Re: LIGO.

Dear harry:

On Feb 8, 7:29 am, "harry" <harald.vanlintelButNotT...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
"dlzc" <d...@xxxxxxx> wrote in message

news:1170869333.336183.149110@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Dear cliff wright:

On Feb 7, 3:39 am, cliff wright <c.c.wri...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
For some years now I have from time to time kept up with
developments at the LIGO sites. Just checked again and
saw that "Gravitational waves" should be being detected
by 2005.

There are some preliminary results (2003) here:
http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/docs/G/G030003-04/G030003-04.pdf
... which you can get to from the LIGO home page.

Well it is now 2007, and I ain't heard nuthin!

What they appear to be saying is how "Enhanced LIGO"
and "Advanced LIGO" and "in combination with Virgo"
these things will be detectable. So what you should
hear is "we can't detect what the Universe is producing
in quantity, with what we have".

Effectively, that is a null result - except if they found an
error in the design of their experiment. Right?

Well they have "signal" in the 2003 report, but they consider it to be
"noise". I think they are looking for the equivalent of a
characteristic frequency response, much as you do from a mass
spectrometer. But it will be a blip for some short period of time.
Like a cop with a radar gun...

So yes, they have a null result with what they have. And no, there is
no error in the design of their experiment, just (apparently) much
room for improvement in the apparatus that will allow additional
resolution and increase the S/N ratio.

Even MMX was repeated for many decades, even though an aether was
falling out of favor, and continually yielded null results. So we
should still refine our tools, and keep looking. This is Science, not
first grade.

But what we have here is "propagation velocity" not of "gravity waves"
but angular momentum. How fast (and how) do members of the Universe
communicate with it, since light is not the carrier of gravitation?
Is the Universe present at each point as some sort of remoted aether
or "proxy", or is it simply present at each point with only some
"flavors" diminished by distance? Mach would have an answer that will
yield a null result (I think) for any tool we could make.

It is all illusion anyway. ;>)

David A. Smith

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Gravitational waves in strong field limit.
    ... More generally, high-frequency gravitational waves in an otherwise slowly varying "background" act effectively as a source of energy, and if enough energy of this sortt is concentrated in a small region, it should collapse in the same way any other source of gravity would. ... I could have said the same thing about, for example, light -- if you concentrate enough light in a small enough region, it will also collapse and form a black hole. ... Penrose the universe should have a starting point that the early universe is very very tiny and quantum mechanics should kick in at the early stage of the universe. ...
    (sci.physics.research)
  • LIGO.
    ... For some years now I have from time to time kept up with developments at the LIGO sites. ... Just checked again and saw that "Gravitational waves" should be being detected by 2005. ... Since 1989 I have had a bet with some of my old colleagues at Auckland university that these waves will not be detectable by such a system. ... Indeed we are apparently looking for a "wave" whose velocity of propagation is not known at all, and whose characteristics may involve extra dimensions of Space or even other potential universes. ...
    (sci.physics.relativity)