Evidence of Gravitational Waves, or Confirmation Bias?

[BeAChooser]

Good stuff.....

Yes, a very interesting presentation, Michael. Thanks for linking it. And ignoring his rather childish jabs at Donald Trump near the end, I think he effectively sums up the situation with LIGO (and modern cosmology in general) with the statement: “It would appear that the desire to believe has triumphed over the desire to understand.”

And note that statement also applies to the proponents of man-made global warming catastrophism … suggesting that there is a more general problem with big government *science* than just in the astro/cosmological arena.

[Zyxzevn]

https://www.quantamagazine.org/strange- ... -20170630/

[Higgsy]

They made a prediction based on the theory and the evidence to support the theory is nowhere to be found. They shouldn't need to torture the data to find evidence, there should be hundreds of events by now.Essentially the experiment has failed and the theory is falsified.

In what universe is the detection of gravitational waves (with excellent signal strength I hasten to add), evidence against gravitational waves and a failure, and evidence that the theory is falsified? What sort of logic is that? Do you assess all scientific papers that you read using logic like that?

I think you need to read the post again. Jay Marx made that prediction in 2008. A prediction is not evidence. They predicted daily events. How many events have there been since Advanced LIGO was completed in March 2015? According to Mr Marx there should have been possibly 818.

There are a number of things here:
1) Dr Marx's prediction does not form part of the theory of gravitational waves
2) Dr Marx did not make a hard prediction; he said that there would possibly be daily detections; no-one knows for sure what the rate of BH, BHNS and NS mergers actually is until it is measured, and indeed it is part of LIGO's mission to determine those rates.
3) Advanced LIGO was not completed in 2015; work is ongoing to improve its sensitivity and it is unlikely to meet its target or design sensitivity until 2021
4) You were the one who claimed that "the evidence to support the theory is nowhere to be found" and that "Essentially the experiment has failed and the theory is falsified". See highlights above. Clearly your claims that the detection of gravitational waves is not evidence to support the theory of gravitational waves, and that the detection of gravitational waves falsifies the theory which predicts gravitational waves, are pure baloney.

[Higgsy]

I can't recall *any* prediction in recent memory that has been made by the mainstream that actually worked as advertised.

Your memory must be extremely short, very selective or completely biased.

Here is just a tiny selection:

1) The overall shape of the CMB power spectrum
2) The angular scale of the first maximum of the CMB power spectrum
3) The ratio of the first and second peaks of the CMB power spectrum
4) The existence of the Higgs boson plus many other particles in the zoo
5) Magnetic interaction of bound electrons
6) Lorentz invariance to 1 part in 1017
7) Frame dragging
8) Time dilation due to realtive velocity
9) Gravitational time dilation
10) Decay of orbits of binary pulsars due to gravitational wave energy dissipation
11) Wheeler's delayed choice
12) Gravitational lensing
13) The weird properties of Bose-Einstein condensates
14) Homogeneity and isotropy of the universe at a large scale
15) The interpretation of the HR diagram
16) A close match between the measured CMB and a model with only six free parameters
17) Neutrino oscillation

These are just a tiny subset off the top of my head. It's obvious that not every prediction and every model will survive - how could it? - physics is far from done. But it's equally absurd rhetoric to claim that no predictions have been confirmed.

[kiwi]

Robataille has shown what a disaster the entire CMB circus is all about .... down go half of your claims in the one basket Higgsy

And Grav lensing? ... where do you find this stuff?

[Aardwolf]

1) Dr Marx's prediction does not form part of the theory of gravitational waves

So what. Prediction is part of the scientific method. Failed prediction = failed theory. Are you stating the theory has no power to predict?

2) Dr Marx did not make a hard prediction; he said that there would possibly be daily detections; no-one knows for sure what the rate of BH, BHNS and NS mergers actually is until it is measured, and indeed it is part of LIGO's mission to determine those rates.

