Evidence of Gravitational Waves, or Confirmation Bias?

[Aardwolf]

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.

Yet predictions are made and you want to ignore them as optimism because they fail. Out of curiosity how many yearly events do you think will be detected once fully operational?

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.

Your sensitivity example is bogus. The 0.4 volume of space is nearby. The 0.6 volume will not have exactly the same number of detectable events. Your example would only make sense if we had already detected the maximum number of events possible within the 0.4 volume. The probability of detecting events outside the 0.4 is much lower. I would argue the 0.4 volume more likely equates to genuinely 40% of detectable events and if the 3 are genuine we might only detect another 4 or 5. If they are all as dubious as the current 3 then IMO it’s a failure.

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

So in your dictionary tentative is also equal to optimistic (your previous description depicting intimate knowledge of another humans’ intent). Personally if I were to articulate a tentative expectation I would probably err of the lower end of a scale. I guess theoretical physicists ain’t got no truck with no cautious estimates. Not when $200m is at stake anyway.

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.

If it was free I would, however, do you have no confidence in the reference? Do you suspect G M Harry is also expressing wildly optimistic tentativeness? Also far greater uncertainty could mean there are far more BH and BHNS events than expected which begs the question;

If the 3 events so far are bogus and no more events are ever found, are you going to argue it’s because there are no events within the detectable sphere?

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.

What’s the lower 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.

Bogus calculation as discussed.

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.

How long so we know when to expect weekly events?

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.

The Niels Bohr Institute.

Not dubious - high SNR and unequivocal.

Comedy gold. Only a true believer would state LIGO has a high SNR. An experiment that has to guard against tumbleweed strikes giving false signals.

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.

Bogus calculation. Also only 40 was stated as an upper bound. For all we know the BH and BHNS events are higher. The article states its uncertain which could be high or low.

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.

Nothing extreme or rhetoric about it. Predictions were made and there is minimal evidence to support it. It’s possible (using the cautiously optimistic tentative words of Jay Marx for clarity) there are no detections at all. And it’s not even crackpots casting doubts, unless of course you think the Niels Bohr Institute is full of extremist crackpots.

[Higgsy]

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.

You are wrong. The SNR is high at over 20 and 15 for the two interferometers independently for GW150914

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

You are just repeating Mozina's nonsense about the sigma and "cherry picking". On this thread (and others I believe) he has been shown not to understand what he is talking about when it comes to measuring the significance of a signal against stochastic noise, in any branch of physics .His claims are pure baloney and you are parroting them because you don't understand any more than he does. He wants to include all the environmental transients (which are already excluded by dedicated channels) in the sigma. So for example, when there is a strong earth tremor with an amplitude 100 times a GW candidate, that must be included in the noise in his absurd view. Yeah, and the noise associated with an electronic failure in the test mass amplifier, yep include that too. Idiotic. Oh look there is a stack overflow in the position counting electronics that gives a signal 50,000 times a GW candidate - put that in. Laser starts mode hopping and gives a signal thousands of times a GW candidate. Chuck it into the noise bucket. Major electric storm within ten miles of the experiment - throw the lightning strikes in to the noise background. This is (to use his own terminology) pure buffoonery on a stick. It shows a profound misunderstanding of how data gathering and analysis are conducted in physics.

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.

Well why don't you look further and show rather than asserting that GWs are not a natural consequence of GR. You do know that the decay of the orbit of binary pulsars by GW radiation has been predicted and measured, don't you?

Nor is the existence of a black hole proven. In all the examples, other explanations are possible.

For example? For example, what other explanation, consistent with all the observations, is there for Sag A?

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.

Utter rubbish. The jets associated with black holes are caused by matter surrounding the black hole being accelerated to relativistic velocities by the black hole but not captured. It is completely compatible with GR. You really have no idea what you are talking about.

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.

Hawking radiation? Hawking radiation? Utterly ridiculous. You obviously don't have a clue what Hawking radiation actually is. The jets produced by some black holes and any radiation produced by some BH mergers has nothing at all to do with Hawking radiation. Uncharged black holes with little material nearby will merge with very low levels of electromagnetic radiation - all the radiated energy would be in GWs.

The LIGO needs to provide good evidence for more than one unproven theory at once.

I have no idea what you mean here by unproven theories, but they are obviously associated with your muddled and erroneous understanding of black holes and Hawking radiation.

Therefore a very clear signal is necessary. Yet this is not the case.

You don't call an SNR of 15 to 20 a clear signal? Wow.

We have to accept many unproven theories.
That includes many theories on the problems with their signal (see above).

Oh - you mean your wrong idea that the signal and power recycling will introduce tones. You are incorrigible about that, aren't you?

[Michael Mozina]

You are wrong. The SNR is high at over 20 and 15 for the two interferometers independently for GW150914

When you're talking about a signal to noise ratio, what "noise" are you talking about, *all normal environmental noise*, or just your "cherry picked noise" test set after filtering the hell out of it?

You are just repeating Mozina's nonsense about the sigma and "cherry picking".

The only nonsense is your denial of the facts. LIGO selected only their favorite "quietest" 16 days from a total data set of 48 days. They then removed from that already highly "cherry picked data set", all environmental noise which they could identify. That's about as cherry picked of a data set as is humanly possible. Why didn't LIGO use all available days and all times? If they had done so, their meaningless sigma figure would not have reached the all important 5+ sigma level because ordinary environmental noise *would* produce those signals over a much shorter timeframe, and their sigma would have been way too low to claim a 'discovery' had occurred! Give me a break. The cherry picking process, and the reasons for that cherry picking are *undeniable*.

On this thread (and others I believe) he has been shown not to understand what he is talking about when it comes to measuring the significance of a signal against stochastic noise, in any branch of physics .

Hogwash. I even used Selfsim's coin flip analogy at CF at his insistence to demonstrate the absurdity of cherry picking only the data that one *wants* to consider in the test data (stochastic noise) set. Based on LIGO's cherry picking methodology it's possible to use coin flips to demonstrate that aliens exist and they communicate through coin tosses.

