No Elephants In My Carpet - More LIES from LIGO*
[*Ludicrous, Insane Excuses for Spending]
06/07/08
Well, they're at it again! Another US$205 million down the
tubes over the next seven years, and for what? A big, fat,
NOTHING! Why aren't people jumping up and down about this
ridiculous waste of money? LIGO, so far, has detected NOTHING.
No matter how you dress it up, it is still NOTHING.
In a
previous Thunderblog about LIGO wasting our money I wrote:
And why is it that the modern space age gurus can laud success,
out of pure failure! Let's have a look at the latest release
from Space Daily Express about the LIGO facility, jokingly (
well, they surely aren't serious...) titled "LIGO Sheds Light
On Cosmic Event"...
"LIGO's contribution to the study of GRB070201 marks a milestone
for the project, says Caltech's Jay Marx, LIGO's executive
director: "Having achieved its design goals two years ago, LIGO
is now producing significant scientific results. The nondetection
of a signal from GRB070201 is an important step toward a very
productive synergy between gravitational-wave and other
astronomical communities that will contribute to our understanding
of the most energetic events in the cosmos.""
Does anyone notice something peculiar about the above quote from
Jay Marx? "... LIGO is now producing scientific results. The
nondetection of a signal from GRB070201 ... " now, call me cynical
if you must, but I can't see how a 'nondetection of a signal' is a
scientific result!
Well, they're at it again. This time I first read the wonderful
news at physorg.com under the very ambitious headline "Heart of
the Crab Pulsar probed -- first direct look into the core of a
neutron star". "How did they do that?" I thought to myself. So
I read the article, and lo and behold, they did this with another
non-detection at LIGO...
LIGO scientists monitored the neutron star from November 2005
to August 2006 using data from the three LIGO interferometers,
which were combined to create a single, highly sensitive
detector. They compared the LIGO data with published data
about the pulsar's rotation rate from the Jodrell Bank
Observatory, looking for a synchronous gravitational-wave signal.
The analysis revealed no signs of gravitational
waves -- a result the scientists say is important
because it provides information about the pulsar and its
structure. They say a perfectly smooth neutron star will not
generate gravitational waves as it spins, and that LIGO would
have been able to detect gravitational waves from a star whose
shape was deformed by only a few meters.
[Emphasis added]
I have to ask. Why would LIGO "have been able to detect
gravitational waves from a star whose shape was deformed
by only a few meters"? On what basis can this comment be
made? LIGO has never detected ANY gravity waves, so this
non-detection is no proof of anything, except perhaps the
ludicrous waste of money chasing fairies around the universe.
But wait, there's more!
According to Ben Owen, "What LIGO really adds is that we
can see more than skin deep. Astronomers see plenty of
electromagnetic waves (radio waves, x-rays, and so on)
from the Crab, but pulsars are so dense that even the
x-rays can't get through the interior and you can only
see down to the surface. But gravitational waves can get
through, so our result is the first direct look into a
neutron star's interior." Joseph Taylor, a Nobel
Prize-winning radio astronomer and professor of physics
at Princeton University, says, "The physics world has
been waiting eagerly for scientific results from LIGO.
It is exciting that we now know something concrete about
how nearly spherical a neutron star must be, and we have
definite limits on the strength of its internal magnetic
field."
Looking to the future of research with LIGO, Ben Owen adds,
"For a long time particle physicists have predicted a lot
of strange possibilities for neutron star interiors, like
neutrons dissolving into more fundamental particles called
quarks. As LIGO's sensitivity improves, we can explore more
of those possibilities. If we see a strong signal in the
next couple of years, it will be strong evidence that these
strange states of matter exist."
This I just have to break down and put my 2¢ in. According
to Ben Owen, "What LIGO really adds is that we can see more than
skin deep. So now we can see INSIDE a neutron star???
Astronomers see plenty of electromagnetic waves (radio waves,
x-rays, and so on) from the Crab, but pulsars are so dense that
even the x-rays can't get through the interior and you can only
see down to the surface. Now hang on a minute, this is implying
WE are PROBING these things with our own X-rays which is SO not
the case.
But gravitational waves can get through, so our result is the
first direct look into a neutron star's interior." And then
it's followed with an implication that somehow gravitational waves
can "get through" a neutron star, so now we've actually looked into
the interior of one of these babies. I would have thought that if
the neutrons are packed so densely that all that mass can fit into
a tiny 10km sphere, there would be little room for any sort of wave
to, well, wave.
Then he finishes off with this corker - "If we see a strong
signal in the next couple of years, it will be strong evidence
that these strange states of matter exist. ". I'd suggest that
based upon performance thus far, if they see a strong signal in
the next couple of years it will be a miracle...
Does anyone else see what's happening here? LIGO returned a NULL
RESULT. It detected absolutely nothing. Yet this somehow is
extrapolated to further our understanding of the interior
of neutron stars? Puh-lease!
And to top it off, Owen's wool-pulling excercise receives even
more 'back up' as a Nobel Prize winner from Princeton
adds "The physics world has been waiting eagerly for scientific
results from LIGO. It is exciting that we now know something
concrete about how nearly spherical a neutron star must be, and we
have definite limits on the strength of its internal magnetic
field." Forgive me for seeming a little befuddled, but
"concrete" and "definite" just don't belong in this fairy tale.
It all reminds me of one of my more amusing excuses for dropping
cigarette ash on the carpet back in the days before smokers were
akin to lepers and one could joke around about such things. If
someone were to notice the inadvertant dropping of said ash I'd
simply respond "Well, it keeps the elephants out of the carpet.
Can you see any elephants in the carpet? No. See, it works!!"
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