Firstly, why do you get to decide what kind of prediction he made. You have no idea. As an executive director of LIGO while applying for a £200m grant he just pulled a figure out of his derriere? Of course he didn’t. More likely it’s based on papers/research etc. similar the one by G M Harry from my follow up post you have yet to address. In that paper there should be around 80 a year based on expected events which is likely a mid range estimate based on what is known about populations.

3) Advanced LIGO was not completed in 2015; work is ongoing to improve its sensitivity and it is unlikely to meet its target or design sensitivity until 2021

On inception it was 40% of its sensitivity and even more so now. Likely the detections should be increasing up to the expectations in 2021. There’s no evidence it’s doing so. In a few more weeks LIGO may even need to concede the detections they have made already are bogus.

4) You were the one who claimed that "the evidence to support the theory is nowhere to be found" and that "Essentially the experiment has failed and the theory is falsified". See highlights above. Clearly your claims that the detection of gravitational waves is not evidence to support the theory of gravitational waves, and that the detection of gravitational waves falsifies the theory which predicts gravitational waves, are pure baloney.

Please detail where I said the detection of gravitation waves falsifies the theory. Around 80 a year was expected and all that exists are 3 dubious events in 18 months. My point being that a few could be errors in a large population but if there were around 80 a year that would be acceptable evidence to support the theory. As it is all 3 could be errors because clearly they are desperate to find something.

[Higgsy]

Robataille has shown what a disaster the entire CMB circus is all about .... down go half of your claims in the one basket Higgsy

And Grav lensing? ... where do you find this stuff?

Not that old chestnut.

Pierre-Marie Robitaille (not Robataille) is a crackpot when it comes to astrophysics, cosmology and astronomy and is completely unqualified in those fields. His idea that the CMB is caused by radiation from the Earth's oceans is absurd on its face, since both WMAP and Planck were located at the Sun-Earth L2, 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. He is completely unable to explain the form of the power spectrum of the CMB, something which is predicted and explained in detail by Baryon Acoustic Oscillations which dictate the behaviour of the photon-baryon plasma before decoupling. For example, the first acoustic peak at multipole l = 220 is predicted by the theory to be at the scale of the acoustic horizon. Robitaille's is completely unable to explain thsi structure.

As for gravitational lensing, I get that from reading the primary scientific literature, something you might try doing some time.

[Higgsy]

http://www.nbi.ku.dk/gravitational-waves/

FYI, It turns out that Ian Harry had a bug in his code which is why he wasn't originally able to produce the results of the paper that was critical toward LIGO. The authors of the paper that was critical to LIGO pointed out Ian's code problem.

That's true.

Now we need to look here, to Harry's corrected ipython notebook: https://github.com/spxiwh/response_to_1 ... lags.ipynb

Let's look first at 10: where he shows that correlations exist if the data is not properly whitened.

Then 11: shows that whitening the data removes most of the correlations although there is still some non-random phase in Livingstone as the whitening did not perfectly remove all tones.

In 13: he reproduces this behaviour with coloured Gaussian noise

In 15: he shows the actual data of the event with the signal and the whitened noise with the signal removed. With the signal the cross correlation is -200 and with the signal removed the residual maximum is -0.4 at 12.5ms with no min/max at 7ms.

In 16: he uses Creswell's signal conditioning with different bandpassing filters. Now there is a minimum in the residual data at 7ms of -12 (compared to the signal cross-correlation of -200), but expanding the time slide shows that there are other minima and maxima at other delays including a +13 at 130ms which is way outside the maximum propagation window. So the minimum at 7ms is unexceptional with this bandpass filter - it looks like a stochastic effect. The signal cross correlation is way higher than any cross correlation in time sliding the residual noise so even after making these corrections, it seems that there is no real problem with residual noise correlation at the event delay.

[Michael Mozina]

Robataille has shown what a disaster the entire CMB circus is all about .... down go half of your claims in the one basket Higgsy

And Grav lensing? ... where do you find this stuff?

