Gravity Waves

[Solar]

Solar,
The screed by Mathis doesn't mention the delay, or the fact of 2 identical, info rich signals, because, as usual, he's is so utterly clueless about what he's talking about. Even tho he shows the graphs side-by-side, he keeps talking about a single interferometer, and I can't see where he's even aware there were 2 of them! I read his "article" for entertainment value, but it's abundantly clear he doesn't understand the experiment at all.

However, my favorite line of all was this...

They can't do real physics, so the only thing left is this highly promoted pretend physics.

The irony is just too much!

That you Sir. The reasoning (from the reference posted earlier) did sound as if only one detector was being considered. I didn't read the reference because I couldn't get past the 2nd sentence of the second para. I'm looking for possible glitches (and not finding any as of yet), AND the potential compatibility such a cosmically induced signal might have with other theories. Conspiracy ideas ("lie") aren't getting the time of day.

*All one needs to consider is the pertinent and salient fact that something (a Force) triggered the detectors at both independent LIGO locations.

The amplitude between the two signals show definite sings of decay just as a propagating wave might show while traversing a given distance between two locations given two detectors at said locations. Anyways: here is the latest from Nature briefly covering "blind injections", the fact that there are two separate independently functioning detectors and the 203,000 year odds that such a signal might have been a false alarm:

After a long day of calls and e-mails, she determined that no blind injection had occurred and told the entire collaboration.
(…)
González and her team decided to take data for another month before beginning a full analysis: the researchers needed to record the natural noise present in their detectors to have something to compare with the chirp. They concluded that the odds of noise producing that loud pattern — and the very same pattern in both Louisiana and Washington at about the same time — were so low that it should only occur by chance less than once every 203,000 years.
(..)
Although the two black holes had probably been orbiting each other for millions of years, LIGO began to pick up their waves only when they reached a frequency of 35 cycles per second (hertz). The frequency rapidly increased to 250 hertz. The signal became chaotic and then rapidly died down; the whole thing was over within a quarter of a second. Crucially, both detectors saw it at roughly the same time — Livingston, in Louisiana, first and Hanford, in Washington, 7 milli¬seconds later. The delay is an indication of how the waves swept through Earth. - Nature:Gravitational waves: How LIGO forged the path to victory

The two arrays would have had to have been set up and modified as similarly as possible. This would explain the 7 millisecond discrepancy.

A propagating wave better explains the differences in amplitudes for two different locations several miles apart. I'd be amazed if it were a "discrepancy".

[Solar]

The basic weakness of both the Bicep2 claims and the LIGO claims is that both teams "claimed" to have a confidence level of eliminating all other potential causes that far exceeds what they should be claiming. The Bicep2 claim of Sigma 5+ confidence bit the dust literally. The 203,000 year "false positive" rate by the LIGO team is also completely unsupportable for a new piece of equipment that has only been in operation for a few months. They pulled that number out of thin air, and it's the one part of the presentation I haven't delved into yet.

Can anyone briefly explain where they got that 203,000 year figure? It seems to be "fine tuned" to push the observation into the "discovery" category, and there is no way on Earth they can justify it based upon a few months of data collection with their new receivers.

False alarm Rate Statistics

[Zyxzevn]

(…)
González and her team decided to take data for another month before beginning a full analysis: the researchers needed to record the natural noise present in their detectors to have something to compare with the chirp. They concluded that the odds of noise producing that loud pattern — and the very same pattern in both Louisiana and Washington at about the same time — were so low that it should only occur by chance less than once every 203,000 years.
(..)

This is overly optimistic, because these signals are caused by almost anything non natural.
An engine, airconditioning, ventilator, etc. That they occur at about the same time is much
less probable, but still higher than finding 2 black holes nearby enough to see their waves
(assuming that they exist at all).

Even the LIGO can produce such signals when the mirrors are not aligned well.
The laser that bounces 1000 of times between the actively adjusting mirrors can cause
strange frequency noises, that after filtering could translate into "chirps".
But there are other possibilities as well.
The mirrors get a lot of radiation, some of which converts into heat.
Heat causes ticking sounds in my heating at home, and it is possible that something
similar can happen in these mirrors. These ticks increase in period, then decrease suddenly.
Just like a chirp. What would be the chance of that happening on the first runs?
About 99% I guess.
And if they were started at the same time, this pattern might be in sync with both detectors.

They started with the wrong assumptions, so you get wrong statistics.

