Evidence of Gravitational Waves, or Confirmation Bias?

[Zyxzevn]

The basis of the LIGO system is a laser that is recycled every 268th of a second.
Which gives a base period of both 268 Hertz for positive feedback,
and 134 Hertz for negative feedback.
This is systematic noise that they can not remove due to the way the LIGO is set up.

Both GW signals have a signal that is very similar to the frequency of the negative feedback.
Which makes it very hard to separate the signal from the noise.

But there is also good news for the LIGO.
The resonating signal is fairly stable in the raw data of the first GW claim.
We can look at the frequency-changes in this resonating signal,
and see if there is a time-shift caused by a GW or something else.
If there is no time-shift, the signal is certainly not a GW.
Anyone interested?

Raw data is at:
https://losc.ligo.org/events/GW170104/

[Higgsy]

The basis of the LIGO system is a laser that is recycled every 268th of a second.

What does that mean? Where on earth did you get this idea from?

Which gives a base period of both 268 Hertz for positive feedback,
and 134 Hertz for negative feedback.

Huh?

This is systematic noise that they can not remove due to the way the LIGO is set up.

Why on earth would you design a sysyem where th signal channel is corrupted by a pure tone right in the middle of the signal bandwidth? And why is positive feedback twice the frequency of negative feedback, whatever it is you mean by feedback?

Both GW signals have a signal that is very similar to the frequency of the negative feedback.
Which makes it very hard to separate the signal from the noise.

Could you just justify this claim that the signal channel is corrupted with a pure tone at 268Hz?

But there is also good news for the LIGO.
The resonating signal is fairly stable in the raw data of the first GW claim.
We can look at the frequency-changes in this resonating signal,
and see if there is a time-shift caused by a GW or something else.
If there is no time-shift, the signal is certainly not a GW.

I have no idea what you are talking about here. What resonating signal?
Anyone interested?

Raw data is at:
https://losc.ligo.org/events/GW170104/[/quote]

[Michael Mozina]

Sigma always relates to the confidence that what is being observed is signal rather than noise. Not just here in LIGO but in general. It never says anyrthing about the cause of a signal.

If that is so then all they can claim to have "discovered" is an signal of *unknown origin*.

In this case as I understand it, all the systematic and environmental causes have been eliminated,

No environmental causes were even included in the statistical noise test set, so their sigma calculation didn't eliminate *anything*! Even the very signal itself was "vetoed", so how did they eliminate *any* environmental influences from consideration?

Blip transients don't even have a veto method associated with them so the sigma calculation doesn't address that potential cause of the signal either. In short *nothing* was actually eliminated based on that sigma calculation and all we can be sure of from their sigma is that it's a real signal of unknown origin.

and the signal closely matches that expected for a black hole merger, including both the inspiral and ring-down. Hence the conclusion that the cause is a black hole merger.

So what? Blip transients fall into the same frequency and duration range and they produce signals that match those same mass merger models that they're using. LIGO even cites an example of one that matches a black hole/neutron star merger pattern.

[Zyxzevn]

The basis of the LIGO system is a laser that is recycled every 268th of a second.

What does that mean?

It is in the beginning of this thread, and on the LIGO website.

From the LIGO documentation I can read that their lasers follow a zig-zag path of
around 1120 km, where it goes through the laser again (power recycling).
With c/1120= 268 Hz, we can see that this laser recycling can be causing a continuous noise

To simplify:
[LASER] ------ 4 km ----> Mirror1
Mirror2 <------ 4km ------ Mirror1
Mirror2 -------- 4km ------> Mirror1
repeat to 280x

now we get:
[LASER] <---- 1120 km ---------------> mirror

The laser has a mirror too, so the beam is recycled over and over again, to make it extra powerful.

But sadly, this trick also introduces the resonance visible in the raw data of the first GW claim.


Can you see the regular up-and-down lines? That is the resonance signal.
It also is the base-frequency of the amplitude modulated signal.

I will place an update on the last GW-claim when I got some time.

[Michael Mozina]

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/fo ... stcount=58

Selfsim: Meanwhile, I find myself (yet again) embroiled in another epic thread with Mozina, (summary recap of the 'debate' here), this time focusing on the sigma figure, wherein his basic math skills have yet again, presented themselves as being woefully inadequate.

LOL! Project much? You're the one that *screwed up* the sigma formula and I had to A) point out your error for you after it sat there for *days*, and B) simplify it for you so that it only required a single variable, specifically the number of flips of the coin. You not only lost points for your typo, you lost homework points for your lack of simplification. You're the one that's been woefully inadequate in your math skills, not me. It's really quite funny that you hoisted yourself from your own petard too. That was a classic.

Speaking of woefully inadequate math and physics skills, are *any* of you ISF mathematical hot shots going to help old clueless Clinger with his missing math formula to express a non-zero rate of magnetic reconnection in his vacuum contraction? You folks have absolutely *no* right whatsoever to question my math or physics skills. You suck at both.