Not that old chestnut.

Pierre-Marie Robitaille (not Robataille) is a crackpot when it comes to astrophysics, cosmology and astronomy and is completely unqualified in those fields. His idea that the CMB is caused by radiation from the Earth's oceans is absurd on its face, since both WMAP and Planck were located at the Sun-Earth L2, 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. He is completely unable to explain the form of the power spectrum of the CMB, something which is predicted and explained in detail by Baryon Acoustic Oscillations which dictate the behaviour of the photon-baryon plasma before decoupling.

I'm going to start by stating that I hold no belief in Robataille's explanation of the source of the the CMB, but since you cannot demonstrate that photons are in any way influenced by things like space expansion or dark energy, nor demonstrate the existence of any exotic forms of matter, I also lack belief in your explanation of the CMB too. Every star in every galaxy emits microwaves. Eddington also nailed the background temperature of spacetime to within 1/2 of one degree based on scattering of photons in a dusty universe, whereas early BB estimates were off by an entire order of magnitude. It took BB'er three or four tries to get any closer to the correct background temperature of the universe than Eddington did using *ordinary scattering*.

If Robataille is a "crackpot" simply because he might happen to be wrong about something related to the CMB, then everyone who was involved in that BICEP2 fiasco paper were all crackpots too. Errors related to CMB "interpretations" are rather common as we can all see from that BICEP2 nonsense.

[Higgsy]

1) Dr Marx's prediction does not form part of the theory of gravitational waves

So what. Prediction is part of the scientific method. Failed prediction = failed theory. Are you stating the theory has no power to predict?

Of course the theory has the power to predict. The theory predicts the decay of the orbit of binary pulsars due to gravitational wave energy loss which is observed. The theory predicts that LIGO will detect gravitational wave events from compact body coalescences. Three of these have been detected with large signal to noise. so yes, the predictions are worked out well and the theory is secure.

Saying that something might possibly be the case is not a formal prediction of the theory as we don't know for sure what the frequency of these events actually is. We have had less than 12 months of operation of Advanced LIGO (O1 plus O2) operating at a fraction of its design sensitivity (a sensitivity of 0.4 reduces the volume of space that can be reached by a factor of 15.6. so you already have to divide any tentative expectations of rate by that factor). During that time there have been three unequivocal events detected and possibly more not yet reported. Do LIGO hope to see BHNS and NS mergers? Of course. Do they hope to see other sorts of gravitational wave? Of course. Have they yet? No. But there is no formal physics theory that has been falsified by LIGO contrary to your extreme claims.

2) Dr Marx did not make a hard prediction; he said that there would possibly be daily detections; no-one knows for sure what the rate of BH, BHNS and NS mergers actually is until it is measured, and indeed it is part of LIGO's mission to determine those rates.

Firstly, why do you get to decide what kind of prediction he made. You have no idea.

The key word is "possibly". He was not making a hard prediction. He was articulating a tentative expectation. That's English, not physics.

As an executive director of LIGO while applying for a £200m grant he just pulled a figure out of his derriere? Of course he didn’t. More likely it’s based on papers/research etc. similar the one by G M Harry from my follow up post you have yet to address. In that paper there should be around 80 a year based on expected events which is likely a mid range estimate based on what is known about populations.

Perhaps you'd like to provide the forum with a copy of reference 8 which is the only technical reference in that paper on which the expectation for the frequency of NS events is based. BH and BHNS events are not even referenced and the paper says they are estimates with far greater uncertainty.

Furthermore you seem to have difficulty understanding English. When someone says "This is expected to be sufficient to see up to 40 neutron star inspiral events per year" they do not mean that to be taken as a mid-range extimate but an upper bound.

And finally, taking the rate of detected events and the fact that Advanced LIGO is currently only probing 0.064 of its design space, the rate of BS mergers is already higher than expected.

