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Gravitational Waves - Updates today!

Now that gravitational waves have been proven true can it be said that gravitational waves are in fact what spacd - time really is?

I will be the first one to say it as I always do.

If gravitational waves are in fact the ocean of space-time then like water gravity can be displaced to allow a boat to travel smoothly and elongantly across the surface.

I will also say that gravitional waves have different phases much like the ocean does. Some days a gravitational wave would be also smooth like a sheet of glass. Other times gravitational waves would be like the large 25 foot high swells in a storm.

The question is how does an object travel down one valley of the wave using less energy but in fact gain more velocity?

A lot of new and fascinating things will be discovered.

I will also be the first one to say that the collision between the two black holes could have caused the gravitational wave to impact Earth killing the dinosaurs and causing an evolutional flip.

Gravitational waves from the same collision could have been what flipped planets on their side as well.


The gravitational waves causing dinosaurs to go extinct is a great idea for a science fiction story but that's definitely not what caused their extinction. No doubt with this new discovery gravitation waves will be used by someone for a science fiction story. You should develop a story Dryson.
 
I don't understand even on a fictional level how that could work. Gravitational waves were not detected for over one hundred years since Einstein predicted them precisely because they are so weak that until very recently we didn't have the tech to even identify them. And then it took three times the mass of the sun being converted into energy pretty much all at once. And all that did was make a gravitational wave that was virtually undetectable by the time it got to earth. What would it take to make one powerful enough to cause an extinction event on this earth? We would have to scale that up by a factor of the unimaginable, or to the power of stupid just to get the sensation of a breeze on your face.
 
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I don't understand even on a fictional level how that could work. Gravitational waves were not detected for over one hundred years since Einstein predicted them precisely because they are so weak that until very recently we didn't have the tech to even identify them. And then it took three times the mass of the sun being converted into energy pretty much all at once. And all that did was make a gravitational wave that is virtually undetectable by the time it got to earth. What would it take to make one powerful enough to cause an extinction event on this earth? We would have to scale that up by a factor of the unimaginable, or to the power of stupid just to get the sensation of a breeze on your face.

In science fiction any idea is possible. I'm willing to bet some writer will use this now that it is the popular subject in physics. I'm not sure how they will use it but I am sure some enterprising writer will come up with a idea even if it is stupid.
 
I don't understand even on a fictional level how that could work. Gravitational waves were not detected for over one hundred years since Einstein predicted them precisely because they are so weak that until very recently we didn't have the tech to even identify them. And then it took three times the mass of the sun being converted into energy pretty much all at once. And all that did was make a gravitational wave that was virtually undetectable by the time it got to earth. What would it take to make one powerful enough to cause an extinction event on this earth? We would have to scale that up by a factor of the unimaginable, or to the power of stupid just to get the sensation of a breeze on your face.

If it happened now, just a couple light years away, I could see it doing some real damage. Of course we'd probably be wrecked by the gamma burst more than the gravitational waves.
 
If space is expanding, shouldn't the frequency of gravitational waves drop as they travel, and couldn't that be used to help measure of the expansion of the universe?

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If it happened now, just a couple light years away, I could see it doing some real damage. Of course we'd probably be wrecked by the gamma burst more than the gravitational waves.

I'd be more worried about two giant black holes colliding nearby and them sucking in our solar system soon. ;)
 
By mid-September 2015 "the world's largest gravitational-wave facility" completed a 5-year US$200-million overhaul at a total cost of $620 million.[2][5] LIGO is the largest and most ambitious project ever funded by the NSF.[6][7]
I continue to be skeptical of experiments conducted on such a massive scale that their failure to produce a dramatic, totally conclusive result would humiliatingly end the careers of several hundred people.

I'm also struck by the fact that the odds of one of these mega projects finding the thing it's looking for is directly proportional to the amount of money they spent on it...
 
I dunno... the justification for them was always that the low-tech projects didn't have the sensitivity, or the resolution, or whatever capability was needed, so you have to spend money on those features. I mean, I certainly don't believe in throwing money at a project in the vague hope that you'll get something out of it. But conversely, it shouldn't be a huge surprise if you make an investment and it pays off.
 
It's a false alarm.

It was actually my cousin Cletus.
He laughed, burped, coughed, sneezed, hiccupped and broke wind all at the same time.
Due to lack of pressure, he collapsed in on himself and formed a singularity--imploding so hard it tore off the back bumper from his pick-up, and triggered LIGO.

To this day, we have an air-pocket along hi-way 79 where the beer cans still circle

Seriously, I do support big science. Big Science gave us many things--not readily visible--that anti-infrastructure types just take for granted.