The LIGO sigma figure was explained by using a simplified coin toss analogy (a binomial distribution) with a mean expectation value u=np and standard deviation σ=(npq)0.5 (σ=(np2)0.5 for coin tosses),

Of course you personally screwed it up and I had to point it out, and simplify the formula for you too.

which incidentally, were devised by Jakob Bernoulli in the 18th century. (Bernoulli being one of the greatest mathematicians of all time).

Unlike you, I'll bet that he would have gotten the math formula right too.

So how does Mozina interpret this? He claims the 'np' as being one variable, (not two),

I *simplified* the math down to a single variable for you and I explained it to you *repeatedly*. I even changed the name of that *one* variable for you too and showed you that it works for every single number of coin flips you might select.

and then proceeds to back himself into a corner about this, feigning it as a personal attack.

What corner? My formula works absolutely *perfectly* and it is *simpler* than yours too. Your whole coin flip homework assignment was a blatant attempt to deflect the conversation away from the *topic* and focus on the individual because that's all you folk know how to do. I don't think I've ever met a worse scientifically prepared group of individuals in my life, as that conversation with Clinger about MR theory demonstrated for *months on end*. Not one of you ever bothered (even to this day) to point out to poor clueless Clinger that "magnetic reconnection" is not a plasma optional process! Holy cow!

Since you suck so bad at physics and your math skills are sloppy at best, all you seem to be able to do is play "kill the messenger" games, only this time it completely blew up in your face! Your karma ran over your own dogma and you blew up the irony meter.

Methinks there's a lot of good fodder for Reality Check's world-famous 'Michael Mozina checklist' on that thread (linked in my previous post) ...

Me thinks that RC is the single sleaziest debater on the internet. His lists are completely pointless because they only link to his own unpublished rants, and he never listens to any answer, so his lists are just endless tirades that are typically *loaded* with personal attacks. If he's your hero, where's his rate of reconnection math formula from 5 years ago? He and Clinger have been running from that question for five years and counting. What a putz and what a sleaze.

Mind you, I guess those lists can only get so big (due to web limited resources) ...

Ya and since RC never updates his lists based on the answers he gets, they always end up as long, useless rants which are completely devoid of any substance, much like your coin toss nonsense which I blew out the water with this post:

https://www.christianforums.com/threads ... t-71340993

LIGO cheated. They simply *cherry picked* the days and times that gave them the best sigma possible, and yet their sigma claim doesn't mean a damn thing with respect to isolating the actual *cause* of the signal. They even fudged their blip transient calculations by *claiming* (without evidence in ER8) that they could *never* be observed by both detectors from the same event, or that they can change frequency (chirp). It was all one big mathematical manipulation from start to finish

For the record,not once did you address the confirmation bias problem that is inherent in their methodology.

Care to explain to us how come I'm now 3 for 3 with my prediction that LIGO will *never* visually (or with neutrinos) verify their "transient" gravitational wave signals with real observations of real celestial events? Care to make a wager that I go four for four and that LIGO will go 0 for 4?

What are the odds that not a single astronomer anywhere on planet Earth can corroborate LIGO's celestial origin claims? It would be a *huge* feather in anyone's cap if they could support even *one* event. All that hardware in space and on the ground and yet nobody on Earth can validate a single one of those three claims with any external piece of hardware, not even one. How can I be right three times in a row with all that incentive to prove me wrong?

[Higgsy]

Astonishing!

It is indeed astonishing that by just looking at some data, one can already
see the grave errors that these scientists have made in their analysis.

Random man on the internet eyeballs a signal analysed by professionals up the wazoo and sees obvious grave errors. Dunning-Kruger.

And it is astonishing how they did not look at the resonating noise signals in
their system, that #%?$ up their signal with an Amplitude modulation.

Random man on the internet obviously doesn't understand what an amplitude modulated signal is.

It is astonishing that these scientists use a basic frequency analysis, without
knowing that it makes no sense in stochastic signal theory, with these kinds of signals.

Random man on the internet creates a word salad sentence with nonsense such as stochastic signal applied to a signal which is deterministic.

[Higgsy]

The basis of the LIGO system is a laser that is recycled every 268th of a second.

What does that mean?

It is in the beginning of this thread, and on the LIGO website.

From the LIGO documentation I can read that their lasers follow a zig-zag path of
around 1120 km, where it goes through the laser again (power recycling).
With c/1120= 268 Hz, we can see that this laser recycling can be causing a continuous noise

To simplify:
[LASER] ------ 4 km ----> Mirror1
Mirror2 <------ 4km ------ Mirror1
Mirror2 -------- 4km ------> Mirror1
repeat to 280x

now we get:
[LASER] <---- 1120 km ---------------> mirror

The laser has a mirror too, so the beam is recycled over and over again, to make it extra powerful.

No it isn't. It has nothing to do with how powerful it is. You clearly don't understand that the Fabry-Perot is introduced to increase the finesse of the fringes and the sensitivity of the interferometer. It doesn't and can't introduce a tone in the strain signal at 268Hz. You just don't understand interferometry.