3) Advanced LIGO was not completed in 2015; work is ongoing to improve its sensitivity and it is unlikely to meet its target or design sensitivity until 2021

On inception it was 40% of its sensitivity and even more so now. Likely the detections should be increasing up to the expectations in 2021. There’s no evidence it’s doing so. In a few more weeks LIGO may even need to concede the detections they have made already are bogus.

Unfortunately, although there was some improvement sensitivity in Livingstone in O2 over O1, there was no improvement in Hanford. Since O2 didn't finish until May, we won't know the full extent of the O2 discoveries for a while.

As I pointed out, 0.4 of design sensitivity equates to 0.064 of design detection volume and 0.064 in frequency of events. Advanced LIGO has a long way to go. As for your last statement, what on earth gives you the impression that they will have to concede any such thing.

4) You were the one who claimed that "the evidence to support the theory is nowhere to be found" and that "Essentially the experiment has failed and the theory is falsified". See highlights above. Clearly your claims that the detection of gravitational waves is not evidence to support the theory of gravitational waves, and that the detection of gravitational waves falsifies the theory which predicts gravitational waves, are pure baloney.

Please detail where I said the detection of gravitation waves falsifies the theory. Around 80 a year was expected and all that exists are 3 dubious events in 18 months.

Not dubious - high SNR and unequivocal.

My point being that a few could be errors in a large population but if there were around 80 a year that would be acceptable evidence to support the theory. As it is all 3 could be errors because clearly they are desperate to find something.

What is 80 x 0.064? It's 5. And we don't have the full results of O2 yet. Plus the 80 is an upper bound expectation and is made up of three different populations of event.

It is more than obvious that your statements that "the evidence to support the theory is nowhere to be found" and that "Essentially the experiment has failed and the theory is falsified" is extreme rhetoric, completely unsupported by the facts and coloured by your obvious animosity against LIGO.

[Higgsy]

I'm going to start by stating that I hold no belief in Robataille's explanation of the source of the the CMB, but since you cannot demonstrate that photons are in any way influenced by things like space expansion or dark energy, nor demonstrate the existence of any exotic forms of matter, I also lack belief in your explanation of the CMB too. Every star in every galaxy emits microwaves. Eddington also nailed the background temperature of spacetime to within 1/2 of one degree based on scattering of photons in a dusty universe, whereas early BB estimates were off by an entire order of magnitude. It took BB'er three or four tries to get any closer to the correct background temperature of the universe than Eddington did using *ordinary scattering*.

If Robataille is a "crackpot" simply because he might happen to be wrong about something related to the CMB, then everyone who was involved in that BICEP2 fiasco paper were all crackpots too. Errors related to CMB "interpretations" are rather common as we can all see from that BICEP2 nonsense.

Perhaps you'd like to explain the power spectrum of the CMB using the hypothesis that the source of the CMB is microwaves from stars in the galaxy scattered by dust. You can begin by telling us why there is a first peak at l=220, a first minimum at l=410 and a second peak a l=550 using your explanation; and then you can calculate the size of dust particles that will uniformly scatter radiation from stars which has a wavelength from 0.3mm to 300mm; and you can explain why shorter wavelengths are not scattered.

Robitaille is a crackpot not because he is wrong but because he is obviously wrong and he persists in his nonsense. The BICEP2 team were wrong, but admitted they were wrong when Planck pointed out that that was the case and they worked together with Planck to confirm the situation and were co-authors to the retraction papers. Anyone can be wrong, but crackpots hold obviously absurd ideas and are incorrigible.

It's not my explanation of the CMB and to be honest I don't give two pins whether you lack belief in it or not.

Oh, and the man's name is Robitaille.

[Michael Mozina]

http://www.nbi.ku.dk/gravitational-waves/

FYI, It turns out that Ian Harry had a bug in his code which is why he wasn't originally able to produce the results of the paper that was critical toward LIGO. The authors of the paper that was critical to LIGO pointed out Ian's code problem.

That's true.