All Selfsim did was admit that what you're now calling "stochastic noise" has almost nothing to do with the *full range* of real environmental noises that have a direct effect on LIGO. LIGO couldn't compare their signal to *all* types of environmental noise because their sigma figure would *never* reach a magic level of 5. That was their whole point of cherry picking their favorite data in the first place!

His claims are pure baloney and you are parroting them because you don't understand any more than he does.

You're confusing the concept of "understanding" with "accepting" and LIGO claim is pure baloney. I understand perfectly well what LIGO did, and why they did it. That fuzzy sigma figure neither directly supports their claim as to cause, nor can it be used to rule out ordinary *environmental* noise as the real culprit. The have *no* quantified way of determining *cause*.

All that sigma figure demonstrates is that it's a real bit of correlated noise of unknown origin. So what? The 'cause' of that noise could still be just about anything. All types of noises have a "cause" including correlated noise. Their sigma figure means *nothing* in terms of supporting their claim of "discovery". All they actually "discovered" with that sigma figure is correlated noise of an unknown origin. Period.

The Danish team showed that there's all sorts of correlated noise going on between the two detectors throughout the signal timeline at the very same time interval as their so called "detection". LIGO simply picked out small segment of that correlated noise and claimed that: This little segment of noise has to be caused by a gravitational waves because it is correlated noise and it fits our mathematical models of BH-BH mergers. What nonsense. They had all sorts of correlated noise happening at 6.9 ms, not *just* this one small subset of noise. Even the timeline of the correlation of the other noises which are present in data, match up with the timelines of these correlated signals too. Pure coincidence?

He wants to include all the environmental transients (which are already excluded by dedicated channels) in the sigma.

No environmental cause can be excluded by those dedicated channels during the signal event because LIGO experienced a "high confidence" *veto* and rejection of that very signal which they refuse to even discuss with anyone. Why was that veto even written in the first place, and what type of "noise" was it designed to "filter out" and "veto"? How the heck did that veto achieve a "high confidence" rejection of that very signal? How did they determine the actual "safety" of that veto in any quantified manner? How do they determine the a quantified "safety" figure for any veto which they determine to be "unsafe"? None of these questions were ever answered by LIGO so you have *zero* evidence that the signal itself should not have been "excluded" by the veto. Nothing as to cause was "excluded" by dedicated channels *during* the signal. Since they had a veto which *could have* been "safely" removing exactly what it was designed to remove, LIGO has no right to be claiming that anything should be excluded in the first place.

There was no reason to "exclude" the most likely producers of noise in the first place from that sigma calculation. They did that only so that they could get a high sigma figure, otherwise they couldn't get a high enough sigma figure to claim "discovery".

Furthermore the "exclusion" process applied by LIGO was *never* applied to celestial origin claims, so it's pure confirmation bias on a stick.

If you're going to try to use that sigma figure to claim to ruled out all potential environmental noises with 5 sigma certainty I absolutely expect all environmental noise to be included in the sigma calculations. If you don't include it, the sigma figure is pointless and meaningless.

So for example, when there is a strong earth tremor with an amplitude 100 times a GW candidate, that must be included in the noise in his absurd view. Yeah, and the noise associated with an electronic failure in the test mass amplifier, yep include that too. Idiotic. Oh look there is a stack overflow in the position counting electronics that gives a signal 50,000 times a GW candidate - put that in. Laser starts mode hopping and gives a signal thousands of times a GW candidate. Chuck it into the noise bucket. Major electric storm within ten miles of the experiment - throw the lightning strikes in to the noise background. This is (to use his own terminology) pure buffoonery on a stick. It shows a profound misunderstanding of how data gathering and analysis are conducted in physics.

The only thing that's idiotic buffoonery on a stick is for LIGO to *exclude* all ordinary environmental noise in that sigma calculation test set, and then run around claiming that environmental noise could never generate the same event with 5+ sigma certainty over x number of years, making this a "discovery" of something entirely new! That's just idiotic behavior, and it's totally unsupported by their cherry picked methodology. Since they stripped out ordinary environmental noise, they have absolutely *no* quantified evidence that ordinary background noise could not and would never generate that signal over X number of years. That's ridiculous nonsense.

Well why don't you look further and show rather than asserting that GWs are not a natural consequence of GR. You do know that the decay of the orbit of binary pulsars by GW radiation has been predicted and measured, don't you?

Since they're claiming to 'discover' gravitational waves like BICEP2, and Joseph Weber before them who all turned out to have cried wolf, why didn't LIGO pick a *visible* event that could be confirmed visually instead of picking a "special pleading" scenario where they give themselves a "free pass" in terms of external corroboration? We all know why. LIGO obviously cannot find *any* noise source in LIGO that can be visually correlated to *any* observed celestial event so they simply cheated and tried to claim discovery without a visual confirmation, just like Joseph Weber cheated. This claim is just like the Weber scenario and it's unlike the BICEP2 claim which at least included a visual signal which could be analyzed by someone who was external to BICEP2. This is exactly like the Joseph Weber scenario when Weber claimed to have 311 "detections" of gravitational waves without any visual support, only the new "LIGO bars" now cost hundreds of millions of dollars each just to *try* to replicate the highly suspicious claim.

This claim of discovery is the third time that someone or some large group claimed to "discover" gravitational waves, and both the previous two claims eventually turned to dust (literally in BICEP2). Without a visual confirmation of their claims, LIGO's "discovery" is no better than Joseph Weber claiming to have 311 instances of a detection of gravitational waves from his custom equipment.

[Michael Mozina]

Uncharged black holes with little material nearby will merge with very low levels of electromagnetic radiation - all the radiated energy would be in GWs.

What an *obvious* case of special pleading! You even need *special* black holes, not just *any* black holes. Now we have to believe that every GW event to date came from a total of 6 uncharged naked black holes without any kind of accretion disks whatsoever. What are the odds? Why even start with a special pleading claim in the first place?

