Gravity Waves

[Michael Mozina]

Rumours of a second signal.
Something I already expected, because electromagnetic "chirp"-events are not so rare.

"..we already have evidence that we have seen a second such event,"
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/ligo-scientist ... ry-1549229

It would be funny if it would coincide with another magnetic storm.

Yes, it certainly would be funny.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owOj2e4mHHo

I would expect to see such events happen rather *frequently*, regardless of the real "cause". The interesting question is whether or not any of the LIGO "hits" can be visually correlated to a specific long distance celestial event. The lack of such a correlation in the first paper is an interesting anomaly, and it undermines the claim a great deal, but if that lack of any visual confirmation becomes a reoccurring "pattern" in the LIGO signals, it's sure going to throw a big and obvious monkey wrench into their claims.

[upriver]

I dont know if this is exactly appropriate for this discussion but I thought I would post it in case anybody was interested.
Here are several articles about alternative ways of detecting gravity.
There is a bit of data in these articles. My thought was could any of the recorded impulses from the chart recorder be similar to the chirp recorded at LIGO...

Interplanetary Communication Gravity Wave Scanning
http://www.lunarplanner.com/EGM/Gravity ... index.html

FASTER THAN A SPEEDING LIGHT
http://home.gwi.net/~erichard/fastlit.htm

Gregory HODOWANEC
http://rexresearch.com/hodorhys/rexhndbk/rxhndbk.htm

LIGO could make something up and no one would know the difference...

[Cargo]

This is getting more comical by the month. Soon we'll have invisible dark things eating and puking other dark things in magical wave forms that only pure math gaussian negative infinitives can produce. They are desperate to confirm their magic before more time for questions come.

Look ma, there be a Black hole. It sends waves across time. Sorry you missed it. You didn't ask the right question in time. And about that Mirror...

[Roshi]

If "space time" is a medium that allows waves - how come it stretches all the time as the Universe expands (as they say)? If it can stretch forever a wave would not travel in it. You pull or push at it, it's going forever in that direction. How do planets even bend space-time if it's so stretchable? How can an orbit be circular or elliptical if a planet's motion is dictated, the planet's inertia is kept in check by and infinitely stretchable medium?
Or maybe - it's like water somehow, waves propagating in water? But water cannot be "bent", and it's also infinitely stretchable, why would orbits even exist in "water".

(They say space-time stretches to solve the problem they created with their theories - of things moving away from us faster than light... Two problems created from nothing - first the speed limit, and second the "accelerated expansion". "Things do not move away, it's just the balloon, it stretches"...)

Or - does it have a rigidity and maybe even a breaking point?...

"I hold that space cannot be curved, for the simple reason that it can have no properties. It might as well be said that God has properties. He has not, but only attributes and these are of our own making. Of properties we can only speak when dealing with matter filling the space. To say that in the presence of large bodies space becomes curved is equivalent to stating that something can act upon nothing. I, for one, refuse to subscribe to such a view." - Nikola Tesla

[Webbman]

another con by the masters of con.
#13 has 62% now. Thanks for the update.

[Michael Mozina]

This is getting more comical by the month. Soon we'll have invisible dark things eating and puking other dark things in magical wave forms that only pure math gaussian negative infinitives can produce. They are desperate to confirm their magic before more time for questions come.

Look ma, there be a Black hole. It sends waves across time. Sorry you missed it. You didn't ask the right question in time. And about that Mirror...

The mainstream does seem to be getting more and more desperate every year, particularly after all the failures of their "cold dark matter" claims in the lab. They *desperately need* something, anything, to deflect the conversations away from their string of recent failures related to "dark matter" "predictions" that apparently don't predict anything useful, and away from their erroneous assumption about "standard candles" that turned out to be less than "standard" after all.

The BICEP2 claim was probably the pinnacle of the "panic" that seems to be setting in, and the extremes to which the mainstream will go in an effort to circumvent the need for a complete reevaluation of their claims. This LIGO paper that proclaims to have found evidence of gravity waves is a lot less ambitious on some levels, but just as scientifically sloppy as the BICEP2 paper. All these claims and papers follow the exact same pattern of logic: "We "proclaim" that we can eliminate every "natural" explanation for the observation in question, therefore our invisible friends did it." Naturally the "weak link" in all such claims is their claim to have logically eliminated the more likely alternatives, in this case "whistler waves", and in the case of BICEP2, dust and synchrotron radiation.

Almost no effort was made in this LIGO paper to attempt to ascertain the effects of geomagnetic influences on their new and upgraded equipment, before *leaping* to the conclusion that "black holes did it". They used a grand total of 16 hand picked days of data, and then tried to extrapolate those 16 days over 203,000 years in terms of potential geomagnetic influences and causes. How ridiculous.