But sadly, this trick also introduces the resonance visible in the raw data of the first GW claim.

No it doesn't and it can't.

Can you see the regular up-and-down lines? That is the resonance signal.
It also is the base-frequency of the amplitude modulated signal.

Sigh. There is no amplitude modulated signal in the LIGO data. Could you give us a reference to the trace above, where you got it from, and what the time and strain axes are? You should realise that traces without attributions and axes are totally uninformative. I'm betting that that is not a raw LIGO signal with a frequency at 268Hz

If you really want to learn a little bit about how the data processing is done, LIGO has helpfully provided a tutorial here: https://losc.ligo.org/s/events/GW150914 ... orial.html. Needless to say it bears no resemblance to your eyeballed conclusions.

[Higgsy]

Sigma always relates to the confidence that what is being observed is signal rather than noise. Not just here in LIGO but in general. It never says anyrthing about the cause of a signal.

If that is so then all they can claim to have "discovered" is an signal of *unknown origin*.

You predict the signal you get from a black hole or black hole/neutron star merger, inspiral and ring down, according to General Relativity. You design a piece of kit to detect that signal. The piece of kit detects a signal which matches your prediction in detail. You eliminate local and instrumental sources. What other conclusion are you supposed to reach?

In this case as I understand it, all the systematic and environmental causes have been eliminated,

No environmental causes were even included in the statistical noise test set, so their sigma calculation didn't eliminate *anything*! Even the very signal itself was "vetoed", so how did they eliminate *any* environmental influences from consideration?

Of course the sigma estimate doesn't eliminate specific transient systematic and envionmental causes of the signal (although it does indicate that the signal differs from the static noise very significantly). I just said it didn't and it can't and it never does here or anywhere else. The sigma figure relates to confidence that it is a real signal rather than random noise (such as photon pressure noise in the strain channel). As I understand it the veto has been explained - it came from an uncalibrated strain channel that should have been labelled unsafe, but wasn't, and was manually labelled unsafe afterwards. As for how environmental and systematic causes of the signal were eliminated, there are entire papers written on that.

Blip transients don't even have a veto method associated with them so the sigma calculation doesn't address that potential cause of the signal either.

THE SIGMA DOES NOT RELATE TO CAUSE.

In short *nothing* was actually eliminated based on that sigma calculation and all we can be sure of from their sigma is that it's a real signal of unknown origin.

All we can be sure of is that the sigma gives us high confidence that it is a real signal - that is all it ever can do, and trying to put the burden of cause on it is unfair and a strawman. Not a single LIGO person or indeed any half-decent physicist would claim that the sigma estimate relates to cause.

and the signal closely matches that expected for a black hole merger, including both the inspiral and ring-down. Hence the conclusion that the cause is a black hole merger.

So what? Blip transients fall into the same frequency and duration range and they produce signals that match those same mass merger models that they're using. LIGO even cites an example of one that matches a black hole/neutron star merger pattern.

Could you give me a reference for that, because as far as I know, the frequency of blip transients do not evolve in time and they are not detected in both Stanford and Livingstone at the same time.

[Michael Mozina]

Selfsim:
Y'know .. there's gotta be some kind of rather bizarre thinking involving the believed role mathematics plays in science vs its actual roles, when WD Clinger's magnetic reconnection commentary/model is somehow raised as being relevant in a 'debate' about the meaning of the LIGO sigma statistic(??)

One of the things that I noticed when I first began debating various topics on astronomy is that astronomers blatantly *cheat* at debate by intentionally changing the conversation from the *topic* that is being discussed, by attacking the *individual*. This is usually done by attacking the math skills of the individual, and belittling the math skills of the individual. It's a sleazy debate tactic of course, but it's a quite common practice. I certainly wasn't the only one that experienced this type of personal attack, and you continue to do so to this day.

You guys run around claiming that math is king, and that math is the only thing that matters as it relates to the strength of any idea, and it's all that matters when supporting an idea.

Clinger's "magnetic reconnection" nonsense clearly demonstrated that the mainstream only cares about math when it suits them, and they ignore the math whenever they feel like it. Clinger spent *months* backing himself into a corner by claiming that he would demonstrate *mathematically* that "reconnection" was a plasma optional process. He erroneously claimed that he could demonstrate magnetic reconnection in a vacuum.

This is utter nonsense of course. Since I had already read a number of books on the topic of MHD theory, I knew that the term is specifically and exclusively related to plasma physics and the term basically describes the transfer of magnetic field energy into particle acceleration. I spent weeks and months waiting to see Clinger demonstrate his claim mathematically while he kept posting short 'installments" while belittling me as an individual the whole time. It wasn't just Clinger either that did a bunch of trash talking, it was RC and several others that engaged in that nonsense. I had to bide my time, and bite my tongue for weeks and months while Clinger did something like 4 or 5 "installments" of his nonsense.