LIGO claimed in 2009 that they'd be able to observe GW's from *many different* types of celestial events on a regular basis, not just "invisible" GW's! If LIGO is going to follow in the footsteps of Weber and BICEP2 who both failed miserably, and they intend to claim that this is a "discovery" (yet again) of GW's, why not start with a GW event that enjoys external visual support of some kind? Why only restrict themselves to *invisible* special pleading claims like Weber did in his pitifully failed methodology?

Unlike LIGO stations, Weber's equipment wasn't even prohibitively expensive to duplicate. In this case, who's going to "duplicate/replicate" LIGO's work without spending *billions* of dollars?

Even the *type* of event that LIGO has fixated themselves upon *reeks* of pure desperation and reeks of deja-vu Weber all over again. If LIGO's original estimates related to these upgrades were even remotely in the right ballpark, they'd have other types of celestial events to choose from by now. Instead all we've seen are three special pleading claims about very "special" types of invisible objects involved in special kinds of invisible merger events.

Bah! This is definitely the Joseph Weber routine all over again, and it's going to blow up in LIGO;s face sooner or later. Since there is nothing "visual' about their claims, it can't and won't blow up in their face as fast as it blew up in Bicep2's face, so it might take a few years. Then what? What happens if they cannot *ever* find us a visual confirmation of any of this GW discovery nonsense?

We had to wait around for the better part of a decade to find out that your 2006 claims about having "proof" of dark matter were pure BS. We found out only recently that your SN1A claims about "discovering" dark energy are less than the magic 5 sigma when using a larger data set. I'm sure we'll all be wondering in few years why LIGO hasn't even managed to corroborate even a single one of their bogus claims *externally* to LIGO too.

Astronomers have long and dark history of "crying wolf" only to be shown to be wrong. There is no evidence to support their dark matter snipe hunts, nor is there any empirical evidence to support LIGO's nonsense. It's all based on "trust us, we're doctors" claims of scientific superiority, and never mind all those failures of the past like BICEP2, Joseph Weber, or that now infamous Bullet Clusterf*ck study from 2006.

LHC blew away all your dark matter "maths" with a vengeance, as did LUX, PandaX, etc. Later studies demonstrated conclusively that your baryonic galaxy mass estimates were never worth the paper they were printed on in the first place. *Still to this day* you folks tell lies to your students about all the "evidence" you have to support exotic matter. Why would anyone trust astronomers?

[Higgsy]

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?

What nonsense is this? The power spectrum of the CMB is measured and is a concept that applies to the measured data. It's existence does not depend in any way on the fact that the universe is expanding. Here is another example of you setting yourself up as a knowledgeable arbiter of physics when in fact your knowledge of physics is abysmal. It's obvious that you don't even know what the power spectrum of the CMB is.

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.

And in three sentences you dismiss areas of physics relating to several backgrounds across a huge spectral range which contain some of the richest and most interesting physics of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Now considering the CMB in particular, it seems to be your contention that the CMB is microwave radiation originating at stars and scattered by dust, I asked you to estimate the size of dust particles that would uniformly (to one part in 10,000) scatter radiation in the 0.3mm to 300mm wavelength range (basically the wavelength range of the CMB). Crickets because a) you don't know how to do it and b) the answer is a population of particles uniformly distributed through space of a similar scale to the wavelengths, which clearly doesnt exist and is hardly dust and c) the spectrum of scattered radiation is a power law and not a blackbody spectrum as the CMB is.

The fact is that the CMB cannot be late radiation scattered from dust because a) it is a perfect BB spectrum and scattered radiation isn't, and b) stellar radiation at 2.7K is tiny compared with radiation at shorter wavelengths whereas the CMB is 100 - 1000 times more intense than the next most intense background radiation (which honour goes to the CIB). The CIB at 140 microns has a typical intensity of 2.3x10-18 ergs s-1 cm-2 Hz-1 sr-1, the peak CMB intensity is about 3x10-15 in the same units. So not only is the CMB's spectrum not compatible with your explanation, the CMB is hugely more intense than the background at any other wavelength. It's definitely not scattered microwave radiation from stars.

So your explanation is completely absurd, while all the features of the CMB; BB spectrum, high homogeneity and the features of the anisotropy: Gaussian, nearly scale invariant, overlaid with the signature of early and late Sachs-Wolfe effects and Sunyaev-Z'eldovich effects, and features of the power spectrum, such as the angular scale of the peaks and minima, relative amplitudes of the peaks etc etc all have coherent and consistent explanations.

[Higgsy]

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.

Your sensitivity example is bogus. The 0.4 volume of space is nearby. The 0.6 volume will not have exactly the same number of detectable events. Your example would only make sense if we had already detected the maximum number of events possible within the 0.4 volume. The probability of detecting events outside the 0.4 is much lower. I would argue the 0.4 volume more likely equates to genuinely 40% of detectable events and if the 3 are genuine we might only detect another 4 or 5. If they are all as dubious as the current 3 then IMO it’s a failure.

You really have no idea what you are talking about, do you? You are talking rubbish. 0.4 does not relate to a volume but a sensitivity. The volume is derived by the cube of the sensitivity.

Here - I'll make simple for you. Advanced LIGO is designed to increase the sensitivity over initial LIGO by a factor of 10. What that means is that the range where a particular event can be detected is increased by a factor of 10. So, for example initial LIGO has a range for 1.4 solar mass NS mergers of 20Mpc. Advanced LIGO design sensitivity expected to be achieved in 2021 will have a range for the same event of 190Mpc. That's roughly a factor of ten. So the volume of space that Advanced LIGO will probe is the cube of 10 or 1,000 times initial LIGO.

