Rumors Are Flying That We Finally Found Gravitational Waves

Live stream of the Washington press conference starting now.


" Ladies and Gentlemen , we have detected gravitation waves !" , that's how the conference started.
The waves detected were produced by two black holes circling each other then merging over 1 billion years ago.

a reply to: dragonridr

You need to revisit physics my friend... There are already particles that are known to move faster than light.

and YES, Einstein's theories only preclude ACCELERATING to faster than light, not traveling faster than light. That is because as you approach the speed of light through acceleration, you gain mass, you would then gain close to infinite mass, requiring infinite energy in order to ACCELERATE to faster than light.

That inn no way precludes TRAVELING faster than light. Only accelerating to faster than light, which is why hyperlight travel is already being considered through warping spacetime as it wouldn't require you to accelerate any where near the speed of light in order to travel faster than the speed of light. Well, at least to travel distances at FTL...

Jaden

a reply to: Masterjaden


The reason why light is limited to whatever "constant" is prevents anything else from exceeding "constant" too.

However what if there was a way to make C variable. Then you wouldn't need to travel faster than light speed if light speed is several hundred times faster than it is naturally and allows you to travel faster than 300,000km a sec.

But either way you aren't going to travel faster than light speed whatever that is set at wherever you are. Ie if you're traveling faster than "light speed" you are still traveling slower than the speed of light.

You still wouldn't be a tachyon. You would need to do some weird ass four wave conjugation in a bose einstein condensate or something to make "those."

originally posted by: grey580
Rumors Are Flying That We Finally Found Gravitational Waves

Might have to give ol Einstein another award or something.

Seems that the Ligo Group at Cal Tech has gone out and posted a rumor online that they may have discovered gravity waves. And it was thanks to their new upgraded equipment.

Like good scientists they are a bit shy about coming out and actually saying they found gravity waves until they can verify their results.

This one is definitely one to watch. Hopefully this one won't be a dud like the few times before.

However I have one main question. What practical applications can be made out of this discovery?

Excited rumors began circulating on Twitter this morning that a major experiment designed to hunt for gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of spacetime first predicted by Albert Einstein—has observed them directly for the very first time. If confirmed, this would be one of the most significant physics discoveries of the last century.

Move a large mass very suddenly—or have two massive objects suddenly collide, or a supernova explode—and you would create ripples in space-time, much like tossing a stone in a still pond. The more massive the object, the more it will churn the surrounding spacetime, and the stronger the gravitational waves it should produce. Einstein predicted their existence in his general theory of relativity back in 1915, but he thought it would never be possible to test that prediction.

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Update!

Seems that there is quite the ink spillage out on the arXiv about LIGO's gravitational waves.

In response to the LIGO paper, a group of scientists posted a rebuttal and claimed that there was a "correlation of noise" in the data that calls the conclusion into question.

To that the LIGO folks posted their rebuttal stating the conclusion reached in the refutation was wrong because they did not do "pre-filtering" to the raw data prior to applying the Fourier Transformations on the raw data.

To which the rebuttal groups said, "I know you are but what am I!" I guess there is going to be fight at the flag pole after school. Or maybe this is how science is done.

I've got five on LIGO!!

[A] team of independent physicists has sifted through this data, only to find what they describe as strange correlations that shouldn’t be there... The potential effects of the unexplained correlations “could range from a minor modification of the extracted wave form to a total rejection of LIGO’s claimed [gravitational wave] discovery,” wrote Jackson in an email to Quanta. LIGO representatives say there may well be some unexplained correlations, but that they should not affect the team’s conclusions.

On June 13, 2017, Jackson and four co-authors published their criticism on the scientific preprint site arxiv.org. The paper generated considerable interest, prompting Ian Harry, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam-Golm and a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, to publish a public rebuttal five days later. Harry argued, in effect, that the independent team missed some subtleties in their data analysis, and that he couldn’t reproduce the claimed correlations.

“There is no drama here,” Kalogera said. “It’s science as usual. … Healthy, positive communication is very much welcome amongst scientists.”

Read full article here at QuantaMagazine.org - Strange Noise in Gravitational-Wave Data Sparks Debate.

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

heh I saw that recently.

I think some more checking is in order.

a reply to: grey580

Getting it right is more important in the end.

I think the LIGO people have good controls on their data and how it was measured and reported. The variance is so small that the fact they can set up a pair of lasers to double check each other is pretty impressive in and of itself.

This is the second time the "continuous vs. discrete" has popped up in my general reading. It is pretty heady math and the concepts are well founded and known. I'm not sure if an "outside source" has taken that into consideration! Which is why I'm hedging my bet on the LIGO side.

Good popcorn session going on watching this one!

Gravity is ghey. LIGO are fraudsters. The announcements are planned and this one was premature.

Gravity is square wave. Not sine. How could swallowed energy be a single frequency.. It couldn't. Black holes arent picky eaters.