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

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