Currently Advanced LIGO is not working to its design sensitivity. Its range is about 75Mpc for the 1.4 solar mass NS merger. 75/190 = 0.395 or approx 0.4 design detection distance. We agree on that number. If you can only see 0.4 the design distance, the volume of space you can probe is the cube of 0.4 or 0.064. So current LIGO is probing 0.064 of the design volume of Advanced LIGO. The reciprocal of 0.064 is 15.6 which is what you have to divide the expected detection rates by to allow for the fact that LIGO is not currently at its design sensitivity.

Comprende?

If the 3 events so far are bogus and no more events are ever found, are you going to argue it’s because there are no events within the detectable sphere?

No, of course not. But there is no reason to think that they are bogus, and that many more won't be detected.

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.

Bogus calculation as discussed.

Your complete misunderstanding of the physics as demonstrated. The rate of BS mergers is already higher using the correct factor of 0.064

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.

How long so we know when to expect weekly events?

O2 has been extended and will not finish till September 2017

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.

The Niels Bohr Institute.

Nah. The residual correlations at 7ms have already been show to be much weaker than the signal and also repeated stochastically at multiple other time slides. It's a storm in a teacup.

Not dubious - high SNR and unequivocal.

Comedy gold. Only a true believer would state LIGO has a high SNR. An experiment that has to guard against tumbleweed strikes giving false signals.

SNR of 15 and 20 for the initial detection. That's high SNR, your silly guffawing notwithstanding.

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.

Bogus calculation.

But it's not. You are the one that has been talking rubbish. The calculation is spot on. The current LIGO is accessing 0.064 of its design volume.

Your statements about the theory being falsified is blatant, extreme and erroneous rhetoric, and you obviously, from what you've written above, haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about.

[Michael Mozina]

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.

Yet predictions are made and you want to ignore them as optimism because they fail. Out of curiosity how many yearly events do you think will be detected once fully operational?

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.

Your sensitivity example is bogus. The 0.4 volume of space is nearby. The 0.6 volume will not have exactly the same number of detectable events. Your example would only make sense if we had already detected the maximum number of events possible within the 0.4 volume. The probability of detecting events outside the 0.4 is much lower. I would argue the 0.4 volume more likely equates to genuinely 40% of detectable events and if the 3 are genuine we might only detect another 4 or 5. If they are all as dubious as the current 3 then IMO it’s a failure.

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

So in your dictionary tentative is also equal to optimistic (your previous description depicting intimate knowledge of another humans’ intent). Personally if I were to articulate a tentative expectation I would probably err of the lower end of a scale. I guess theoretical physicists ain’t got no truck with no cautious estimates. Not when $200m is at stake anyway.

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.

If it was free I would, however, do you have no confidence in the reference? Do you suspect G M Harry is also expressing wildly optimistic tentativeness? Also far greater uncertainty could mean there are far more BH and BHNS events than expected which begs the question;

If the 3 events so far are bogus and no more events are ever found, are you going to argue it’s because there are no events within the detectable sphere?

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.

What’s the lower 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.

Bogus calculation as discussed.

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.

How long so we know when to expect weekly events?

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.

The Niels Bohr Institute.

Not dubious - high SNR and unequivocal.

Comedy gold. Only a true believer would state LIGO has a high SNR. An experiment that has to guard against tumbleweed strikes giving false signals.

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.

Bogus calculation. Also only 40 was stated as an upper bound. For all we know the BH and BHNS events are higher. The article states its uncertain which could be high or low.

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.

Nothing extreme or rhetoric about it. Predictions were made and there is minimal evidence to support it. It’s possible (using the cautiously optimistic tentative words of Jay Marx for clarity) there are no detections at all. And it’s not even crackpots casting doubts, unless of course you think the Niels Bohr Institute is full of extremist crackpots.

This whole conversation is a bit surreal. It's also a really interesting conversation from the standpoint of LIGO's choice of events with which to claim their 'discovery' of gravitational waves. Joseph Weber claimed to find 311 instances of gravitational waves in his equipment, without a visual counterpart of course. They all turned out to be environmental noise of course. So far LIGO is up to three such invisible events, and they're headed in exactly the same direction as Weber in terms of a lack of visual support, even *with* a Herculean effort being made to support every one of those three events in real time.

LIGO *could* have chosen to be "prudent" and they could have chosen to select only a visually active candidate signal for the purposes of claiming a "discovery", but instead they chose an event, in fact three events without a visual corroboration to their collective names. LIGO *continues* to select only such "special pleading" events too. Why?

The obvious answer is that LIGO simply does not have any candidate "noise" which can be visually connected to any known celestial event, even after completing 2.5 years of operation with their upgraded equipment. The pressure is on. The very best they can do is go the route of Joseph Weber and hope like hell that they get a chance to retire before the whole thing falls apart.

There is no such thing as "scientific prudence" in play in this "discovery" claim. This is pure speculation at best case, and it's only made possible because nobody can "prove" that invisible things do not exist. LIGO has skipped the burden of proof issue entirely by exempting their own claims as to cause from the same process of elimination methodology that they applied to every other claim as to the cause of this same noise pattern. That's the real magic of their claims, along with the blatant cherry picking of data that was required to reach the five sigma figure.

LIGO is backing themselves right into a corner. They've struck out three straight times in trying to correlate these chirp-blip-transient noises to anything celestial in origin. This BH-BH merger scenario is the only possible "type" of celestial event that *could* conceivably emit gravitational waves without a strong EM counterpart, but they could never be sure it was gravitational wave related noise unless they already had a proven track record of demonstrating the existence of gravitational waves from *visible* events.

LIGO's claim is heavily biased "bad science" at every level of the spectrum. If they already had a proven track record of correlating visible celestial events to various noise patterns of LIGO, this entirely invisible "discovery" claim wouldn't sound so absurd and so hokey. We're supposed to believe that the first three gravitational wave events which we can observe are created by invisible stuff which then emits more invisible stuff, which can only be observed in two half billion dollar "LIGO/Weber bars". Where have I heard this story before and how did that "discovery" work out?

