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I did my PhD working on LIGO, but haven't been involved in the project for about five years. To me this article sounds like a crackpot hit-piece akin to the 9-1

I did my PhD working on LIGO, but haven't been involved in the project for about five years. To me this article sounds like a crackpot hit-piece akin to the 9-11 deniers claiming that jet fuel can't melt steel. Most of the claims in this article have been refuted elsewhere, and I am sure current LIGO scientists will jump in here to further refute its claims. The matter of "retractions" is, for example, not a fair criticism. LIGO generates automatic low-latency notifications of potential detections in order to allow optical telescopes and other detectors to aim at the location of the potential event. Upon further analysis -- which takes time and can't be done at low latency -- many of these event notifications are downgraded. These retractions should not diminish your confidence in LIGO. Indeed, the team fine tunes the "false alarm rate" to avoid sending out too many false positives while not missing real events. The gravitational wave community is _extremely conservative_ in its scientific statements, and you can be assured that every scrutiny has gone into the analysis of detected events and the associated papers. The LIGO detections should not be considered controversial. There is 30+ years of science behind them, and the effort of thousands of professional scientists.

mehrdadn 7y ago
> The matter of "retractions" is, for example, not a fair criticism. LIGO generates automatic low-latency notifications of potential detections in order to allow optical telescopes and other detectors to aim at the location of the potential event. Upon further analysis -- which takes time and can't be done at low latency -- many of these event notifications are downgraded. These retractions should not diminish your confidence in LIGO. The post itself explained this... >> "The alerts must go out quickly in order for telescopes to be swung around and point at the right location in the sky." The rest of your criticism doesn't really match up with the post for me either. (See "I do not have the same concerns as were raised by the LIGO critics", etc.)
- tobinfricke 7y ago
  Every paragraph of this blog post consists of FUD that has been debunked elsewhere. The blog post repeats all of these various sources of doubt without including the follow-up that has been done bolstering support for the LIGO results. It seems like the purpose of the blog post is to sow doubt in the LIGO results, which is not warranted. > Already in 2017, a group of physicists around Andrew Jackson in Denmark reported difficulties when they tried to reproduce the signal reconstruction of the first event. This has been solidly debunked by several independent groups. Here's the first Google result I found on the topic: https://www.quantamagazine.org/studies-rescue-ligos-gravitational-wave-signal-from-the-noise-20181213/#disqus_thread https://www.quantamagazine.org/studies-rescue-ligos-gravitat... > It further fueled the critics’ fire when Michael Brooks reported last year for New Scientist that, according to two members of the collaboration, the Nobel-prize winning figure of LIGO’s seminal detection was “not found using analysis algorithms” but partly done “by eye” and “hand-tuned for pedagogical purposes.” I'm not sure what this is about -- it sounds like some off-hand remark taken out of context -- but the numerous, extremely detailed follow-up publications, not to mention that the public data release, should clear up any ambiguities. https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/detection-companion-papers https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/detection-companion-papers > "Since April, the collaboration has issued 33 alerts for new events, but so-far no optical counterparts have been seen. " That should say that no NEW optical counterparts have been seen. GW170817 was a stunning success wherein a neutron star collision was observed by LIGO in gravitational waves and by numerous optical detectors. https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/press-release-gw170817 