes smashing together millions of light years away is to finish an entire scientific study of the event and then ask the injection team to reveal whether the data was faked.” —-> The fake was done on analog level through actuators moving mirrors. Thus virtually undetectable if there was no record of commands sent to actuators preserved. Keep in mind they know how “true” gravity wave looks like. After all they have GRT models, right?
“When a potential gravitational wave signal was detected on the instrument in September of 2010, the entire LIGO team went to work. Through six months of late nights, they looked at every last detail and wrote up scientific reports of their finding. When the paper was complete, a mass vote was held to decide whether to submit that paper to the eager scientific journals of the world. The vote was a unanimous yes. Dramatically, the team responsible for injecting events dramatically opened an envelope to reveal whether the event was real or an injected fake.” —->They were ready to publish! The whole team!
Can we be certain that 2015 discovery was not fake data injection? Was the team under pressure? They discovery came 5 months after $200 million upgrade of the detection system. Could they make available the paper written in 2011 based on 2010 fake injection. How much the “true” gravity waves measured in 2010 differ from the true gravity waves measured in 2015?
What I find perplexing about this event is that it lasted only 0.25 seconds. I would have thought there would have been a significant time dilation as the two objects accelerated around each other to the point of impact. However long the collision took in the frame of reference of the black holes, I would have thought it would have taken significantly longer in our frame of reference.
Isn’t the orbital speed at the event horizon equal to the speed of light? In which case we would never see an orbiting object cross the event horizon. It would be accelerated into our infinite future.
“I would have thought it would have taken significantly longer in our frame of reference.”
Exactly the question that came to my mind when I first read about their observation: Why just a quarter of a second? And why exactly when they were able to observe it? Can it be observed again and again? If not, the whole thing doesn’t qualify as a reproducible scientific experiment.
Quick Gravity Question for anyone who has the info.
The last time I looked into it the theory was that Gravity propagated at the speed of light, but that it had never been tested because Gravity Waves had never been detected. Has this detection of Gravity Waves from colliding black holes she’d any light on the theory?
And sorry for the pun. ^¿^
For the umpteen million time, it was Gravitational waves detected not Gravity waves. Several links to the difference have been posted on the two threads. Just search gravitational waves vs gravity waves and read for yourself.
gravity waves
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“gravity waves” are a corruption of the English language. The term means a wave in gravity, just like “ocean waves” means waves in the ocean.
The correct term is something like “gravity assisted waves”, because ocean waves are not simply the result of gravity, they also require the wind.
a whole lot of processes on earth are gravity assisted. consider the flow of a river and the resultant meander and sedimentation. or rocks rolling down from the top of a mountain collecting at the bottom. these are gravity flows just as much as atmospheric and ocean processes are gravity waves. but gravity is only part of the story.
gravity waves, gravity flows. this sounds like the pompous language of PhD’s, designed to impress more than explain, and in the process hides the true nature of the process involved.
Well ocean gravity waves are just that; waves in the ocean surface (depth) due to vertical (radial) disturbances of the surface. The key point is that the water particle restoring force is gravity; the weight of the displaced water; and that gravity restoring force is CONSTANT and independent of the amplitude of the wave.
BUT water surfaces that are disturbed from flat, are also affected by surface tension, and the surface tension restoring force is not independent of displacement. Now it is independent of the surface area stretch, but that does not linearly relate to the vertical wave height displacement.
One of those kinds of waves is non dispersive, and the other is dispersive (velocity changes with frequency). I don’t remember which is which. But as a result, the waves travel at a different speed depending on water depth, and the higher frequencies go faster in shallower water.
So when waves come in towards a beach, and the water gets shallower, the high frequencies go faster, so water runs up to the leading edge of the wave, turning it from near sinusoidal to near saw tooth, until the front of the wave actually tips over itself as the wave breaks on the beach.
So some kinds of water waves are gravity waves, but not gravitational waves. Water also propagates longitudinal waves, which are a common form of sound waves. Gravity waves are transverse waves.
G
I think this is a problem of timning. The term gravity wave is already in use for atmospheric phenomena. I suspect (but am not sure) that if the term had not already been in use then “gravity wave” would have been an acceptable term for these gravitational waves. Any comments DrS? Is the term “gravity wave” somehow misleading or wrong, apart form the fact that it is already used for something else?
Well when I went to school (high school) one of my physics instructors was a nut about waves on water. No matter what the curriculum subject was at any time in any lecture, this chap, at the drop of a hat could switch the discussion over to talking about waves on water. If you sneezed, or dropped something on the floor that made a noise, he could switch on the water waves.
So that was 60 years ago, that he told us in great detail about gravity waves, and surface tension waves, and longitudinal waves in water.
So I don’t care when or where modern folks first heard or used the term gravity waves nor for what purpose.
For a long time that term has been used in connection with ocean waves.
And no he never ever suggested that gravity was warping our minds, or the fabric of space.