So in addition to the five LIGO methodology problems which I already pointed out, they have a sixth problem in their methodology as well. First they have to cherry pick only the "juiciest" data that gets them to the almighty five sigma figure, then they have to overlook the correlation of noise between the two detectors and *pretend* that only gravitational wave signals can be observed by both detectors within a 10ms window. The whole LIGO claim is one giant circular feedback loop that is based upon a 1/2 dozen *questionable* assumptions, all of which skew the results in their favor.

Now we need to look here, to Harry's corrected ipython notebook: https://github.com/spxiwh/response_to_1 ... lags.ipynb

Why bother? The Danish group already looked at Harry's Python code and they already had to explain to him exactly which errors he made. I therefore know that Harry's original assessment was flat out wrong, and he's from LIGO. I already know that LIGO is as a prone to error as anyone else, and Harry's other commentary is based on false assertions that are based on buggy software routines.

That only makes me wonder all that much more about that "missing veto" which LIGO won't talk about, especially it's original *****intent******, it's "high confidence" rejection of the exact signal in question, and LIGO's complete lack of type of quantification with respect to any "unsafe veto".

Let's look first at 10: where he shows that correlations exist if the data is not properly whitened.

In other words, we already know for a fact that signals *can be* correlated between the detectors, so LIGO's oversimplified assertion that the correlation of any signal *requires* gravitational waves is falsified. LIGO has to go to *great* lengths to try to remove correlation from the detectors *before* we can even decide if one specific "noise" is correlated or not correlated between the detectors. The correlation claim can therefore *not* be used to exclude "blip transients" from further consideration because we can never be certain that we have eliminated 100 percent of the correlation of ordinary background noise between the two detectors, and the background noise is often *far greater* than the candidate signal.

The whole LIGO claim of "discovery" is based upon the *flimsiest* of possible arguments rather than being based upon any type of *visual* or neutrino confirmation of their claims!

This sure looks like Joseph Weber claims all over again. He claimed to have 311 "confirmations" before his results were overturned because they couldn't be replicated. It's deja vu all over again. This time around, the new 'Weber bars' cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build to test LIGO's claims, and for all I know they will *destroy* LIGO's claims rather than confirm them.

Then 11: shows that whitening the data removes most of the correlations although there is still some non-random phase in Livingstone as the whitening did not perfectly remove all tones.

In 13: he reproduces this behaviour with coloured Gaussian noise

In 15: he shows the actual data of the event with the signal and the whitened noise with the signal removed. With the signal the cross correlation is -200 and with the signal removed the residual maximum is -0.4 at 12.5ms with no min/max at 7ms.

In 16: he uses Creswell's signal conditioning with different bandpassing filters. Now there is a minimum in the residual data at 7ms of -12 (compared to the signal cross-correlation of -200), but expanding the time slide shows that there are other minima and maxima at other delays including a +13 at 130ms which is way outside the maximum propagation window. So the minimum at 7ms is unexceptional with this bandpass filter - it looks like a stochastic effect. The signal cross correlation is way higher than any cross correlation in time sliding the residual noise so even after making these corrections, it seems that there is no real problem with residual noise correlation at the event delay.

The Danish team went to great lengths in their video to point out the problems with "templates' being applied to different data and to explain why they went to great lengths to avoid them where possible. LIGO has to go to *ridiculous* lengths in order to "cherry pick" out only the very "best" data which they can find to support their claim, and they have to reject more than 2/3rds of the original data to get themselves to the all important 5 sigma figure. They then have to massage the hell out of the remaining data set using filters galore, and even then we have correlated noise problems which remain in the data.

LIGO then claims that three events which they can find *must* be caused by gravitational waves only because the noise happens to show correlation, when we know for a fact that noise can be correlated between the detectors, and *is* correlated between the detectors! This whole LIGO claim reeks of "bad science", "wishful thinking", and blatant confirmation bias, at every level of the process, including the way that LIGO *processed the data*!