https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/press-release-gw170817 > The number of retractions is fairly high partly because the collaboration is still coming to grips with the upgraded detector. True. These aren't really "retractions," but low-latency event notifications that are downgraded on further analysis. > With the still lacking independent confirmation that LIGO sees events of astrophysical origin False. GW170817. > "Alexander Unzicker – author of a book called “The Higgs Fake” – contemplates whether the first event was a blind injection, ie, a fake signal. The three people on the blind injection team at the time say it wasn’t them, but Unzicker argues that given our lack of knowledge about the collaboration’s internal proceedings, there might well have been other people able to inject a signal." This is simply a conspiracy theory. Note that the author (Mr. Unzicker) claims that CERN, a completely separate experiment and group of people, was subject to the same kind of conspiracy. > And then there are the “glitches”. LIGO data is indeed very non-stationary (in the spectral sense) and contains various instrumental artifacts. A great deal of effort is put into understanding these effects.
  - jakeogh 7y ago
    About the steel, since you brought it up. It for sure melted, there was an iron fire that lasted months. https://web.archive.org/web/20180911150844/http://911encyclopedia.com/wiki/index.php/World_Trade_Center_Hot_Spots https://web.archive.org/web/20180911150844/http://911encyclo... http://s3.amazonaws.com/nasathermalimages/public/video/pretext.mov http://s3.amazonaws.com/nasathermalimages/public/video/prete...
    - qubex 7y ago
      Every time I travel to New York, though I am not American and lost nobody in the attack, I take a morning to visit the site and mourn. The atrocity committed against the whole of humanity that day was stunning, and I still haven’t come to terms with it (personally).
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - throwaway2048 7y ago
    The GW170817 neutron star merger (that LIGO detected, and was confirmed by telescopes) is such a blatant contradiction of the articles claims, this entire article is garbage.
  - dnautics 7y ago
    >> With the still lacking independent confirmation that LIGO sees events of astrophysical origin > False. GW170817. One observation does not independent confirmation make. Obviously from context Sabine doesn't mean independent in the independent group sense as the observation itself is collaborative and there aren't exactly other ligos around. Why are you so defensive?
    - tobinfricke 7y ago
      I took that sentence to mean "independent" as in having some confirmation other than the gravitational wave signal. That's provided by the optical observations of GW170817 which confirm independently that the event is real. > there aren't exactly other ligos around One of the three currently operating GW detectors is Virgo, of a different design and build by different people, in Italy. It's true that LIGO and Virgo collaborate extensively.
lidHanteyk 7y ago
Yeah, Sabine's sounding not-so-solid these days. Her recent videos are also a little, well, crackpotted. It's frustrating -- she has a point with her criticisms of string theory, and it's only with the relatively recent rise of "swampland" thinking that the crazier stuff is getting correctly marked as such, but her anti-computer bias is getting to be a bit too much.
- guest_198273 7y ago
  LIGO is bunk. Zero optical counterparts since April. It's all noise. 170817 is no proof, LIGO was hours late. You guys are real crackpots and fringe cargo-cult fakers.
- ncmncm 7y ago
  What "anti-computer bias"? The more one knows about software, the less one trusts it, absent independent corroboration. Especially, software coded by grad students. Software engineering is a discipline of its own not generally taught them.
rurban 7y ago
Whow, so you are claiming that jet fuel actually can melt steel? Even NIST did not claim that. You would need to double your numbers. 1500 vs 2750F https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a6384/debunking-911-myths-world-trade-center/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a6384/debunking-91...