When he got to the supposed "end" of his presentation, it was obvious that he was missing the *most* important mathematical formula, specifically the one that described a non-zero rate of 'magnetic reconnection" in his vacuum contraption. He completely painted himself into a corner of course because without any charged particles, there's no way to transfer magnetic field energy into particle acceleration.

Instead of just admitting his mistake, and acknowledging his missing math formula, he tried to simply badmouth me for not having math skills some more. The irony of course is that he could easily be shown to be wrong "mathematically" because he had no mathematical way to demonstrate a non-zero rate of reconnecion in his vacuum contraption.

Nobody in all that time bothered to point out Clinger's problem to him. When it became clear that he couldn't produce the required formula, the mods at JREF basically had to ban me to shut me up. I taunted him over that missing math formula for *weeks* before you folks finally banned me. Five years later, his nonsense is *still* published on Clinger's personal website, and not a single one of you have set him straight, even though the math, in this case *missing math* blows his claim right out of the water.

I realized through that process that you people don't really care about mathematics. You just use it like a weapon to belittle anyone and everyone that questions your dogma. If math really mattered to anyone at JREF, you'd have pointed out Clinger's error to him. Nobody every did. Instead you all acted like his nonsense was correct anyway.

I learned through that process that non only are your *physics* skills really very limited, but your "math is king" routine is completely BS. You guys don't give a rat's backside about the math other than to belittle others. When the math doesn't work in your favor, you simply ignore it!

You folks have *no* right whatsoever to belittle anyone over their math skills. You ultimately don't even care about math and the math doesn't change your position. All you care about is belittling the individual with the *claim* that their math skills are somehow inferior to your own skills, but as we all saw in the LIGO thread, your math skills are sloppy a best, and as Clinger's nonsense demonstrated, you folks know almost nothing at all about plasma physics. That also explain why you continue to peddle a form of pure "pseudoscience' to describe the behaviors of plasma.

Until or unless i ever see Clinger's missing math formula, I refuse to take anymore of your trash talking without pointing out what hypocrites you really are. Where's that missing math formula to describe a non-zero rate of 'magnetic reconnectino' in a vacuum? We all know you can't produce it, so why haven't even one of you set poor confused Clinger straight in over five years? Hypocrites!

The two issues (LIGO and MR theory) are only related by the fact that the MR debate clearly demonstrates that you folks are *not* the mathematical demi-gods you claim to be, as your botched coin flip formula demonstrated yet again. You cheated in the LIGO thread at CF by attacking my math skills, but like Clinger, you hoisted yourself by your own petard by screwing up the math.

[Michael Mozina]

Double post

[Michael Mozina]

Sigma always relates to the confidence that what is being observed is signal rather than noise. Not just here in LIGO but in general. It never says anyrthing about the cause of a signal.

If that is so then all they can claim to have "discovered" is an signal of *unknown origin*.

You predict the signal you get from a black hole or black hole/neutron star merger, inspiral and ring down, according to General Relativity. You design a piece of kit to detect that signal. The piece of kit detects a signal which matches your prediction in detail. You eliminate local and instrumental sources. What other conclusion are you supposed to reach?

https://www.christianforums.com/threads ... t-71340993

Selfsim insisted that I use his coin flip analogy to demonstrate the problem in that logic. I used almost exactly the same methodology as LIGO. I started with 48 flips of the coin, since LIGO started with 48 total days of raw environmental data. I then "cherry picked" only 16 hand selected days of that were the "most quiet" with respect to my 'candidate signal'.

I can then compare my candidate signal of four consecutive tails that I associated with 'aliens' with my 'statistical noise" from my cherry picked subset, and I can now demonstrate that it's impossible for the "statistical noise" to be "shifted" or "sliced" or any type of manipulate to "accidentally' produce my 'candidate signal". Based on LIGO's own methodology I demonstratee with 48 flips of the coin that aliens exist and they're communicating with me though a coin flipping exercise. .

If the sigma isn't related to the cause in any physical way, it's just a useless math exercise in the final analysis. LIGO started by *stripping out* the most likely environmental causes of the signal and cherry picked only the data they wished to "compare" their candidate signal to. They "eliminated" statistical (cherry picked) background influences, but they couldn't possibly eliminate *all* environmental influences that way.

Of course the sigma estimate doesn't eliminate specific transient systematic and envionmental causes of the signal (although it does indicate that the signal differs from the static noise very significantly).

In my coin flip example, my "candidate signal" of four tails is very significantly different than my "statistical noise' subset too. So what? All that demonstrates is that I did a good job "cherry picking" the right data compared to my candidate signal.

I just said it didn't and it can't and it never does here or anywhere else. The sigma figure relates to confidence that it is a real signal rather than random noise (such as photon pressure noise in the strain channel).

Ok, and like my example, all that demonstrates is that my candidate signal isn't caused by the data in my cherry picked subset of data. I didn't eliminate much of anything else however.

As I understand it the veto has been explained - it came from an uncalibrated strain channel that should have been labelled unsafe, but wasn't, and was manually labelled unsafe afterwards.

