A Space & astronomy forum. SpaceBanter.com

Go Back   Home » SpaceBanter.com forum » Astronomy and Astrophysics » Astronomy Misc
Site Map Home Authors List Search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read Web Partners

LIGO's Absolute Secrecy: Why?



 
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
Prev Previous Post   Next Post Next
  #1  
Old February 25th 17, 05:36 PM posted to sci.astro
Pentcho Valev
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 8,078
Default LIGO's Absolute Secrecy: Why?

Physics has changed in strange ways. Theoreticians can now do without experimental confirmation while experimentalists find it ethical to work in absolute secrecy. Here is the latest news:

"Either way, Advanced LIGO could give us an additional test very soon, and it may have done so already - two events that are under analysis triggered an alert to other telescopes." https://arstechnica.com/science/2017...ified-gravity/

But this seems to be a remake or an improved version of the 2010 very secret story - then "a select few expert administrators" deceived everybody, misled astronomers into wasting time and money on the fake, and "this became particularly useful starting in September 2015":

https://www.researchgate.net/blog/po...-not-a-failure
"...a blind injection test where only a select few expert administrators are able to put a fake signal in the data, maintaining strict confidentiality. They did just that in the early morning hours of 16 September 2010. Automated data analyses alerted us to an extraordinary event within eight minutes of data collection, and within 45 minutes we had our astronomer colleagues with optical telescopes imaging the area we estimated the gravitational wave to have come from. Since it came from the direction of the Canis Major constellation, this event picked up the nickname of the "Big Dog Event". For months we worked on vetting this candidate gravitational wave detection, extracting parameters that described the source, and even wrote a paper. Finally, at the next collaboration meeting, after all the work had been cataloged and we voted unanimously to publish the paper the next day. However, it was revealed immediately after the vote to be an injection and that our estimated parameters for the simulated source were accurate. Again, there was no detection, but we learned a great deal about our abilities to know when we detected a gravitational wave and that we can do science with the data. This became particularly useful starting in September 2015."

In the changed physics world the following C.S.I. activity is regarded as a normal scientific procedu

http://nautil.us/issue/34/adaptation...ty-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."

http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2016/04/bl...ational-waves/
"Rai said, "Look, we went through every possible scenario for how you would inject a false signal, and tried to do it ourselves." There were only a few people in the entire collaboration with sufficient access and knowledge to do something like that, and they interrogated them all. And you have to physically attach stuff, you can't just do this telepathically, so they looked for little black boxes and things like that. It was like a C.S.I. experiment. So there's no physical evidence. It would be very hard to fake a signal without being caught. And I don't think anyone in the collaboration has that sophisticated a criminal mind. In fact, when they did a [deliberate] blind injection during the test run [of the earlier version of LIGO], they screwed it up a little. They got the orientation wrong."

So in 2010 LIGO conspirators still did not have "that sophisticated a criminal mind" and "screwed it up a little" but then they improved and in 2015 everything was just fine:

http://www.thenational.ae/arts-life/...s-collide#full
"Einstein believed in neither gravitational waves nor black holes. [...] Dr Natalia Kiriushcheva, a theoretical and computational physicist at the University of Western Ontario (UWO), Canada, says that while it was Einstein who initiated the gravitational waves theory in a paper in June 1916, it was an addendum to his theory of general relativity and by 1936, he had concluded that such things did not exist. Furthermore - as a paper published by Einstein in the Annals of Mathematics in October, 1939 made clear, he also rejected the possibility of black holes. [...] On September 16, 2010, a false signal - a so-called "blind injection" - was fed into both the Ligo and Virgo systems as part of an exercise to "test ... detection capabilities". At the time, the vast majority of the hundreds of scientists working on the equipment had no idea that they were being fed a dummy signal. The truth was not revealed until March the following year, by which time several papers about the supposed sensational discovery of gravitational waves were poised for publication. "While the scientists were disappointed that the discovery was not real, the success of the analysis was a compelling demonstration of the collaboration's readiness to detect gravitational waves," Ligo reported at the time. But take a look at the visualisation of the faked signal, says Dr Kiriushcheva, and compare it to the image apparently showing the collision of the twin black holes, seen on the second page of the recently-published discovery paper. "They look very, very similar," she says. "It means that they knew exactly what they wanted to get and this is suspicious for us: when you know what you want to get from science, usually you can get it." The apparent similarity is more curious because the faked event purported to show not a collision between two black holes, but the gravitational waves created by a neutron star spiralling into a black hole. The signals appear so similar, in fact, that Dr Kiriushcheva questions whether the "true" signal might actually have been an echo of the fake, "stored in the computer system from when they turned off the equipment five years before"."

Pentcho Valev
 




Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

vB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Forum Jump

Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
More on LIGO, DM, PBHs, CIB and CXB Robert L. Oldershaw Research 12 August 1st 16 08:59 PM
Is LIGO for Real??? G=EMC^2TreBert Misc 13 March 27th 16 09:20 PM
LIGO Progress Mike Astronomy Misc 8 April 5th 06 04:21 AM
Secrecy surrounding X-43 scramjet Uddo Graaf Policy 14 April 3rd 04 10:27 PM
OSP Secrecy Explorer8939 Policy 82 January 5th 04 11:39 PM


All times are GMT +1. The time now is 01:51 AM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.6.4
Copyright ©2000 - 2025, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
Copyright ©2004-2025 SpaceBanter.com.
The comments are property of their posters.