I thought the BICEP2 claims of discovering gravitational waves was bad, but in comparison to LIGO claims, BICEP2 was "good science". At least BICEP2 was discussing and using a real celestial observation as evidence of their claim, so their claim had the ability to be falsified by the Planck team. LIGO's claim is just like the Weber scenario, only the equipment costs a whole lot more this time around.

IMO LIGO has failed *miserably* to demonstrate their claims as to cause, and they've implemented a textbook example of a confirmation biased methodology that's every bit as bad as the one that Weber was using.

This line was classic IMO:

So current LIGO is probing 0.064 of the design volume of Advanced LIGO.

Yet somehow with this diminished volume capacity LIGO is supposedly observing celestial events that are over a billion, up to several billion light years from Earth, yet all they ever pick up are gravitational waves from entirely invisible event. Oy Vey.

[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?

What nonsense is this? The power spectrum of the CMB is measured and is a concept that applies to the measured data.

So what? The overall arrangement of mass has no super important application as it relates to a static universe theory where the whole universe could be infinite and eternal. It's just a mass layout pattern which we happen to observe. It happens to have *holes* in it which defy your predictions, and hemispheric variations that defy your predictions too. But even still, somehow you think that because you can "fit" that power spectrum with 95 percent supernatural mumbo-jumbo, that you've achieved something of great importance as it relates to all other possible cosmology theories. That mass layout patterns is not even a critically important observation for any static universe theory, regardless of what the mass layout happens to be.

It's existence does not depend in any way on the fact that the universe is expanding.

*Your* personal desire to see some cosmology "fit" to that pattern only relates to an expanding universe. It simply "is what it is" in a static universe. Worse yet, your model *requires* that you to turn a blind eye to all those baryonic mass estimation problems in the Bullet cluster fiasco study from 2006 because you can't get a fit with just any old percentage of baryonic matter. Your fit to that power spectrum using metaphysics is not a "plus" for your theory either, it's actually more like a noose around your neck that requires you go into pure denial about all the ordinary matter that we've found since 2006, and every lab result on dark matter from the past decade too.

Here is another example of you setting yourself up as a knowledgeable arbiter of physics when in fact your knowledge of physics is abysmal. It's obvious that you don't even know what the power spectrum of the CMB is.

Pure boloney. I just know that it has no special meaning in a static universe. It's just an "observation" that requires no great "explanation" down to the last "bump" in the curve that you were trying to get me to "explain". This is just another example of you playing the 'attack the messenger" game. Yawn. You folks are entirely predictable.

And in three sentences you dismiss areas of physics relating to several backgrounds across a huge spectral range which contain some of the richest and most interesting physics of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

The microwave background and the mass layout patterns of the universe aren't all that special in any other cosmology theory. They're only special to you because these particular observations are critical to *your own* belief system and to "expansion" based theories in general. It wouldn't matter *what* the mass layouts looked like in a static universe theory, and it wouldn't matter one iota to anyone that read Eddington's work what the average temperature of the universe might be. Eddington *nailed* the background temperature to within 1/2 of one degree based on *scattering*, not "space expansion", "dark energy', "dark matter" and and 'big bangs".

I'm not dismissing those particular observations. I'm just pointing out to you that they have no super-special meaning in a static universe because that power spectrum needs no "explaining" in a static universe. It just is whatever it is.

Now considering the CMB in particular, it seems to be your contention that the CMB is microwave radiation originating at stars and scattered by dust,

Bingo! Eddington predicted the average temperature of spacetime to within 1/2 of one degree of the correct number on his first try. It took BB'er three or four tries to get any closer to the correct background temperature than Eddington. It's not *just* microwaves that get scattered, absorbed and reemitted however. That's another of your strawmen I presume.

http://redshift.vif.com/JournalFiles/Pr ... 2N3ASS.PDF

I asked you to estimate the size of dust particles that would uniformly (to one part in 10,000) scatter radiation in the 0.3mm to 300mm wavelength range (basically the wavelength range of the CMB).

Why do I have to do your personal "busy work" on command on any subject of your personal choice again?

Crickets because a) you don't know how to do it

Pure personal attack nonsense.....yawn. Somehow I'm obligated to spend as much time as necessary to do anything that you ask, on command, or I run the risk of being personally attacked yet again. What a huge frigging ego you have.

and b) the answer is a population of particles uniformly distributed through space of a similar scale to the wavelengths, which clearly doesnt exist and is hardly dust

It's scattered by dust, by various types of EM and temperature related scattering, it's interactions with plasma, it's a caused by lots of stuff. There's no point in doing your busy work on just "dust" for that very reason!

and c) the spectrum of scattered radiation is a power law and not a blackbody spectrum as the CMB is.

The initial source of those wavelengths in distant galaxies are the very same sources that exist in our own galaxy, namely lots of suns, and lots of dust and lots of "scattering" that has to be "filtered out" of the microwave background before we can even "see" the other galaxy layouts. You keep ignoring the fact that Eddington calculated a *background temperature* that would have every reason to look like a "black body" over great distances. So what?

The fact is that the CMB cannot be late radiation scattered from dust because a)

Because the great wizard of Oz says so.....

Give me a break.

it is a perfect BB spectrum

It's not even a "perfect BB spectrum until you go to great lengths to *filter out* everything that *doesn't fit* that claim from the original images. Guess what specific things break that claim? Suns, dust and scattering in our own galaxy, and other close by galaxies and objects.

It's only a perfect BB as you put it because you made it that way by filtering the hell out of it, and it *still* has hemispheric variations which *defy* your claims of homogeneity!

and scattered radiation isn't,

Over what distance and what densities and which materials? I've yet to see you make even a single calculation that supports your claims, yet I'm supposed to "disprove" them on command?

and b) stellar radiation at 2.7K is tiny compared with radiation at shorter wavelengths whereas the CMB is 100 - 1000 times more intense than the next most intense background radiation (which honour goes to the CIB).