Nobody outside of LIGO even knows why that veto was added or what specific type of "environmental' influence is was trying to detect. We don't know why it rejected this exact signal with a 'high confidence' figure. We don't know what the term 'safe" even means in any quantified way. Maybe it did 'safely' remove the exact environmental factor that LIGO was originally trying to filtered out with this veto. Why specifically was that veto even added in the first place? What was it designed to do?

As for how environmental and systematic causes of the signal were eliminated, there are entire papers written on that.

That only brings us right back to their blatant confirmation bias problem. They eliminated *non-celestial* claims based uponi a *lack* of external corroboration in external hardware. They then blatantly *failed* to put their own celestial claims through that very same process of elimination. They simply rigged the system in their favor.

THE SIGMA DOES NOT RELATE TO CAUSE.

Then they only ever "discovered" an unknown "chirp" signal from an unknown cause, they didn't "discover gravitational waves"!

This isn't like particle physics discovery where *any* type of deviation from the standard model is a "discovery" of something new. Particle physicists also don't "cherry pick" their data.

All we can be sure of is that the sigma gives us high confidence that it is a real signal - that is all it ever can do, and trying to put the burden of cause on it is unfair and a strawman. Not a single LIGO person or indeed any half-decent physicist would claim that the sigma estimate relates to cause.

Then where's the "discovery" in this paper?

Could you give me a reference for that, because as far as I know, the frequency of blip transients do not evolve in time and they are not detected in both Stanford and Livingstone at the same time.

See figure 12:
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.10 ... 34001/meta
https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.03844

They even mention that this blip transient event fits with a neutron star/black hole merger pattern. Since they're in the engineering run to test the capability of their heavily upgraded equipment, how could they possibly *know* yet that blip transients cannot *ever* be detected by both detectors at the same time? The same question applies to their bald-faced *assumption* about blip transients *never* "chirping" occasionally. If because of various environmental factors, it's just a "rare" blip transient that chirps and can be observed by both detectors, it would still end up being classified as a gravitational wave "discovery".

The bottom line here is that there is no way to be sure that any particular candidate signal is celestial in origin without some type of visual or neutrino confirmation of that claim. Without it, the candidate signal should simply end up in an "unknown origin" category at best case, certainly not a 'discovery of aliens' category as in my simplified example.

So far I'm already 3 for 3 in terms of predicting that since these are not likely to be celestial candidate signals to start with, LIGO is unlikely to ever be able to visual confirm them. Meanwhile, with all that hardware in space, and on the ground, and with all that incentive to support LIGO's claim, no one outside of LIGO has been able to see anything that supports even one of their three 'candidate signals" as being celestial in origin. Pure coincidence and pure dumb luck that I'm already 3 for 3 and LIGO is 0 for 3?

According to their news report they supposedly have another half dozen "candidate signals' and yet I haven't heard a word from anyone about any exciting news related to LIGO being "verified" by anyone. LIGO would surely put their best foot forward in terms of their signals, so if they can't visual verify any of those signals in the next paper, that probably means that I'm already 9 for 9, and LIGO is probably already 0 for 9.

[Higgsy]

https://www.christianforums.com/threads ... t-71340993

Selfsim insisted that I use his coin flip analogy to demonstrate the problem in that logic. I used almost exactly the same methodology as LIGO. I started with 48 flips of the coin, since LIGO started with 48 total days of raw environmental data. I then "cherry picked" only 16 hand selected days of that were the "most quiet" with respect to my 'candidate signal'.

I can then compare my candidate signal of four consecutive tails that I associated with 'aliens' with my 'statistical noise" from my cherry picked subset, and I can now demonstrate that it's impossible for the "statistical noise" to be "shifted" or "sliced" or any type of manipulate to "accidentally' produce my 'candidate signal". Based on LIGO's own methodology I demonstratee with 48 flips of the coin that aliens exist and they're communicating with me though a coin flipping exercise. .

I have no idea what you're talking about here. I am not party to whatever discussion you are referring to and in any case I see no relevance to our discussion here.

If the sigma isn't related to the cause in any physical way, it's just a useless math exercise in the final analysis. LIGO started by *stripping out* the most likely environmental causes of the signal and cherry picked only the data they wished to "compare" their candidate signal to. They "eliminated" statistical (cherry picked) background influences, but they couldn't possibly eliminate *all* environmental influences that way.

You see the thing that really puzzles me Michael is all this fuss you are making here (and on other forums apparently) about how the sigma of the detection doesn't relate to cause, and when I point out to you that it doesn't relate to cause, it can't relate to cause and no-one expects it to relate to cause, you start saying it's useless. The reason I'm puzzled is that determining the probability of whether an apparent signal is signal or random noise is completely routine, not just here but in every branch of physics. I'm amazed that someone like you who takes such an interest in physics doesn't know that. I don't understand why this is at all controversial. You measure the statistics of your static random noise (arising from shot noise in the electronics, photon pressure noise and so on) and you determine the probability that that static random background could give rise to the thing you think is a signal, and you express that probability as a sigma. (Oh and by the way, in determining the statistics of the random static noise, you have to do so at a time when the system is quiet and not subject to transients, whether true signal or transient noise. See below)

(There is also continuous noise associated with specific sources such as mains and its harmonics, resonances in the mirror suspension systems and so on which you can notch filter out of the data since these are tones).