[Metryq]

Consider also the speed-of-light between the two locations. We know that gravity is much faster than light from aberration. Thus, it is unlikely the LIGO "signal" was a gravity wave, otherwise the delay between locations would probably be too small to measure.

[+EyeOn-W-ANeed2Know]

Consider also the speed-of-light between the two locations. We know that gravity is much faster than light from aberration. Thus, it is unlikely the LIGO "signal" was a gravity wave, otherwise the delay between locations would probably be too small to measure.

According to the news article I saw the other day, Gravity travels at c.
Dr. Cliff Burgess, a theoretical physicist who splits his time between McMaster University and Waterloo's Perimeter Institute, answered some question about the discovery, (as well as it's worthiness of Nobel Prize).
The part that caught my eye was:

Can you explain a bit more about gravitational fields?

Burgess: What we'd been taught in school about gravity is there's a force acting on you due to the earth, let's say, and it's an instantaneous thing and it's always there. About 100 years ago, Einstein in particular came to realize that a better way to think about it is that the earth is setting up a gravitational field. The field essentially applies a force to you. Imagine you're the earth and you're feeling the force of gravity due to the sun, let's say. If someone instantaneously destroyed the sun, the way you and I would have thought of that is that instantaneously all the planets would stop feeling the attraction to the sun and then they'd start moving off in a straight line and stop orbiting. What really happens is that if someone destroyed the sun right now, we'd still actually feel the force attracting us to the sun for another eight minutes because a ripple goes out through the gravitational field. Until that ripple reaches us — and it's travelling at the speed of light so it takes about eight minutes to get here from the sun — we still think we're being attracted to where the sun was. It's only when the ripple passes that we'd realize there's no more sun there to be attracted to.

[willendure]

Consider also the speed-of-light between the two locations. We know that gravity is much faster than light from aberration. Thus, it is unlikely the LIGO "signal" was a gravity wave, otherwise the delay between locations would probably be too small to measure.

According to the news article I saw the other day, Gravity travels at c.
Dr. Cliff Burgess, a theoretical physicist who splits his time between McMaster University and Waterloo's Perimeter Institute, answered some question about the discovery, (as well as it's worthiness of Nobel Prize).
The part that caught my eye was:

Can you explain a bit more about gravitational fields?

Burgess: What we'd been taught in school about gravity is there's a force acting on you due to the earth, let's say, and it's an instantaneous thing and it's always there. About 100 years ago, Einstein in particular came to realize that a better way to think about it is that the earth is setting up a gravitational field. The field essentially applies a force to you. Imagine you're the earth and you're feeling the force of gravity due to the sun, let's say. If someone instantaneously destroyed the sun, the way you and I would have thought of that is that instantaneously all the planets would stop feeling the attraction to the sun and then they'd start moving off in a straight line and stop orbiting. What really happens is that if someone destroyed the sun right now, we'd still actually feel the force attracting us to the sun for another eight minutes because a ripple goes out through the gravitational field. Until that ripple reaches us — and it's travelling at the speed of light so it takes about eight minutes to get here from the sun — we still think we're being attracted to where the sun was. It's only when the ripple passes that we'd realize there's no more sun there to be attracted to.

Gravity waves travel at c, but not gravity itself. If the sun vanished, we would feel the effects much sooner than 8 minutes - exactly how soon? I don't know. Some have estimated a velocity around c^2.

Consider also an electrical charge. Oscillate it, and an electromagnetic wave results travelling at c. But if you could make it dissapear, would its electro-static attraction or repulsion to another charge travel at c or some other speed?

I do find it begging an explanation, if gravity and electricity are entirely separate phenomena, why their waves should both travel at c.

[Zyxzevn]

Looking at the actual signals that were received at LIGO,
I spot a difference between the Hanford and the Livingston signal that does not just seem noise.

The signals are already 0.07 seconds shifted. The Hanford signal is 0.07 earlier.
In the beginning of the signal the phase of the Hanford signal is about 0.05 seconds ahead,
even after the signals are put in sync.
Its signal is also stronger than that of Livingston.
Later they get in sync, and the Livingston signal gets stronger.
But still the Hanford signal is 0.07 seconds ahead.

This appears that the source is a moving target,
flying near to the earth somewhere.

[Michael Mozina]

Looking at the actual signals that were received at LIGO,
I spot a difference between the Hanford and the Livingston signal that does not just seem noise.