Give me a break!

Without a visual or neutrino confirmation of their claim, this whole ''discovery" claim is just a textbook example of confirmation bias on a stick and it's a mirror image of the Joseph Weber fiasco.

Why did LIGO even start with BH-BH mergers if they were so difficult to visually confirm? Why not start with one of the other types of events which LIGO claimed they would be able to observe as well, which would be more straight forward to visually verify? Why? Because LIGO can't find any celestial event that actually ties back to any type of LIGO noise pattern, that's why. This "discovery" claim is like a "hail Mary" pass, with the express intent of circumventing any type of need for visual confirmation which is exactly why it's almost identical to Weber's bogus claims.

After reading the Danish team's assessment of the correlation problems, I have no confidence whatsoever that any one of these three specific signals in any way requires the introduction of gravitational waves to explain. Period.

They nailed LIGO to the wall (again).

[Michael Mozina]

Robitaille is a crackpot not because he is wrong but because he is obviously wrong and he persists in his nonsense.

So where does that leave the mainstream with respect to the topic of 'dark matter"? Not only were their/your baryonic mass estimates of those Bullet clusters in 2006 shown to be a complete joke, every "prediction" they/you have made with respect to the lab has been *falsified*. In just the last 5 years we've found more mass in two different halos around the galaxy than all the mass that exists in every star in the galaxy, and that's *after* botching all the stellar mass estimates!

They/you are obviously wrong with respect to the need for exotic matter to explain lensing patterns or galaxy rotation patterns, yet you persist in that nonsense.

Dark matter crackpots abound.

[Zyxzevn]

The basis of the LIGO claim is that black hole merges can be detected via gravitational waves,
with a large enough signal.
Because there is no other way to proof this concept, a very good signal must be found.
Yet this is not the case at all.

The LIGO claim has been completely debunked in this thread: their sigma-5 claim is not
based on any good science.

We can look further and see that the whole gravitational wave idea is based on an
interpretation of the general relativity theory. It is not a necessary result.
Nor is the existence of a black hole proven. In all the examples, other explanations are possible.
The biggest problems with black holes is that they are not black at all. Some examples produce
clear beams of radiation, which is impossible with general relativity. New unproven theories
were invented to compensate for this fact.
And since black holes do produce radiation, it would be logical that a collision of 2 black holes
would produce a very large amount of (Hawking) radiation. Otherwise we have to invent an
additional unproven theory to solve that problem.

The LIGO needs to provide good evidence for more than one unproven theory at once.
Therefore a very clear signal is necessary. Yet this is not the case.
We have to accept many unproven theories.
That includes many theories on the problems with their signal (see above).

This is why I compare the LIGO detection with the face on Mars.
While the face on Mars is a very visible signal,
we have to accept many unproven theories before we can accept that
some intelligence made this face structure. And possibly some pyramids too.
At least with the face on Mars we could take a second picture..
and we could see that this face was not a face at all.
The major cause of the problems: noise, shadows, and abuse of filters.
Problems very similar with the LIGO.

[Michael Mozina]

Perhaps you'd like to explain the power spectrum of the CMB using the hypothesis that the source of the CMB is microwaves from stars in the galaxy scattered by dust.

Just out of curiosity, why would I attempt to 'explain' a 'power spectrum", which is a concept that only applies to an expansion theory, when I have absolutely no evidence that the universe is even expanding in the first place?

The universe has *lots* of "backgrounds", and the stars and galaxies are the primary emitters of all those wavelengths including microwaves. The universe is simply reasonably homogeneous, but not *perfectly* homogeneous. Period.

I have no idea why you seem to be so "smug" about that particular curve fitting exercise to start with since you require multiple forms of supernatural constructs to get a "fit" to that particular curve fitting exercise. So what? If your mythical "dark matter" doesn't exist, and it doesn't enjoy any empirical support, then your curve fitting exercise doesn't fit that curve anymore.