Gravity was simply providing the restoring force, that was trying to maintain the surface of the water flat to an atomic layer flatness, except with about a 4,000 mile radius of curvature.
g
As for the Columbia river headwaters region receiving a boatload of water, you can go down to Astoria, and watch it all go sailing by out to sea.
Hanford is not in Oregon, but there are also some dry and arid regions out in north eastern Oregon, and that doesn’t stop the Columbia river from getting a boat load of water.
It is important not to lose sight of what has been actually observed, and what is a pure conjecture. Most probably, some slight space-time ripples were observed, caused by the interaction of two galactic mass centers (NOT black holes, since black holes were never observed). This result needs multiple confirmations, though, before it could be accepted as a fact.
Similarly, a single observation of the Higgs’ boson cannot be accepted as a fact before this experimental result is reproduced many times within several different facilities.
In my opinion, the most fundamental observation is that all that sensitive instrumentation, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, did NOT register any space-time ripples that should, allegedly, be caused by the so-called “Big Bang” event. Nothing, zilch, nada. this negative experimental result confirms a theory proposed by Hoyle, Arp, and Narlikar.
The rest is annoying hype and pep-talk.
Just a question :
I assume that two sets of instruments at both locations are identical, and produce identical response to any disturbance to the optics. That is what engineering adjustments and tests should have insured.
The Gravitational Wave has travelled billion+ light years distance, so its impact on both Hanford and Livingston (should not have change across light milliseconds distance).
Raw signal should be almost identical at both locations and yet it is not. As the graph shows it is not just meter of the local noise, either system is not setup correctly or it could be that signal origin is far more localised, e.g. of solar origin and intensity is function of the location – sun direction angle at the time of the impact etc.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LIGOrd.gif
Since orientation of the equipment at location is different Livingston signal has to be inverted and delayed
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LIGOrd2.gif
coincidence is good, but Hanford peaks are up to 20% stronger.
And finally
It appears that Livingston signal continues with some oscillations post event, or either has high level noise preceding and following the event. It is assumed that there are no oscillations post event then the useful section of data (outlined in red, period with signal higher than the post-event noise) is indeed very limited
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LIGO-L.gif
I think for a high degree of certainty one more event might nail it down.
coincidence is good
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the signal is not a whole lot stronger than the noise level. I’d like to see how often such peaks or larger occur without being correlated, because if such peaks are common then eventually two will coincide by chance.
Hanford peaks are up to 20% stronger
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given that the wave propagates in the orbital plane, Hanford must have been considerably closer to the event.
Hi ferdberple
Despite coincidence being good, noise is a problem worth looking into, correlation during the period of critical 50 msec and the spectral composition are both rather weak, .
It could have been what they say, but equally could have been something else.
My view on the collision of two black holes is for time being reserved, but if you happen to see one coming
get the hell out of their way.
Vuk,
That is simply not true. The fit is very good
No, it is wrong to conclude that it “equally could have been something else”.
Your argument is like “I bought a lottery ticket and lost, but I could equally well have won”.
http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/03559/270116-MATT-WEB_3559809a.jpg
Comparing two signals in the time domain, with the noise not filtered out. Good grief.
Mr Sable, if you are still around,
Before applying filtering indiscriminately, consideration has to be given to what is eliminated and what is left in.
If you are interested in comparison of the filtered signals it is clearly displayed in the article (second image) and I don’t think I could improve on that,
If you read paper carefully, calculations show that incoming oscillations are low frequency from few Hz progressively increasing towards the kHz range, reaching crescendo and then instantly ceasing, after that point only noise present. However if you look at the top panel you would see that the post event has considerable presence of frequencies that fall into the range of incoming signal’s frequencies.
Filtering of one of the signals you can see here, with the filter transfer function given:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/02/17/the-detection-of-gravitational-waves-a-triumph-of-science-enabled-by-fossil-fuels/#comment-2147587
and as you can see there is considerable post event left over, which if noise, nothing has been achieved by filtering, if part of the incoming signal it invalidates the paper.
As I have already stated time coincidence of two signals is good, save for the amplitude differences, so filtering would achieve nothing in that respect.
In this specific case comparing two non-filtered signals is a correct way, and I am sorry to say despite any expertise you might have, in this case you are plainly wrong.
In addition calculating correlation of two filtered signals leads to a wrong conclusions.
Just talking from the sidelines and doing nothing to contribute to the understanding of the signal, may impress casual observers, but if you wish to make an impact, why not put your money on the table, filter the whole length of at least one of the signals, and than explain the filter’s leftovers post the event.
If it is noise, nothing has been achieved by filtering; if it is the signal it invalidates whole of the LIGO experiment.
I’m looking forward to see your result and your interpretation of it.
Peter Sable: “Comparing two signals in the time domain, with the noise not filtered out. Good grief.”
Good grief, no sign of Mr. Sable, quick on criticising slow on results.
I’ve stopped talking about ” Gravitational Waves ” so I don’t really care if such things exist or not.
