- #106
websterling
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PeterDonis said:Science is not a democracy.
And regardless of the field, generally the less knowledgeable the opposition, the louder their claims.
PeterDonis said:Science is not a democracy.
PeterDonis said:Science is not a democracy.
Perhaps not a 'democracy' an sich, but people are allowed to ask questions in contrast to a dictatorship. And isn't it the duty of peers to analyze critically? Otherwise anyone can just publish and claim whatever they want.PeterDonis said:Science is not a democracy.
auou said:isn't it the duty of peers to analyze critically?
Of course people are allowed to ask questions. You asked, and your question was answered in posts 89, 91, 93, and 94: "No, we have the mathematical tools to show that the relative motion between the various sites will not introduce the sort of error that you're considering".auou said:but people are allowed to ask questions
The CMB is an arbitrary reference frame without relevance here.auou said:Of course it has got nothing to do with the CMB itself, but the CMB acts like a reference frame.
The detectors could be moving away or running into the GW, or be hit from the side, skewing the signal. So it all depends on running into the wave at a particular time of day (orientation), a few hours later and we wouldn't notice a thing if the signal is perpendicular.
About 10%. Read the paper?auou said:Well if Redshift is relevant how much did the GW redshifted over time and loose energy?
For galaxies we don't rely on long-term observations of their distances either. The length of the measurement is irrelevant (apart from reducing statistical uncertainties).auou said:For Galaxies moving away we can keep track about what's going on, the Hubble constant, but a GW is just one short single pulse.
What does that even mean?auou said:Sure, we can know if it comes from one side or the other, 1 dimensional, but we know nothing about the 2nd dimension.
There are no gravity waves. You mean gravitational waves. The emission is not spherically symmetric. So what?auou said:An other issue is how symmetric is the Gravity Wave, two spiralling-colliding objects are not 100% spherical.
With that argument, you could stop all scientific progress by making up hundreds of nonsense suggestions and then watch the scientists refuting all of them while you simply make up hundreds of new ones.Dr. Courtney said:I don't consider that to be how confidence works in science if we apply the maxim that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
I tend to put the burden of proof that potential sources of error are smaller than their error bars on those publishing or defending extraordinary new experimental claims rather than on skeptics suggesting potential sources of error.
Indeed! Still some politicians don't get the idea that they cannot change the fundamental laws of nature by 2/3 majorities .PeterDonis said:Science is not a democracy.
"Science is a democracy, in that every scientist has a voice, but it is nothing like majority rule. Indeed, what ground can I stand on when the majority of my profession embraces a research program I can not accept even though accepting it would be to my benefit? The answer is that democracy is much more than rule by majority. There is a system of ideals that transcends majority rule."PeterDonis said:Science is not a democracy.
Abstract: We describe independent analysis of LIGO data for black hole coalescence events. Gravitational wave strain waveforms are extracted directly from the data using a filtering method that exploits the observed or expected time-dependent frequency content. Statistical analysis demonstrates that residual noise, after filtering out spectral peaks, is nearly Gaussian, with no anomalous causal correlation between the Hanford and Livingston sites. The extracted waveforms and time offsets differ only slightly from the published LIGO results. Simulated events, with known signals injected into real noise, are used to determine uncertainties due to residual noise and demonstrate that our results are unbiased. While the extracted waveforms are clearly indicative of black hole coalescence, we find signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) much smaller than the published matched-filter detection SNRs.
One would hope so, butmfb said:and we have the neutron star merger with an optical counterpart. I think the question in the title has an absolutely clear answer.
According to this post from October 20 by 4gravitons (who is now at NBI), A LIGO in the Darkness, they also have problems with the neutron star observation. The last paragraph of the post-I wonder what the Danish group will do next...
The 5th comment to the post, by 4gravitons, is especially problematic-A few posts back, I mentioned a group at NBI who had been critical of LIGO’s data analysis and raised doubts of whether they detected gravitational waves at all. There’s not much I can say about this until they’ve commented publicly, but do keep an eye on the arXiv in the next week or two. Despite the optimistic stance I take in the rest of this post, the impression I get from folks here is that things are far from fully resolved.
The short answer is, they think glitches that look like neutron star collisions should be common in LIGO’s data, and they only published that one because the gamma ray telescopes were seeing something. But I don’t really want to say more about this until they’ve published or said something publicly, for one because I don’t know their full argument.