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 includin

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.