Shades of my fear of what neutrino communication might allow--one individual wonders about another threat to comsats out of this: http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=39297.100

.Still, the audio of the event we are discussing does sound like dripping water.

Hey Cletus!
 
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I dunno... the justification for them was always that the low-tech projects didn't have the sensitivity, or the resolution, or whatever capability was needed, so you have to spend money on those features. I mean, I certainly don't believe in throwing money at a project in the vague hope that you'll get something out of it. But conversely, it shouldn't be a huge surprise if you make an investment and it pays off.
That's just it: investors expect a real payoff from their investment. In science, the payoff is sometimes "Experiment is sensitive enough to detect it if it was there; we detected nothing, so it's not there." One would expect this to occur at least SOME of the time, with some pretty inconclusive negative results.

But with the biggest projects, that's not what happens. Even the negative results are presented as "Experiment is sensitive enough to detect it if it was there; we detected something so maybe it's there."

"We detected gravity waves caused by a collision of two black holes and the collision released more energy than is generated in the entire visible universe!" is a really exciting headline that you can point to as a significant return on a scientific investment. "We detected gravity waves from an unknown source and we have many theories about where they might have come from and here are a few likely ones (colossal black hole collision is our favorite, it's number #18 on the list)" not so much.

Beyond that, the researchers in charge of the program are running a highly specialized system with a VERY esoteric operating procedure such that even if they show all of their work, not many people will be able to tell exactly how they derived their results. The temptation to simply MAKE SHIT UP would be huge.
 
Sounds like you're building a bit of "damned if they do, damned if they don't" argument to me.
"You spent all that money and didn't find anything? what a waste!"
"You spent all that money and immediately found something? Sounds fishy to me!"
 
Sounds like you're building a bit of "damned if they do, damned if they don't" argument to me.
"You spent all that money and didn't find anything? what a waste!"
"You spent all that money and immediately found something? Sounds fishy to me!"
First of all, the thing's been operational for almost 15 years, that's hardly "immediately found something."

But as far as I'm concerned, it's fine if they never do. Conclusive null result means we learned something about general relativity doesn't fit observations and we have to go back to square one. That means more experiments, more observations, more calculations and better models are needed. That also means a lot of the EXISTING observations and EXISTING models are wrong in some fundamental way and need to be reexamined.

Aside from sandbagging the careers of all the people who made those earlier observations and the models based on them, that also tags your $650 million investment with the label "Experiment shows we know LESS than we thought we did. More experiments needed (please give us more money)."

Confirmation bias is a well-recognized effect: when the researcher has a personal investment in the outcome, he tends to skew the results to get the outcome he wants to see. So imagine you're the scientist -- not a scientist, but THE scientist -- who gets the job of crunching the numbers from the latest LIGO run. You're part of a committee that has close to 1000 scientists on it, and every single one of them want to see some results. Some of them want it more badly than others. Some are putting on more pressure than others. And some of their investors are wondering if it's really worth funding the next layer of improvements on a project that has become your main source of income on the way to retirement. The results in front of you... pretty exciting, but sketchy. Not quite conclusive, but close; they indicate SOMETHING, but it's hard to say what.
Do you:
a) Tell a consortium of 1000 of your fellow scientists plus their increasingly antsy/annoying investors that this latest run is actually nothing special or
b) Find something in the data -- ANYTHING that stands out -- and massage the numbers a little until they give everybody some good news.

Confirmation bias is pressure towards option b). And of course, everyone knows that Einstein Was Right, everyone knows Gravity Waves are real, so even if THESE results aren't legit, the next one probably will be, AND we'll get funding for the upgrades because of this so it's all good. Results are confirmed, no one gets shitcanned, science marches on, everyone's happy.

How do you prove the existence of unicorns? Spend a billion dollars studying them. I could prove that Jesus masturbated left handed if you gave me a big enough research grant.

I'm not actually disputing the results here because at this point it's impossible to know either way. That's actually my point: the big-budget science projects don't seem to have any meaningful controls for massive institutional confirmation bias; they are guaranteed to find what they were CREATED to find because their managers will have to answer some difficult questions if they don't.
 
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:D
 
Doesn't some university in the US have a device that can measure slight fluctuations in gravity at ground level? I remember seeing that device on an episode of Mythbusters, as they had it on load for an experiment.

Just on that story idea I have a gravity drive in a ship in a story I am writing and using that as a weapon.
 
What would happen if two Gravitational Waves from two different events such as a double black hole collision took place?
 
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