In this particular case, I'm pretty sure all they "detected" were ordinary whistler waves in the Earth's magnetosphere/ionosphere. The obvious 'fly in the ointment" in their claim relates to their complete lack of a visual confirmation of their claim about this "blip" being caused by a celestial event. Supposedly their black hole merger event emits more energy than multiple entire suns in about 1/4 second interval, yet it's completely and utterly invisible on any wavelength studied by humans?

The really interesting question now is whether or not they can *ever* tie a LIGO signal of this type back to an actual visual event in space. If this signal is actually caused by whistler waves, that's never going to happen. They currently have a *lot* more 'wiggle room' as it relates to visual confirmation potential since they only have a couple of upgraded detectors online. They can't currently triangulate anything to a "point" in the sky yet, just a "general area" where they should see a visual signal. Once they get a more units online however, they should be able to better triangulate the signal, and they'll end up with a lot less wiggle room as it relates to visual confirmation of their claim.

The 64 thousand dollar question is whether or not any future papers include any visual confirmation of their claim. If it truly is a celestially driven event, we should be able to "see" it too. If it's not a celestially produced event, they'll never be able to confirm the claim visually. That's the real question and the real issue to pay attention to in future papers on this topic.

[Michael Mozina]

I think my mantra for gravity wave claims for the foreseeable future will be: Where's the visual beef?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug75diEyiA0

[Aardwolf]

They had to find something or the funding would have eventually ceased. See this extract from their paymaster's (NSF) 2014 budget;

In an era of fiscal austerity and focus on return on investment for the U.S. taxpayer, the strategic investments in NSF’s FY 2014 portfolio sustain national economic growth, create new high technology jobs, support the transition to a clean energy economy, and train and develop the Nation’s globally competitive science and engineering (S&E) workforce.

https://www.nsf.gov/about/budget/fy2014 ... fy2014.pdf

No gravity waves = no return on investment = no more money.

[BeAChooser]

No gravity waves = no return on investment = no more money.

BINGO.

[comingfrom]

In the early days, it was; "Still haven't found them, need more money for bigger detector. Need more money for another detector".

But after BICEP2, and upgrading LIGO, the pressure must have been on LIGO to come up with a result.

They must have run out of times they can say "Not yet, need still more money".

[Aardwolf]

In the early days, it was; "Still haven't found them, need more money for bigger detector. Need more money for another detector".

But after BICEP2, and upgrading LIGO, the pressure must have been on LIGO to come up with a result.

They must have run out of times they can say "Not yet, need still more money".

Here's what they said when going cap in hand to the NSF in 2008;

"We anticipate that this new instrument will see gravitational wave sources possibly on a daily basis, with excellent signal strengths, allowing details of the waveforms to be observed and compared with theories of neutron stars, black holes, and other astrophysical objects moving near the speed of light," says Jay Marx of the California Institute of Technology, executive director of the LIGO Laboratory.

And increased their budget for it by;

The National Science Foundation will fund the $205.12 million, seven-year project, starting with $32.75 million in 2008.

[Michael Mozina]

One of the interesting aspects of this 'discovery' to come out of my conversation on this topic over at CRUS is this little tantalizing tidbit:

http://www.ligo.org/magazine/LIGO-magazine-issue-8.pdf

LLO – September 14, 2015, 09:53:51 UTC – Alex Urban, Reed Essick: The Coherent WaveBurst (cWB) data analysis algorithm detected GW150914. An entry was recorded in the central transient event database (GraceDB), triggering a slew of automated follow-up procedures. Within three seconds, asynchronous automated data quality (iDQ) glitch-detection followup processes began reporting results. Fourteen seconds after cWB uploaded the candidate, iDQ processes at LLO reported with high confidence that the event was due to a glitch. The event was labeled as “rejected” 4 seconds afterward. Automated alerts ceased.
Processing continued, however. Within five minutes of detection, we knew there were no gamma-ray bursts reported near the time of the event. Within 15 minutes, the first sky map was available.
At 11:23:20 UTC, an analyst follow-up determined which auxiliary channels were associated with iDQ’s decision. It became clear that these were un-calibrated versions of h(t) which had not been flagged as “unsafe” and were only added to the set of available low latency channels after the start of ER8. Based on the safety of the channels, the Data Quality Veto label was removed within 2.5 hours and analyses proceeded after restarting by hand.

Essentially, the h(t) veto routines that were installed and that were in use at the time of the signal had originally *rejected* this signal as being an actual gravity wave with *high confidence* no less. They literally had to go into the software routine that was in use at the time and *modify* that software to remove an unspecified veto mechanism of some type. I'm inclined to believe that this signal was originally rejected based on magnetometer readings of EMP signals, but I simply don't have enough information to verify that yet.

[comingfrom]

You know what they say about first impressions, how they often turn out to be correct.
And,

... "we knew there were no gamma-ray bursts reported near the time of the event."

And,

It became clear that these were un-calibrated

Even knowing they had no confirmation, they went ahead and re-calibrated anyway.