Now let's say that, as in this case, the probability that the putative signal could arise from the static random background noise is very low - the statistics of the backround noise compared with the putative signal indicates that the signal would only arise from the random noise once in 100,000 odd years. OK, so you have a signal, but you're not out of the woods yet. You still have to eliminate the possibility that your signal is caused by either intrumental or environmental transients - earthquakes, lightning strikes, heavy trucks moving about near the experiment, North Korean nuclear tests, doors slamming in the office, blip transients etc etc. In this case LIGO has a large number of channels with accelerometers and magnetometers and seismometers and microphones and so on and so forth to eliminate envirionmental transients. Once you have done all that, and the environment is clean and the kit is running clean, you can at last say that you have a proper signal.

But you're still not out of the woods, because the next question is did the other site see the same signal, and what was the coherence between them? If you do time slides of the data from the two sites does a slide within a few milliseconds give a big response? If only one site sees it, throw it away. If both sites see something but the time difference is too great, throw them away. In this case you have a very strong signal which has a high degree of coherence with a physical time difference between the two sites. You're still not out of the woods, because you have to match the signal you now have with merger templates, and if, and only if, your coherent signal appearing at both sites matches a template for inspiral, merger and ring-down, then you think you might have a candidate.

But the main point is that LIGO is using sigma estimates in a completely routine, normal and boring way, and I am surprised that you are exercised by it.

As I understand it the veto has been explained - it came from an uncalibrated strain channel that should have been labelled unsafe, but wasn't, and was manually labelled unsafe afterwards.

Nobody outside of LIGO even knows why that veto was added or what specific type of "environmental' influence is was trying to detect. We don't know why it rejected this exact signal with a 'high confidence' figure. We don't know what the term 'safe" even means in any quantified way. Maybe it did 'safely' remove the exact environmental factor that LIGO was originally trying to filtered out with this veto. Why specifically was that veto even added in the first place? What was it designed to do?

I'm not sure you understand what vetoes are and what they are for. Vetoes are not intended to dictate conclusions. They are an aid, not a supervisor. The data is noisy, with high levels of static and transient noise. Multiple channels look at the strain data in multiple ways and trigger potential candidates - dozens per day. Everyone would go mad if they had to analyse all those candidates, so automatic vetoes are used to say "ignore this, it's probably noise; ignore this, it's not a big enough signal; ignore this, it's the wrong shape". Nothing says that people can't over-ride a veto, if on analysis they disagree with it. But in this case there wasn't even a valid veto in the first place as it came from an uncalibrated strain channel, that should not have been allowed a veto in the first place. There was no valid veto (by the way, it wasn't measuring the environment - it was a strain channel).

That only brings us right back to their blatant confirmation bias problem. They eliminated *non-celestial* claims based uponi a *lack* of external corroboration in external hardware. They then blatantly *failed* to put their own celestial claims through that very same process of elimination. They simply rigged the system in their favor.

And it brings me back to the point that you know what you're looking for and when you see it, it's not unreasonable to say so. I fail to see where the confirmation bias is. If you're talking about counterparts, it's always been considered that seeing a counterpart of a neutron star merger would be great physics, but no-one ever said as part of the LIGO experimental design that seeing a counterpart is needed to claim a detection - and in fact no counterpart or a very difficult to detect counterpart is expected from a BH merger.

This isn't like particle physics discovery where *any* type of deviation from the standard model is a "discovery" of something new. Particle physicists also don't "cherry pick" their data.

I really don't know what you mean by cherry picking. What data was cherry picked?

All we can be sure of is that the sigma gives us high confidence that it is a real signal - that is all it ever can do, and trying to put the burden of cause on it is unfair and a strawman. Not a single LIGO person or indeed any half-decent physicist would claim that the sigma estimate relates to cause.

Then where's the "discovery" in this paper?

The detection of gravitational waves caused by a black hole merger as inferred from the fit between the data and the theory and the elimination of all other likely causes, using an instrument designed to detect gravitational waves.

See figure 12:
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.10 ... 34001/meta
https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.03844

They even mention that this blip transient event fits with a neutron star/black hole merger pattern.

Well, it's a strong signal, and it's compared with the best fit neutron star/BH merger template, which it doesn't fit very well (too short on the inspiral side, no ring down), and of course it only appears at one site. There is no frequency evolution and it doesn't match a BH merger. So, no, blip transients don't match the candidates at all.

Since they're in the engineering run to test the capability of their heavily upgraded equipment, how could they possibly *know* yet that blip transients cannot *ever* be detected by both detectors at the same time? The same question applies to their bald-faced *assumption* about blip transients *never* "chirping" occasionally. If because of various environmental factors, it's just a "rare" blip transient that chirps and can be observed by both detectors, it would still end up being classified as a gravitational wave "discovery".