mehrdadn 7y ago

> The matter of "retractions" is, for example, not a fair criticism. LIGO generates automatic low-latency notifications of potential detections in order to allow optical telescopes and other detectors to aim at the location of the potential event. Upon further analysis -- which takes time and can't be done at low latency -- many of these event notifications are downgraded. These retractions should not diminish your confidence in LIGO. The post itself explained this... >> "The alerts must go out quickly in order for telescopes to be swung around and point at the right location in the sky." The rest of your criticism doesn't really match up with the post for me either. (See "I do not have the same concerns as were raised by the LIGO critics", etc.)

tobinfricke 7y ago
Every paragraph of this blog post consists of FUD that has been debunked elsewhere. The blog post repeats all of these various sources of doubt without including the follow-up that has been done bolstering support for the LIGO results. It seems like the purpose of the blog post is to sow doubt in the LIGO results, which is not warranted. > Already in 2017, a group of physicists around Andrew Jackson in Denmark reported difficulties when they tried to reproduce the signal reconstruction of the first event. This has been solidly debunked by several independent groups. Here's the first Google result I found on the topic: https://www.quantamagazine.org/studies-rescue-ligos-gravitational-wave-signal-from-the-noise-20181213/#disqus_thread https://www.quantamagazine.org/studies-rescue-ligos-gravitat... > It further fueled the critics’ fire when Michael Brooks reported last year for New Scientist that, according to two members of the collaboration, the Nobel-prize winning figure of LIGO’s seminal detection was “not found using analysis algorithms” but partly done “by eye” and “hand-tuned for pedagogical purposes.” I'm not sure what this is about -- it sounds like some off-hand remark taken out of context -- but the numerous, extremely detailed follow-up publications, not to mention that the public data release, should clear up any ambiguities. https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/detection-companion-papers https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/detection-companion-papers > "Since April, the collaboration has issued 33 alerts for new events, but so-far no optical counterparts have been seen. " That should say that no NEW optical counterparts have been seen. GW170817 was a stunning success wherein a neutron star collision was observed by LIGO in gravitational waves and by numerous optical detectors. https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/press-release-gw170817 https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/press-release-gw170817 > The number of retractions is fairly high partly because the collaboration is still coming to grips with the upgraded detector. True. These aren't really "retractions," but low-latency event notifications that are downgraded on further analysis. > With the still lacking independent confirmation that LIGO sees events of astrophysical origin False. GW170817. > "Alexander Unzicker – author of a book called “The Higgs Fake” – contemplates whether the first event was a blind injection, ie, a fake signal. The three people on the blind injection team at the time say it wasn’t them, but Unzicker argues that given our lack of knowledge about the collaboration’s internal proceedings, there might well have been other people able to inject a signal." This is simply a conspiracy theory. Note that the author (Mr. Unzicker) claims that CERN, a completely separate experiment and group of people, was subject to the same kind of conspiracy. > And then there are the “glitches”. LIGO data is indeed very non-stationary (in the spectral sense) and contains various instrumental artifacts. A great deal of effort is put into understanding these effects.
- jakeogh 7y ago
  About the steel, since you brought it up. It for sure melted, there was an iron fire that lasted months. https://web.archive.org/web/20180911150844/http://911encyclopedia.com/wiki/index.php/World_Trade_Center_Hot_Spots https://web.archive.org/web/20180911150844/http://911encyclo... http://s3.amazonaws.com/nasathermalimages/public/video/pretext.mov http://s3.amazonaws.com/nasathermalimages/public/video/prete...
  - qubex 7y ago
    Every time I travel to New York, though I am not American and lost nobody in the attack, I take a morning to visit the site and mourn. The atrocity committed against the whole of humanity that day was stunning, and I still haven’t come to terms with it (personally).
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway2048 7y ago
  The GW170817 neutron star merger (that LIGO detected, and was confirmed by telescopes) is such a blatant contradiction of the articles claims, this entire article is garbage.
- dnautics 7y ago
  >> With the still lacking independent confirmation that LIGO sees events of astrophysical origin > False. GW170817. One observation does not independent confirmation make. Obviously from context Sabine doesn't mean independent in the independent group sense as the observation itself is collaborative and there aren't exactly other ligos around. Why are you so defensive?
  - tobinfricke 7y ago
    I took that sentence to mean "independent" as in having some confirmation other than the gravitational wave signal. That's provided by the optical observations of GW170817 which confirm independently that the event is real. > there aren't exactly other ligos around One of the three currently operating GW detectors is Virgo, of a different design and build by different people, in Italy. It's true that LIGO and Virgo collaborate extensively.

lidHanteyk 7y ago

Yeah, Sabine's sounding not-so-solid these days. Her recent videos are also a little, well, crackpotted. It's frustrating -- she has a point with her criticisms of string theory, and it's only with the relatively recent rise of "swampland" thinking that the crazier stuff is getting correctly marked as such, but her anti-computer bias is getting to be a bit too much.

guest_198273 7y ago
LIGO is bunk. Zero optical counterparts since April. It's all noise. 170817 is no proof, LIGO was hours late. You guys are real crackpots and fringe cargo-cult fakers.
ncmncm 7y ago
What "anti-computer bias"? The more one knows about software, the less one trusts it, absent independent corroboration. Especially, software coded by grad students. Software engineering is a discipline of its own not generally taught them.

rurban 7y ago

Whow, so you are claiming that jet fuel actually can melt steel? Even NIST did not claim that. You would need to double your numbers. 1500 vs 2750F https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a6384/debunking-911-myths-world-trade-center/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a6384/debunking-91...