What the heck are you even talking about? Show me an image of the sun in microwaves that is "dimmer" than the background of space. You're just full of nonsense today and you're making this up as you go.

http://solar.physics.montana.edu/ypop/S ... owave.html

Notice that the brightest thing in the image isn't the CMB, it's the *SUN*? Virtually any 'background" is *tiny* in comparison to the solar output of *any* wavelength from almost every sun. The galaxy of course has to be "filtered out" too because guess what? It emits all kinds of microwaves from hundreds of billions of stars in the galaxy which would otherwise spoil your 'black body" claims. The scattering in "dust" around our galaxy has to be filtered out too as BICEP2 learned the hard way.

The CIB at 140 microns has a typical intensity of 2.3x10-18 ergs s-1 cm-2 Hz-1 sr-1, the peak CMB intensity is about 3x10-15 in the same units.

And....

So not only is the CMB's spectrum not compatible with your explanation, the CMB is hugely more intense than the background at any other wavelength. It's definitely not scattered microwave radiation from stars.

Except that it is caused by scattering and from the suns themselves. I fact Eddington even got the right number based on nothing but scattering.

So your explanation is completely absurd,

No your claims are just absurd which is why BB'er's had such a tough time coming up with the *right* number whereas Eddington *nailed* it to within 1/2 of a degree in one try and he didn't even know that there were other galaxies in space.

while all the features of the CMB; BB spectrum, high homogeneity and the features of the anisotropy: Gaussian, nearly scale invariant, overlaid with the signature of early and late Sachs-Wolfe effects and Sunyaev-Z'eldovich effects, and features of the power spectrum, such as the angular scale of the peaks and minima, relative amplitudes of the peaks etc etc all have coherent and consistent explanations.

Except your so called Sunyaev-Zeldovich effects are a complete joke which can be falsified by one microwave image of any sun:

http://solar.physics.montana.edu/ypop/S ... owave.html

The sun is *much* brighter than the CMB because all suns emit microwaves in large amounts compared to the CMB.

The bright spots in those Planck images have *nothing* to with "forward scattering" (the one place you try to *misuse* scattering is amusing by the way), they're brighter where the the stars and galaxies and other *sources* of microwaves are concentrated. Period. The 'holes' in those images are simply regions of space that have a lower density of galaxies and suns. Period. There's nothing that special about the CMB. It's just another wavelength that stars emit.

Your "dark" based theories are so "tightly constrained", that you're required to *remain* in pure denial of anything and everything that even tries to change any of the percentages of your 'dark stuff' by even a few percentages, lest the whole flimsy model fall apart. There are no less than five major errors in the baryonic mass estimates of galaxies in that now infamous Bullet Cluster study, yet you folks steadfastly refuse to make even a tiny adjustment in the percentages of exotic matter because you can't. You're stuck between a power spectrum rock and a hard supernatural dogma package. It's so damn frail, one strong wind and the whole house of cards falls apart, starting with your "power spectrum" claims to fame.

[BeAChooser]

The jets associated with black holes are caused by matter surrounding the black hole being accelerated to relativistic velocities by the black hole but not captured.

That's called hand waving.

I asked you a question about jets previously but you ignored it.

So let me ask it again.

This …

https://phys.org/newman/gfx/news/hires/ ... vjvjjj.jpg

is not a black hole.

It’s a planetary nebula called Fleming 1.

Yet it has polar jets … helically twisted jets.

The helical twisting of jets is something the mainstream has a great deal of trouble explaining.

But not plasma cosmology.

In this case, the mainstream had to invent an “incredibly rare” pair of “extremely close” white dwarfs … neither of which has actually been observed … that are orbiting one another with “incredible speed”. And the mainstream further describes the jets as “oddly” knotted and curved. And the explanation for why material streaming from one star to the other produces a jet is vague at best.

But as I noted to you earlier (a post even earlier that you also ignored), there is another explanation.

http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/ ... ornado.htm

[BeAChooser]

Eddington *nailed* the background temperature to within 1/2 of one degree based on *scattering*, not "space expansion", "dark energy', "dark matter" and and 'big bangs".

Time to apply Occam's razor.

[Higgsy]

The calculation is spot on. The current LIGO is accessing 0.064 of its design volume.

Oh, by the way, if anyone believes that I'm doing the calculation incorrectly, you can read LIGO-P1200087, which is at arXiv:1304.0670v3, Prospects for Observing and Localizing Gravitational-Wave Transients with Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo. Reading the whole thing will educate you on the matter of sensitivity and the volume accessed by various iterations of Advanced LIGO. But if you can't be arsed, go to the table on page 24 which is a summary. There you will see that the upper bound of expected BNS detections increases by a factor of 50 between O1 and observing runs beyond 2019, even more than my estimate of 15.6. Note that this paper was written before Advanced LIGO came on line, and the expectation was that O2 (2016 - 2017) would have better sensitivity than O1 (2015 - 2016). But unfortunately the sensitivity of Hanford has not been improved between O1 and O2, so LIGO is still working with the O1 BNS range of 70Mpc. When and if A-LIGO reaches its design sensitivity of 190 - 200Mpc it will be able to access a volume of space 15 - 50 times more than it can today. So you have to divide all the estimates of detection rates for fully functioning Advanced LIGO by 15 - 50 times for current LIGO.

Aardwolf's lack of understanding of LIGO sensitivity led him to prematurely and incorrectly declare that the detected rates were fatally low compared with projections made by the LIGO team.

I'll close with a quote from the Conclusions of this paper which lays out LIGO's formal expectation of detection rates:
"Unless the most optimistic astrophysical rates hold, two or more detectors with an average range of at least 100 Mpc and with a run of several months will be required for BNS detection." The current sensitivity is 70Mpc accessing only 1/3 of the volume at 100Mpc. it's not just me using the term "optimistic".