And if I had bread I could make a sandwich if I had some cheese. No blip transients have ever been detected that match an inspiral, merger and ring down signal in both detectors at a physical delay, and especially not a BH merger signal. You could say "how do you know that some unknown gremlin, never ever before seen, doesn't exactly mimic a strong BH merger signal in both detectors with a physical delay?", but then you'd never ever do any physics. Oh, and the detection was in the engineering phase, but an enormous amount of operational running has been done since, both before and after the publication of the first, second and third detection papers.

The bottom line here is that there is no way to be sure that any particular candidate signal is celestial in origin without some type of visual or neutrino confirmation of that claim. Without it, the candidate signal should simply end up in an "unknown origin" category at best case, certainly not a 'discovery of aliens' category as in my simplified example.

[/quote]But this is your standard, not the standard set by the experiment, and I have to say that I think yours is unreasonable. First of all BH mergers are not expected to have a counterpart, or if they have it would be weak. Second, these events are very distant. We worked out together a difference in apparent and absolute magnitude of 40 for z=0.2. So they will be faint (at least BH mergers will be faint - NSBH and NS mergers are expected to be brighter). Third they are very short lived, particularly BH electromagnetic counterparts if they are detectable at all. And fourth, they require the good luck to have a powerful telescope looking in exactly the right direction at the right time. So counterparts are not regarded as necessary for a detection. You disagree and I don't see how that disagreement can be resolved by discussion. But it is you against the entire community.

However, LIGO has engaged all along with the light astronomy folk, and sooner or later I expect a counterpart will be detected. I don't see anything wrong with you expressing thoughtful caution and saying that you don't accept the discovery until then (although the community disagrees), but I do think some of the things you're banging on about, sigma and the veto in particular, are ill-conceived.

[Higgsy]

One of the things that I noticed when I first began debating various topics on astronomy is that astronomers blatantly *cheat* at debate by intentionally changing the conversation from the *topic* that is being discussed, by attacking the *individual*. This is usually done by attacking the math skills of the individual, and belittling the math skills of the individual. It's a sleazy debate tactic of course, but it's a quite common practice. I certainly wasn't the only one that experienced this type of personal attack, and you continue to do so to this day.

You guys run around claiming that math is king, and that math is the only thing that matters as it relates to the strength of any idea, and it's all that matters when supporting an idea...

The two issues (LIGO and MR theory) are only related by the fact that the MR debate clearly demonstrates that you folks are *not* the mathematical demi-gods you claim to be, as your botched coin flip formula demonstrated yet again. You cheated in the LIGO thread at CF by attacking my math skills, but like Clinger, you hoisted yourself by your own petard by screwing up the math.

I just wanted to comment on this in principle. I have no idea what the specifics of the debate are, and I am not taking sides in it, or making any comment about your maths skills, which, so far as I know, could far exceed mine. I just want to comment on the need for maths in physics. You can't do physics without a pretty good understanding of what most lay people would regard as quite advanced maths; physics attempts to describe the world in a quantified way, and the language that it uses to do that is maths. Take any undergraduate course for a major in physics - year 1 you are going to be doing wave theory, classical mechanics, classical electromagnetism, classical thermodynamics, maybe elementary geometrical optics. Everyone of these will start from the first lecture with maths. You'll do multiple exercises to help understand and reinforce the basics and all of these will require maths. You simply can't do physics (as opposed to chatting about it on a forum like this) without maths. Take classical electromagnetism, which is one of the key subjects for this forum - everything boils down to various formulations of the Maxwell equations, and in order to make sense of the Maxwell equations in order to solve specific problems you need to understand and be able to manipulate vector fields via vector calculus, including things like the curl, div and grad operators and the integration of vector fields. There are also tensor formulations of Maxwell's equations. And that's a classical example that's beeen around 150 years that uses relatively simple mathematical ideas. Modern physics relies on much more advanced mathematical concepts. So, yeah, you can chat about physics (up to a point) without using maths, but you can't do physics without it.

[Michael Mozina]

One of the things that I noticed when I first began debating various topics on astronomy is that astronomers blatantly *cheat* at debate by intentionally changing the conversation from the *topic* that is being discussed, by attacking the *individual*. This is usually done by attacking the math skills of the individual, and belittling the math skills of the individual. It's a sleazy debate tactic of course, but it's a quite common practice. I certainly wasn't the only one that experienced this type of personal attack, and you continue to do so to this day.

You guys run around claiming that math is king, and that math is the only thing that matters as it relates to the strength of any idea, and it's all that matters when supporting an idea...

The two issues (LIGO and MR theory) are only related by the fact that the MR debate clearly demonstrates that you folks are *not* the mathematical demi-gods you claim to be, as your botched coin flip formula demonstrated yet again. You cheated in the LIGO thread at CF by attacking my math skills, but like Clinger, you hoisted yourself by your own petard by screwing up the math.