Gravity wave detection aught to be the other way around.
Like, after detecting a large GRB, or X-ray flare, then turn to LIGO and ask, did you "feel" that?

~Paul

[Michael Mozina]

http://www.ligo.org/magazine/LIGO-magazine-issue-8.pdf

LLO – September 14, 2015, 09:53:51 UTC – Alex Urban, Reed Essick: The Coherent WaveBurst (cWB) data analysis algorithm detected GW150914. An entry was recorded in the central transient event database (GraceDB), triggering a slew of automated follow-up procedures. Within three seconds, asynchronous automated data quality (iDQ) glitch-detection followup processes began reporting results. Fourteen seconds after cWB uploaded the candidate, iDQ processes at LLO reported with high confidence that the event was due to a glitch. The event was labeled as “rejected” 4 seconds afterward. Automated alerts ceased.
Processing continued, however. Within five minutes of detection, we knew there were no gamma-ray bursts reported near the time of the event. Within 15 minutes, the first sky map was available.
At 11:23:20 UTC, an analyst follow-up determined which auxiliary channels were associated with iDQ’s decision. It became clear that these were un-calibrated versions of h(t) which had not been flagged as “unsafe” and were only added to the set of available low latency channels after the start of ER8. Based on the safety of the channels, the Data Quality Veto label was removed within 2.5 hours and analyses proceeded after restarting by hand.

From reading through this "log" file from LIGO last week, and thinking about this issue a bit over the weekend, the fact that the event in question was originally rejected, and the results were "hand changed" after the fact, casts a serious doubt as to the legitimacy of this claim. There apparently were various software routines in place that were designed to eliminate false alarms and those software veto routines rejected the signal with a high confidence figure. That would suggest to me that we had "data quality veto" routines in place that had "high confidence" to reject the signal, and humans later decided that this same signal was a "discovery" of gravity waves with 5.1 sigma confidence, based upon the removal of a single software veto routine that was done after the fact. I need to see that specific "data quality" veto routine and the input channels in question, but whatever the reason for original rejection, the exact reason for the original data quality veto rejection, as well as the subsequent change should have been *clearly explained* in the published paper. The fact that these "minor details" were entirely left out of the published paper casts a very strong air of suspicion as to the legitimacy of many of the other claims that were made in the paper.

At 11:23:20 UTC, an analyst follow-up determined which auxiliary channels were associated with iDQ’s decision. It became clear that these were un-calibrated versions of h(t) which had not been flagged as “unsafe” and were only added to the set of available low latency channels after the start of ER8. Based on the safety of the channels, the Data Quality Veto label was removed within 2.5 hours and analyses proceeded after restarting by hand.

Specifically which auxiliary channels were associated with the IDQ's "high confidence rejection" and was this confidence figure of rejection provided as a sigma figure from the software? What does the term "unsafe" mean in this context? Define "unsafe" with 5+ sigma confidence as it relates to this specific *human* choice.

[Michael Mozina]

Based upon that last LIGO paper, I'm adding a 10th item to the growing list of problems with the LIGO "discovery" paper:

1. There is no visual confirmation of this claim even with many instruments that should be capable of verifying the LIGO team's claim of a celestial origin of this signal.
2. There is no void/falsification/verification mechanism applied to *any* celestial origin claim at all, a blatant double standard with respect to other potential causes of the signal in question.
3. There is no specific channel or specific explanation identified or justified for "blip transients", which are routinely seen by both instruments in exactly these frequency ranges and with very similar wave patterns.
4. Blip transients even have a very similar wave form as demonstrated, documented and noted in figure 12 of the supporting document on EM influences considered by LIGO.
5. There is a known and demonstrated coupling mechanism between EM pulse events and the equipment that is being used to detect this signal.
6. No potential long term or "one off" events from geomagnetic or solar influence are taken into account in that highly "fine tuned" 203,000 year figure which is based upon just 16 days of cherry picked "quiet" data.
7. No raw magnetometer data from either detector seems to be publicly available for inspection during the 1/4 second timeline in question. I've been through a lot of the data that is available online, and I've not seen it, but perhaps it's publicly available and someone could just point it out.
8. No relevant satellite magnetosphere observational data was ever compared to any 'blip transient' events, or the 'discovery' event even though whistler waves from the magnetosphere follow similar signal patterns and can occur in these frequencies.
9. The entire paper is based upon the flimsy premise that "Since we can't easily explain the observation in question locally yet, therefore something exotic and 'unseen' that is really far away did it." just like the BICEP2 paper. This type of premise has already been demonstrated to be *fraught* with scientific peril over the long haul, and it's the same basis of the the breakdown of the 5+ BICEP2 claim during peer review, the breakdown of the "dark matter" claim over the past decade, as well as the breakdown of the "standard candle" claim over the past 15 years.
10. No detailed explanation was given for the iDQ rejection, or the subsequent removal of the "data quality veto" method of the iDQ software in the published paper as clearly warranted by the original rejection of this exact signal.