Oh - and for Michael's benefit with regard to finding EM counterparts: "Electromagnetic follow-up of GW candidates may help confirm GW candidates that would not be confidently identified from GW observations alone. However, such follow-ups would need to deal with large position uncertainties, with areas of many tens to thousands of square degrees. This is likely to remain the situation until late in the decade."

[Michael Mozina]

I'll close with a quote from the Conclusions of this paper which lays out LIGO's formal expectation of detection rates:
"Unless the most optimistic astrophysical rates hold, two or more detectors with an average range of at least 100 Mpc and with a run of several months will be required for BNS detection." The current sensitivity is 70Mpc accessing only 1/3 of the volume at 100Mpc. it's not just me using the term "optimistic".

Oh - and for Michael's benefit with regard to finding EM counterparts: "Electromagnetic follow-up of GW candidates may help confirm GW candidates that would not be confidently identified from GW observations alone. However, such follow-ups would need to deal with large position uncertainties, with areas of many tens to thousands of square degrees. This is likely to remain the situation until late in the decade."

As of July 2017, We're already kinda "late into the decade" at this point. Won't Virgo allow them to triangulate the candidate noise transient signals to a smaller region of space than they can achieve with just two detectors? When will Virgo be online and working with the other two detectors?

Can you be any more specific than "several"? It's already been a few days short of 20 months since LIGO claimed to observe it's first BH-BH merger, and they claim to have observed two more such events. Supposedly they have a half dozen other candidate signals according to the article in Nature. After nearly two years, wouldn't we expect to see a least a "few" BH-NS merger events by now too? Why is just *one* type of GW detectable by LIGO?

Can you offer us any calculations related to NS-NS orbit/merger scenarios?

I guess the real question is whether LIGO is going to continue to pull the same exact stunt as Weber pulled in terms of *never* offering any external visual confirmation of any of his 311 'detections of gravitational waves"? How are LIGO's detection claims any more "certain" than Weber's claims in your opinion Higgsy?

That correlated noise problem that was picked up by the Danish team is actually a very big deal. That observation of correlated noise at 6.9ms demonstrates that LIGO's assertion/claim/assumption that blip transient events cannot ever be observed by more than a single detector within 10ms is false. LIGO did not have then, nor does it have now, anywhere near enough data to demonstrate that claim. If various noises are observed to be correlated between at least two detectors at the same time, then all bets are off as it relates to whether or not "blip transients' can be correlated.

The blip transient argument was admittedly one of the more subjective areas of my paper, but after seeing the Danish teams evidence of signal correlation at 6.9 ms, that blip transient argument is now very well supported by that observation.

This hokey LIGO methodology has all the earmarks of a "Joseph Weber 2" scenario. Right now only one or two pieces of gear on the whole planet seem to observe some "noise pattern" and the real cause of that noise pattern is pretty much anyone's guess. Weber claimed to have 'discovered" gravitational waves 311 times without any need for external confirmatoin, so LIGO has a long ways to go to catch up to Weber.

The new "LiIGO/Weber2 bars" will cost a whole lot more this time around, but the outcome could en up being exactly the same as Weber experienced.

With all these other potential candidate signals, why is it that LIGO can only seem to find noise patterns from entirely invisible celestial objects? That doesn't seem the *least* be suspicious to you? Really?

Not only does LIGO require these to all be "black holes", they all need to be six very special uncharged, naked black holes without any accretion disks to their names. The amount of special pleading going on thus far by LIGO is simply off scale. If LIGO can detect gravitational waves from billions of light years away, then LIGO should have other types of signals to choose from by now, not *just* signals from special uncharged, naked BH-BH mergers with no accretion disks in sight. LIGO is going down the exact same path as Joseph Weber. How long did it take Weber's "discovery" claims to fall apart? What specifically makes you so sure that LIGO''s claims will last any longer? Admittedly the detectors cost a lot more this time around but a third working unit should come online pretty soon and more are in the works.

I guess it's conceivable that some folks associated with LIGO will retire before things go south, but these claims could easily end up being no more accurate that the first 312 claims of gravitational wave detection.

Between the LIGO funding and the DM funding, the mainstream seems to have all their funding nest eggs sitting in invisible baskets. That's not a great plan for the future IMO.

[Higgsy]

It simply "is what it is" in a static universe.

It simply "is what it is"? You're not curious at all to explain the rich statistics of the CMB anisotropies? Oh yes, I forgot, you're not a scientist.

Eddington *nailed* the background temperature to within 1/2 of one degree based on *scattering*, not "space expansion", "dark energy', "dark matter" and and 'big bangs".

Except that Eddington was talking about something completely different (the temperature a black body would reach as a result of being exposed to the average radiation in the ISM from stars, which radiation is nothing like a BB at 3K. Eddington pointed that out himself: "Radiation in interstellar space is about as far from thermodynamical equilibrium as it is possible to imagine, and although its density corresponds to 3.18° it is much richer in high-frequency constituents than equilibrium radiation of that temperature." So although a black bulb thermometer would register 3.18K, the radiation that causes that looks nothing like a thermal BB a 3.18K. The average radiation from stars and from re-radiated photons in ISN dust is 700 million times too low to explain the CMB peak at 2.64mm. This argument that Eddington explained the CMB is stupidly wrong, and is usually used by idiotic creationists. You're in good company.

I'm not dismissing those particular observations. I'm just pointing out to you that they have no super-special meaning in a static universe because that power spectrum needs no "explaining" in a static universe. It just is whatever it is.

Nice scientific attitude there again. Gods did it.

More later.

[Michael Mozina]

It simply "is what it is" in a static universe.

It simply "is what it is"? You're not curious at all to explain the rich statistics of the CMB anisotropies? Oh yes, I forgot, you're not a scientist.

You just can't help yourself when it comes to taking cheap shots, and playing kill the messenger games can you? Are you proud of yourself?

