BeAChooser wrote: ↑Tue Jun 29, 2021 8:26 pm
By the way, speaking of LIGO, the Europeans are planning a new $2 BILLION dollar gravitational wave detector called the Einstein Telescope (ET). And of course the Americans have funded a large study to start design/planning of their own new detector ... which of course they will want to be even bigger than ET. So once again we all see the motivation of those pushing this stuff. MONEY, PRESTIGE, AND POWER. It's not science.
This whole LIGO claim is very likely to blow up in their faces over the next couple of observation runs. The pressure is now on for LIGO to deliver on their promises of of additional examples of multimessenger astronomy. That can only happen if these are actually real signals from real gravitational waves.
LIGO flat out *lied* in their first published paper about there being no vetoes present within an hour of their first so called "signal". The actual signal in question was vetoed by their hardware/software routines within 18 seconds of it being uploaded to the graceDB database. LIGO simply *lied* to the peer reviewers in the published paper about that fact and thereby avoided any unpleasant need to explain which channels were involved in that veto and why their software originally rejected the fist signal with "high" confidence according to the LIGO magazine article. If they have to lie to make their point, their point is a lie. That's what it comes down to.
They got "lucky" that only one detector was able to pick out a so called "signal" within a few seconds of a gamma ray burst. Since only one detector actually "saw" it, they could manipulate the location/triangulation data to suit themselves. That kind of data manipulation scenario won't be possible with more sensitive detectors and more actual detectors online. If they aren't actually gravitation waves they are seeing, they will never be able to duplicate any additional multimessenger events because even if the timing is 'close' again, the triangulation data from LIGO won't jive with the gamma ray burst location.
Look for real panic to start setting in about half way through the next observation run (scheduled to start in June of 22) if they aren't able to deliver on their promise of multimessenger astronomy events. By December of that year, I think the Joseph Weber scenario will start to look like deja-vu scenario all over again. Gravitation wave research has a long history of crying wolf, only to have the claims eventually fall apart. In this case however the detectors don't just cost a few tens of *thousands* of dollars, they cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build, but they are building them now. More detectors and more sensitive detectors are not their friend if these are simply "blip transient" events from terrestrial discharge events in the Earth's atmosphere, and I'm convinced that is the actual source of these so called "signals".