Gravitational Waves and Secrecy

Tom Shanks Says: "This does raise the issue of why all this secrecy is necessary. While it's good fun working out what happened maybe someone should tell us! After all, these detectors and telescopes are all publicly funded facilities and maybe their follow-up would be even better had there been less "Omerta". While I appreciate we don't want to be flooded by false detections, I get the feeling that there is some Astro power politics involved in keeping things private. Thank goodness for twitter or we wouldn't know anything!" telescoper Says: "My thoughts exactly! It's all a bit absurd!" https://telescoper.wordpress.com/201...-and-ngc-4993/

So why the secrecy? Is the answer

"Because gravitational waves don't exist and LIGO folks are fraudsters"

totally unreasonable?

"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"." http://www.thenational.ae/arts-life/...s-collide#full

Pentcho Valev

Gravitational waves don't exist. Some brothers of LIGO conspirators - e.g. GOTO conspirators - must have informed LIGO brothers about the event:

"The Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO) was inaugurated at Warwick's astronomical observing facility in the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory of the Instituto de AstrofÃ*sica de Canarias on La Palma, Canary Islands, on 3 July 2017. GOTO is an autonomous, intelligent telescope, which will search for unusual activity in the sky, following alerts from gravitational wave detectors - such as the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (aLIGO), which recently secured the first direct detections of gravitational waves."
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandeve...for_detecting/

"As of today, scientists working at the two giant Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) facilities in the US have confirmed three separate detections of the elusive waves, typically described as "ripples in space-time", that were generated by collisions between black holes. But because there are only two working facilities, currently it is impossible to pinpoint the precise origin of the waves and the location of the cosmic collision. A third interferometer called VIRGO, near Pisa in Italy, is now joining the search and will enable scientists to triangulate the source of the wave signals with much greater precision, but astronomers also want to search for electromagnetic evidence. The big challenge is that the gravity-wave signals appear out of the blue without warning, while it also takes months to confirm each "event" from the data collected, by which point any transient optical evidence of the event will have long disappeared from view. This is where the GOTO project comes in: it is set up to react swiftly to any indication of a possible gravity-wave event emanating from the LIGO and VIRGO facilities, point at the area of sky where the signal is believed to have originated, and look for any sudden changes."
http://optics.org/news/8/7/7

LIGO conspirators still have problems with the fakes they produce (the noise-correlation bungle will prove catastrophic some day) but things were much worse in the past:

"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."
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2016/04/bl...ational-waves/

So in 2010 LIGO conspirators still did not have "that sophisticated a criminal mind" and "screwed it up a little". But that was the dress rehearsal which was nevertheless successful. "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":

"...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." https://www..researchgate.net/blog/p...-not-a-failure

Pentcho Valev

Before LIGO conspirators came to power, theoreticians were in the process of abandoning Einstein's idiotic spacetime:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U47kyV4TMnE
Nima Arkani-Hamed (06:09): "Almost all of us believe that space-time doesn't really exist, space-time is doomed and has to be replaced by some more primitive building blocks."

https://edge.org/response-detail/25477
What scientific idea is ready for retirement? Steve Giddings: "Spacetime. Physics has always been regarded as playing out on an underlying stage of space and time. Special relativity joined these into spacetime... [...] The apparent need to retire classical spacetime as a fundamental concept is profound..."

https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26563
Nobel Laureate David Gross observed, "Everyone in string theory is convinced...that spacetime is doomed. But we don't know what it's replaced by."

https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...me-from-space/
"Splitting Time from Space - New Quantum Theory Topples Einstein's Spacetime. Buzz about a quantum gravity theory that sends space and time back to their Newtonian roots."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...spacetime.html
"Rethinking Einstein: The end of space-time. It was a speech that changed the way we think of space and time. The year was 1908, and the German mathematician Hermann Minkowski had been trying to make sense of Albert Einstein's hot new idea - what we now know as special relativity - describing how things shrink as they move faster and time becomes distorted. "Henceforth space by itself and time by itself are doomed to fade into the mere shadows," Minkowski proclaimed, "and only a union of the two will preserve an independent reality." And so space-time - the malleable fabric whose geometry can be changed by the gravity of stars, planets and matter - was born. It is a concept that has served us well, but if physicist Petr Horava is right, it may be no more than a mirage."

Then mighty LIGO conspirators both modeled and detected ripples in spacetime, took all possible prizes, etc. As a result, poor theoreticians don't attack Einstein's idiocy anymore - they now know that the ripples in spacetime give "moments in science that you live for":

"In celebration of Einstein's birthday, physicists reflect on the German-born scientist's work and its impact on the field and on everyday life. "We have good reason to believe general relativity is not a complete theory and, in particular, that it's going to break down in the context of describing black holes," said UCSB physics professor Steve Giddings. "That's very much an important problem in physics today. "The direct observation of gravitational waves from colliding black holes really constrains the possible departures from general relativity that we know are there and limits where modifications can be made," he continued. "But the discovery is still spectacular and its announcement was one of those moments in science that you live for." http://www.news.ucsb.edu/2016/016562...ein-revolution

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