If you had listened to what I actually said, you'd realize that those anisotropies are simply due to the various mass layouts of galaxies and like all wavelengths of light, these wavelengths are also related to stellar output in a static universe scenario. The microwave background doesn't have any 'bang" connotations associated with it in a static universe anymore than the x-ray background, or any other background. The suns emit *all* the different wavelengths of light, which are then scattered and absorbed in space, and therefore the universe has a "background" in pretty much *every* wavelength, including microwaves and x-rays. So what?

The only other interesting thing about the CMB is that it also happens to represent the average temperature of spacetime due to the scattering of starlight. It's no big deal however in a static universe. You picked *one* specific wavelength range of light and you're trying to build a federal case over it as it relates to your own cosmology theory. That one wavelength range has no great special meaning in all other cosmology theories, particularly any static universe theory. In terms of the BOA, There's nothing to "match" in a static universe theory, it's just a reasonably homogeneous universe that doesn't need to be 'explained" in any way. It simply is whatever it is.

Eddington *nailed* the background temperature to within 1/2 of one degree based on *scattering*, not "space expansion", "dark energy', "dark matter" and and 'big bangs".

Except that Eddington was talking about something completely different (the temperature a black body would reach as a result of being exposed to the average radiation in the ISM from stars, which radiation is nothing like a BB at 3K.

Sure it is which is why he got the right number. It's almost exactly the same. The only thing that's different about that background temperature than Eddington imagined is the fact that the universe is simply much larger than Eddington ever realized. Even *still* he got the right number. The mainstream's first "guess" about the background temperature of space based on "big bang" theory was off by more than a whole order of magnitude! You're so damn smug about it too, but it took BB'er three or four tries to get any closer the correct background temperature of space than Eddington did on his *very first shot*.

Eddington pointed that out himself: "Radiation in interstellar space is about as far from thermodynamical equilibrium as it is possible to imagine, and although its density corresponds to 3.18° it is much richer in high-frequency constituents than equilibrium radiation of that temperature."

It is of course far richer in various wavelengths than *just* microwaves from a pure black body. It's full of x-rays, and gamma-rays and all sorts of emissions from objects that are nowhere near the average background temperature of spacetme. You also have to "filter out" all the excess microwaves that come from our own sun, and our own galaxy and local galaxies in our local cluster to be able to get a nice smooth CMB, just like you'd have to do with *any* wavelength to make it 'smooth". You're simply kludging the meaning of what Eddington said.

So although a black bulb thermometer would register 3.18K, the radiation that causes that looks nothing like a thermal BB a 3.18K.

http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/Planc ... 5Jul10.jpg

True. If I looked at the sun, or any star in our our galaxy, it's not going to be radiating at 3.18 degrees, or just emitting microwaves. That's also why you have to filter the hell out of the original raw microwave images like the image in that link I posted. The thermal BB aspect relates to the *average temperature of the whole of spacetime* and it will look like a bit like a black body *after you filter the hell out of it*, and only after you filter the hell out of it. If you don't filter the hell out of it doesn't look all smooth and homogeneous now does it?

The average radiation from stars and from re-radiated photons in ISN dust is 700 million times too low to explain the CMB peak at 2.64mm.

So what? It's not just the dust from the ISM that emits microwaves however, its the whole dust body in the whole of spacetime that emits and scatters those wavelengths.

This argument that Eddington explained the CMB is stupidly wrong, and is usually used by idiotic creationists. You're in good company.

Gee, another personal cheap shot. Who would have guessed? It's a pretty ironic and absurd cheap shot too because between the two of us, only you're proposing a 'creation' (of all matter) event from some 'primordial atom" using supernatural constructs galore. AFAIK the universe is infinite and eternal. Pot's and kettles considering the fact that you're peddling a creation (of all matter) event and I'm not. Irony overload.

I'm not dismissing those particular observations. I'm just pointing out to you that they have no super-special meaning in a static universe because that power spectrum needs no "explaining" in a static universe. It just is whatever it is.

Nice scientific attitude there again. Gods did it.

Your attitude is *anything but* "scientific" so who are you to lecture me? All you've done is ignore every point I made about the implications of a a static universe theory and you keep pretending that I'm obligated to describe some random wavelength in the context of expansion.

That CMB ends up being a scientific noose around your neck because you can't change any of the supernatural elements or percentages of your mythical universe lest the whole thing come crashing down in an instant. You need ad-hoc gap filler galore to get a fit. That's why you keep sweeping all the baryonic mass estimate problems in that now infamous Bullet Cluster study right under the rug. That's why you have to ignore all the NULL lab results on DM too. It's also why you could care less that your exotic matter theories have been *utterly useless* in terms of making any useful predictions about lab results. The only reason you even *need* exotic matter is because you couldn't get a "fit" to that BAO figure without it and your nucleosynthesis calculations fall apart. You *need* magic matter and magic energy to get your theory to work right, so you are obligated to simply ignore any and all mistakes in your baryonic mass estimates of galaxies, and all NULL lab results from your dark matter snipe hunts.

You've got an inflation god, and space expansion god, a god of dark energy and a god of dark matter lumped into a single creation event, so who the hell are you to be lecturing me about 'Gods did it" considering the fact that more than 95 percent of your beliefs relate to *supernatural* forms of matter and energy?

[Michael Mozina]

At the risk of bringing the thread back on topic, I am really very curious to find out if any of the 6 other candidate signals which were eluded to in that Nature magazine article enjoy any sort of empirical visual support, or if I'm already 9 for 9 in predicting that LIGO will *never* link a transient noise pattern to real celestial events.

That Danish study blows away LIGO's assertion that "blip transient" events cannot be correlated between the detectors. They demonstrate that all kinds of background noise *is* correlated in both detectors. Not only can't LIGO claim to have eliminated all environmental noise from consideration based on their meaningless sigma figure, LIGO doesn't even have a legitimate scientific way or a quantified way to distinguish between ordinary and common blip transient events and gravitational waves! LIGO's methodology is totally biased against all environmental causes of these signals, and it is completely biased in favor of any and all celestial origin claims. It's the Joseph Weber scenario all over again.