BUT ! I have suddenly gotten really interested in what, for the want of a better term, I am going to call ” Einstein Waves ” , or ” Einsteinian Waves ”
Einstein Waves, are a completely hypothetical theoretical kind of wave disturbance, that falls out of the completely fictitious mathematical manipulation of the equally fictitious Einstein theoretical MODEL that he concocted a hundred years ago, and gave the goofy name of ” General Theory of Relativity ” to.
So it just so happens that the way he described his “General Relativity”, he was able to concoct out of thin air, a notion of a wave disturbance in some who knows what entity that was a part of his fictitious model that he called general relativity.
Well a lot of people started spending a lot of time dabbling with this new math of Einstein waves, largely because they didn’t have anything better to do.
So it got to where these chaps lost sight of the fact that Einstein waves are just fictional things that came out of applying fictional mathematics to Einstein’s silly idea of general relativity. Presumably this means more or less, that ” generally, this is related to, or relative to that. ” Whoopey, who would have guessed that this is related to that.
So these chaps eventually started to imagine that Einstein waves were actually real things; total lunacy if you ask me.
And they started spending a whole lot of money trying to build a machine to listen to Einstein waves and find out if they liked the music.
Well it’s like as if you spend a whole lot of money trying to squish hydrogen atoms into helium atoms thinking you can actually make energy that way.
So naturally this contraption they built didn’t find anything at all, well other than earthquakes, and trucks roaring by and stuff like that. For 20 years they played with this thing (gotta feed the family somehow), and they never heard hide nor hair of any Einstein waves, but still they kept at it, and adding more bells and whistles to their white elephant machine.
Finally, just last year, they actually heard a noise that sounded just like what an Einstein wave was supposed to sound like (in certain circumstances)
And their buddies over in a different part of the country, who also had one of these gizmos, they called over and said they heard the same noise.
Only it wasn’t quite the same noise, but then they realized; well the earth curves over a 3,000 km distance, so even though both of these contraptions were built flat on the ground, because they are on a sphere, they are not actually co-planar in 3-D space, and so the Einsein waves floating around, if there was any such thing, would come at each machine from a different direction, so they wouldn’t ever expect to get exactly the same noise, but they would be related to each other, and they might not both hear the noise at exactly the same time, if it took time for Einstein waves, or whatever the racket was, to get from one place to the other.
So both of these fellows seem to have heard the same disturbance; whatever the heck it was, but what they heard seems to be exactly what those idle mathematicians said that an Einstein wave should look and sound like.
Now I can’t see or hear or feel Einstein waves, but if you believe what these folks say they heard with their contraptions, evidently something does exist, that behaves exactly like what Einstein said an Einstein wave should do under similar circumstances, if in fact real Einstein waves existed.
Well I have no idea just what would cause that to happen, but evidently these folks heard/saw/ measured/whatever, something that behaves exactly like what an Einstein wave would sound/look/whatever like if such things even exist.
Maybe one day, we’ll understand what causes these noises, and we’ll start to call them something else as we get to know them better. But in the meantime, well we might as well stick with the name Einstein waves, because what they have found; and they have found something, behaves for all the world just like Einstein waves, that of course he made up in his head from his generally relative theory a hundred years ago.
G
Hi Big G
To my mind (and who the hell am I) that is THE MOST SENSIBLE THING I have read on the two threads devoted to this subject.
THANKS !
Went on a holiday, missed the fun.
Your assumption is incorrect. The two detectors aren’t identical. The Livingston detector has a significant noise spike at ~180Hz and ~400 Hz and Hanford does not (Figure 1). The Hanford detector has a significant noise spike at ~1500Hz and ~1900Hz, the Livingston detector does not.
I think it’d be more accurate to do a 2D correlation calculation on the spectogram (Figure 10). A time domain correlation calculation doesn’t make sense for a shifting signal in a noisy system where the spectrums of the noise are different.
Source: https://dcc.ligo.org/public/0122/P1500238/022/P1500238_GW150914_noise_characterization.pdf
Peter
Livingston seagull – no it is signal – (hope you read it)
Me, I’m a skeptic.
With billions and billions of stars out there, there also are billions of years of possible dates for interactions of relatively rare black holes. I expect that the odds of them turning on their machine and immediately just happening to observe the moment when two black holes became one are… astronomical.
I’d like some follow up which checks to see if this is a case of confirmation bias.
Think of it as a near sighted person putting on glasses for the first time, perceiving at once what was always there, but before then, not discernible.
By mid-September 2015 “the world’s largest gravitational-wave facility” completed a 5-year US$200-million overhaul at a total cost of $620 million.
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nothing like a huge budget overrun to get results.
In a scientific laboratory, ‘clean’ power means a stable voltage and a stable frequency, free of variations or spikes. When you are trying to measure relativistic contraction over a light path several km long, parts per trillion variation in frequency or amplitude are HUGE, and noise spikes are as potentially damaging as lightning strikes.