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Sounds great -- I'm hesitant to wordsmith further. The previous title was correct, too, it just led me to the wrong first impression. aLIGO is "on the verge of
by ISL 12y ago
Sounds great -- I'm hesitant to wordsmith further. The previous title was correct, too, it just led me to the wrong first impression. aLIGO is "on the verge of detection", on timescales of years. For a project begun in 1992 or earlier, that's real soon. Everyone in the experimental detection community is excited and upbeat.
For the skeptic sibling comment -- there remains a non-negligible chance that aLIGO will see nothing. If it reaches its design specifications and sees nothing, it would force mainstream astrophysics to rethink a lot of widely-held beliefs regarding neutron star abundances and merger rates.
- mtdewcmu 12y ago>> For the skeptic sibling comment -- there remains a non-negligible chance that aLIGO will see nothing. If it reaches its design specifications and sees nothing, it would force mainstream astrophysics to rethink a lot of widely-held beliefs regarding neutron star abundances and merger rates. Thanks. I'm not so much a critic of LIGO, I just like science writing that doesn't obscure the facts (as a sober scientist would assess them). It's odd in any case to assert that a scientific instrument is on the verge of a history-making observation (that implies being able to see the future). A person with a genuine interest in scientific progress ought to be able to handle the truth: the inescapable lesson that LIGO and other projects have taught us so far is that gravity waves are difficult to detect by all known methods. Science is about accepting truth as we are able to observe it.