The Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger - Duncan Brown

[@RickyMooreDaniels]

not quite K-12 :)

[@-Pentcho-Valev]

LIGO's incredible "science": nautil.us/issue/34/adaptation/the-gravity-wave-hunter "I can tell you about Alan Weinstein’s reaction, and he’s a professor here at Caltech who works on the LIGO experiment. He said when they got the phone calls they were all incredulous because they couldn’t believe that it was real. They’ve been looking for gravitational waves for decades. He said at first he thought that it was a blind injection, that someone had put in a signal and they didn’t know about it and so they thought that they were going to have to go through this whole rigmarole again, to find out that at the end of the day it was a hardware injection. Then they thought that maybe it was double blind because no one seemed to know what was going on. Whoever did the injection didn’t tell anyone, and this is going to be a big secret, and then eventually it’s not going to be a real signal. But then everyone swore that they hadn’t done any injections, and so they were starting to think, “oh my gosh, maybe this is real!” And then Alan thought maybe it was a triple blind experiment, and that just means it’s a malicious hacker who somehow managed to erase all of their steps and get the perfect gravitational wave signal in the mirror, and then will announce that they’ve somehow engineered this in a few months, and embarrass the collaboration. But he also claims that a binary black hole merger is much more likely than someone with that level of computer hacking power who is interested in hacking LIGO." The hacker who performed the triple blind experiment was malicious? No, he had already rehearsed this in 2010, then improved the procedure, and on September 14, 2015 was just thinking what he would buy for the Nobel prize: www.newscientist.com/article/2076754-latest-rumour-of-gravitational-waves-is-probably-true-this-time/ "In 2010, before LIGO had been upgraded to its present sensitivity, a textbook chirp that looked like two black holes colliding came through. The team drafted a paper and sent maps of where the signal may have come from to astronomers, who searched for a counterpart with other telescopes. There was just one problem: the signal was a fake deliberately injected into the data stream to make sure the team would be able to spot a real one. The dramatic opening of a sealed envelope revealed that fact to 300 team members in the room, with 100 more watching via a video link." [Note that in 2010 not only LIGO members were deceived - astronomers all over the world were misled into wasting time and money and looking for the non-existent black hole collision.] motls.blogspot.bg/2016/02/ligo-journal-servers-behind-scenes.html Luboš Motl: " On September 9th, the LIGO folks were already convinced that they would discover the waves soon. Some of them were thinking what they would buy for the Nobel prize and all of them had to make an online vote about the journal where the discovery should be published. It has to be Physical Review Letters because PRL (published by the APS) is the best journal for the Nobel-prize-caliber papers, the LIGO members decided. Five days later, Advanced LIGO made the discovery. Four more days later, as you know, they officially started Advanced LIGO. ;-) "

[@INteNsEHaXx]

+Pentcho Valev It's clear you have a complete misunderstanding of how LIGO injections work. LIGO injections are intentional and secret to prevent the collaboration from discerning false positives from true positives. They do them routinely, and it's an excellent way to do science. The most hilarious part of your little conspiracy is the insinuation that "they were just thinking what they would buy with the Nobel prize". The Nobel prize money isn't shit. You could barely pay off a mortgage with Nobel prize money when it's split 3 ways - which it definitely would be, considering there were hundreds of physicists collaborating on the subject. Read the papers before you make judgements based off of articles written by laymen and reporters. False assumptions make an ass out of all of us.