The signals are already 0.07 seconds shifted. The Hanford signal is 0.07 earlier.
In the beginning of the signal the phase of the Hanford signal is about 0.05 seconds ahead,
even after the signals are put in sync.
Its signal is also stronger than that of Livingston.
Later they get in sync, and the Livingston signal gets stronger.
But still the Hanford signal is 0.07 seconds ahead.

This appears that the source is a moving target,
flying near to the earth somewhere.

That's very interesting. Could you point me to the data set that you're getting those figures from?

[Pi sees]

Looking at the actual signals that were received at LIGO,
I spot a difference between the Hanford and the Livingston signal that does not just seem noise.

The signals are already 0.07 seconds shifted. The Hanford signal is 0.07 earlier.
In the beginning of the signal the phase of the Hanford signal is about 0.05 seconds ahead,
even after the signals are put in sync.
Its signal is also stronger than that of Livingston.
Later they get in sync, and the Livingston signal gets stronger.
But still the Hanford signal is 0.07 seconds ahead.

This appears that the source is a moving target,
flying near to the earth somewhere.

That is indeed interesting. Are you suggesting that the signals could be due to an electrical interaction between the Earth and an incoming meteorite?

The amplitude variation in the latter part of the signal also appears to be noticeably greater for Hanford than it is for Livingston.

[Metryq]

If the sun vanished, we would feel the effects much sooner than 8 minutes - exactly how soon? I don't know. Some have estimated a velocity around c^2.

The late Tom Van Flandern estimated the speed of gravity at 20 billion times that of light—effectively infinite at the scale of the Solar system. Eddington argued that if gravity were no faster than light, the planets would speed up in their orbits. Also, celestial mechanics (e.g. navigating space probes) assumes an instantaneous speed for gravity.

Experiments during eclipses show aberration between the Sun's light and its gravity. We see the Sun where it was about 500 seconds ago, while gravity points to the Sun's current location.

Ergo, the LIGO signal was not a gravity wave.

[Zyxzevn]

That's very interesting. Could you point me to the data set that you're getting those figures from?

Got it from:
http://astronomy.stackexchange.com/ques ... -discovery
where it shows clearly.

Now I see, it is slightly different from:

https://www.advancedligo.mit.edu/
Where it is more hidden.

The data is mixed up. (hanford <-> livingston) in the first one.
It still means that the source might be moving.

The unshifted raw data might tell us more. I still have to work with it.
(which is their job btw)

[Michael Mozina]

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012AGUFMSM31B2278S

FYI, my money is on this being an ordinary EM "chirp" from the magnetosphere. The signal sure has all the earmarks of an electromagnetic chirp from high in the atmosphere, and the magnetosphere-ionosphere region tends to emit these very same frequencies. Whether it "moved" much during the short duration chirp is hard to say from a simple graph, but it's actually rather irrelevant.

As far as I can see, the "method" that they seem to use to eliminate discharge pulses from lightning strikes near each detector is based on the premise that the lightning will only occur low in the atmosphere, and only near one of the two detectors, and they assume that signal wouldn't be observed by the other detector. If they don't see it in both detectors, it doesn't count, so they "assume" that they have eliminated EM pulse false alarms.

If however the EM pulse originates much higher in the atmosphere and it can be seen by both detectors, they're going to register it as "signal". There's no real elimination process that I've seen so far where they are intentionally looking for any magnetosphere pulses that I can see in these various papers. The magnetosphere is a known source of those specific frequencies! That's a serious oversight.

I think the basic problem here is that they just started a "new run" with a much more sensitive set of instruments that can now observe electromagnetic pulses from a far greater distance. As a result, they can now pickup EM pulse signals from the magnetosphere that they simply could not see in previous, less sensitive tests.

Now that both units have been upgraded, and they are much more sensitive, they're seeing magnetosphere activity that they could simply never see before. EM pulses from lightning have a *known and tangible* effect on LIGO receivers. They keep making them more and more sensitive, and they're doing a great job of making them more sensitive, but they're not doing a great job eliminating "background EM" emissions from the magnetosphere. In fact I haven't read anything yet to suggest that they even considered it.

[+EyeOn-W-ANeed2Know]

Consider also the speed-of-light between the two locations. We know that gravity is much faster than light from aberration. Thus, it is unlikely the LIGO "signal" was a gravity wave, otherwise the delay between locations would probably be too small to measure.

According to the news article I saw the other day, Gravity travels at c.
Dr. Cliff Burgess, a theoretical physicist who splits his time between McMaster University and Waterloo's Perimeter Institute, answered some question about the discovery, (as well as it's worthiness of Nobel Prize).
The part that caught my eye was:

Can you explain a bit more about gravitational fields?