I just wanted to comment on this in principle. I have no idea what the specifics of the debate are, and I am not taking sides in it, or making any comment about your maths skills, which, so far as I know, could far exceed mine. I just want to comment on the need for maths in physics. You can't do physics without a pretty good understanding of what most lay people would regard as quite advanced maths; physics attempts to describe the world in a quantified way, and the language that it uses to do that is maths. Take any undergraduate course for a major in physics - year 1 you are going to be doing wave theory, classical mechanics, classical electromagnetism, classical thermodynamics, maybe elementary geometrical optics. Everyone of these will start from the first lecture with maths. You'll do multiple exercises to help understand and reinforce the basics and all of these will require maths. You simply can't do physics (as opposed to chatting about it on a forum like this) without maths. Take classical electromagnetism, which is one of the key subjects for this forum - everything boils down to various formulations of the Maxwell equations, and in order to make sense of the Maxwell equations in order to solve specific problems you need to understand and be able to manipulate vector fields via vector calculus, including things like the curl, div and grad operators and the integration of vector fields. There are also tensor formulations of Maxwell's equations. And that's a classical example that's beeen around 150 years that uses relatively simple mathematical ideas. Modern physics relies on much more advanced mathematical concepts. So, yeah, you can chat about physics (up to a point) without using maths, but you can't do physics without it.

Ya, but math isn't everything, nor does it seem to matter to SelfSim (or anyone else at ISF) with respect to Clinger's missing math formula to express a non-zero rate of reconnection in his vacuum contraption. If mathematics really mattered to them, they would have corrected Clinger the moment I pointed out his missing math formula. If they understood *plasma physics* properly, they'd have corrected him long before I pointed out his missing math formula. I've waited over five years for the missing math formula, and nobody seems to be capable of producing it, so either they're all mathematically challenged, or they simply backed themselves into a corner, and denial set in. Whatever the problem, it's clear that math is pretty much irrelevant to the EU/PC "hater posse".

Math can also be *misused* as well as used properly, and while some mathematical models work on paper, they don't work right in the lab. Take "magnetic reconnection". Alfven called it "pseudoscience" till the day he died, and he made it mathematically obsolete in all current carrying environments with his double layer paper. The mainstream still ignores the mathematical irrelevancy of MR theory inside of "current sheets", the epitome of a current carrying environment.

Math won't resolve that debate, but a few lab tests will. The main way that MR proponents try to "demonstrate" MR theory is by beginning with *current* and electric fields to create two current carrying filaments which simply "rewire" themselves over time.

Birkeland's solar atmospheric models work in the lab, whereas the mainstream could *never* create a full sphere corona in a lab using "magnetic reconnection".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m58-CfVrsN4

[Higgsy]

Ya, but math isn't everything, nor does it seem to matter to SelfSim (or anyone else at ISF) with respect to Clinger's missing math formula to express a non-zero rate of reconnection in his vacuum contraption. If mathematics really mattered to them, they would have corrected Clinger the moment I pointed out his missing math formula. If they understood *plasma physics* properly, they'd have corrected him long before I pointed out his missing math formula. I've waited over five years for the missing math formula, and nobody seems to be capable of producing it, so either they're all mathematically challenged, or they simply backed themselves into a corner, and denial set in. Whatever the problem, it's clear that math is pretty much irrelevant to the EU/PC "hater posse".

Math can also be *misused* as well as used properly, and while some mathematical models work on paper, they don't work right in the lab. Take "magnetic reconnection". Alfven called it "pseudoscience" till the day he died, and he made it mathematically obsolete in all current carrying environments with his double layer paper. The mainstream still ignores the mathematical irrelevancy of MR theory inside of "current sheets", the epitome of a current carrying environment.

Math won't resolve that debate, but a few lab tests will. The main way that MR proponents try to "demonstrate" MR theory is by beginning with *current* and electric fields to create two current carrying filaments which simply "rewire" themselves over time.

Birkeland's solar atmospheric models work in the lab, whereas the mainstream could *never* create a full sphere corona in a lab using "magnetic reconnection".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m58-CfVrsN4

Of course maths isn't everything and of course it can be misused. Of course you can put forward any hypothesis you like with as complex maths as you like, and if it doesn't match reality, well then it's just a failed hypothesis. Nature is the arbiter.

But the other side of the coin is true. You can't describe the world in physical terms without maths. You just can't. It's been that way since Galileo in the 1640s. No-one can do physics without maths. It's simply impossible.

As for Alfven, well, in science we don't accept what people say because they are who they are. We don't have holy prophets. We accept what people say because their propositions match reality so far as we can see it. I have no idea whether Alfven said magnetic reconnection was pseudoscience or not, but I don't give two pins what Alfven said. All I care about is whether there is a physical phenomenon which is commonly called magnetic reconnection. And there demonstrably is, so that's good enough for me. Your anatagonism and that of others on this forum to the term is an utter mysrtery to me. But all this diverges from the point which is that you can't do physics without maths.