Burgess: What we'd been taught in school about gravity is there's a force acting on you due to the earth, let's say, and it's an instantaneous thing and it's always there. About 100 years ago, Einstein in particular came to realize that a better way to think about it is that the earth is setting up a gravitational field. The field essentially applies a force to you. Imagine you're the earth and you're feeling the force of gravity due to the sun, let's say. If someone instantaneously destroyed the sun, the way you and I would have thought of that is that instantaneously all the planets would stop feeling the attraction to the sun and then they'd start moving off in a straight line and stop orbiting. What really happens is that if someone destroyed the sun right now, we'd still actually feel the force attracting us to the sun for another eight minutes because a ripple goes out through the gravitational field. Until that ripple reaches us — and it's travelling at the speed of light so it takes about eight minutes to get here from the sun — we still think we're being attracted to where the sun was. It's only when the ripple passes that we'd realize there's no more sun there to be attracted to.

Gravity waves travel at c, but not gravity itself. If the sun vanished, we would feel the effects much sooner than 8 minutes - exactly how soon? I don't know. Some have estimated a velocity around c^2.

Consider also an electrical charge. Oscillate it, and an electromagnetic wave results travelling at c. But if you could make it dissapear, would its electro-static attraction or repulsion to another charge travel at c or some other speed?

I do find it begging an explanation, if gravity and electricity are entirely separate phenomena, why their waves should both travel at c.

LOL! Yes. Far be it that a simple layman like me to disagree with the good Dr. Burgess, but it seems that there's some confusion there between the "field" (the sphere of influence of the force) and waves travelling within it.

I used this example just the other day when speaking with couple of mainstream supporters:
Gravity is comparable to a tethered connection between a powered boat (earth) travelling around a central point(sun) in a body of water.
Yes, there will be waves, but what happens if the tether is suddenly severed?
The waves are still there, but does the boat wait till the waves cease before beginning it's unanchored course?
Or does it immediately follow it's new trajectory?

As an interesting side note: When I used that analogy, their immediate response was one referred to the water as "empty space" while the other said "No, it's spacetime". I disagreed, insisting instead that it's much more accurate to say the water represented the plasma content of the heliosphere (as it provides an actual medium of propagation).

[willendure]

I used this example just the other day when speaking with couple of mainstream supporters:
Gravity is comparable to a tethered connection between a powered boat (earth) travelling around a central point(sun) in a body of water.
Yes, there will be waves, but what happens if the tether is suddenly severed?
The waves are still there, but does the boat wait till the waves cease before beginning it's unanchored course?
Or does it immediately follow it's new trajectory?

Very good. I wonder if this stuff can ever be tested or will simply remain a thought experiment. Mass energy is conserved, so we cannot simply make something large and heavy disappear and time how long it is before its effect on another body is felt. How can we ever test this?

[Pi sees]

I used this example just the other day when speaking with couple of mainstream supporters:
Gravity is comparable to a tethered connection between a powered boat (earth) travelling around a central point(sun) in a body of water.
Yes, there will be waves, but what happens if the tether is suddenly severed?
The waves are still there, but does the boat wait till the waves cease before beginning it's unanchored course?
Or does it immediately follow it's new trajectory?

In your example, it is the tension on the tether which is keeping the boat circling around the post. If you cut the tether then then boat will indeed fly off in a new trajectory, but will it necessarily do so immediately? Surely it takes a non-zero amount of time for centripetal force exerted by the post to reach the boat via the tether? We just don't notice it because the tether is so short relative to the speed at which the force transmits. But in the case of the Earth and Sun we are talking about a "tether"which is 8 light-minutes long, so wouldn't there be an 8 minute delay between the severing of the Earth-Sun "tether" and the Earth beginning to fly off on its new trajectory?

This question of how the Earth 'knows' where the Sun is right now is particularly vexing. I have not had much luck in my attempts to find answers to it, yet given the mainstream's view that gravitational influences travel at c you'd think this question would be much more prevalent than it actually is. The same goes for the ion stream between the Sun and the Earth (which I suspect is what really keeps the Earth in orbit around the Sun): how does this 8+ light-minute long ion stream maintain its coherence if both bodies 'see' each other where they were 8 minutes ago? Indeed, how does any body or system large enough to be measured in light-seconds (or larger units) manage to stay intact?