Thursday, June 16, 2016

New black hole collision announced

A reader alerts me to this:
Why does Ligo's reported second detection of gravitational waves and a black hole merger look absolutely nothing like the first detection announced in Februaray?
There are more details at the LIGO Skeptic blog.

I don't know. I am also wondering why they are just now announcing a collision that was supposedly observed 5 months ago, and whether LIGO still has its policy of only 3 people knowing whether or not the result has been faked.

And why do they sit on the data so long? The LIGO folks could tell us whenever they have a coincident event. As it is, they are not telling us the full truth, because they make big announcements while concealing the data that would allow us to make comparisons.

1 comment:

  1. This has GIGO written all over it.

    Please understand what they are actually doing. They have templates they have created that are what they imagine two black holes would 'sound' like. they then use all kinds of data manipulation/masturbation to process their absurdly tenuous signal (questionable unto itself) until they find a 'match' to their made up template. This is not outright detection of anything, this is heavily processed and manipulated signal being compared against a made up signal (template) they think a black hole would produce, being that said black hole has not even been observed producing said signal by any known means, claiming said processed signal is indication or confirmation of a black hole is at best wishful thinking. We know next to nothing about if black holes even exist as speculated about mathematically. Any nonsense about a simple process of elimination making determinations of what a distant stellar object actually is makes no sense when it has been recently determined that stars themselves can have many magnitudes more mass than even wildly imagined possible without collapsing, and yet still be stars.

    Since most of current black hole speculation revolves around entirely un-measurable non-physical dimensions which are pure geometrical abstraction (at best) in order to exist even mathematically, and requires manipulations of quantities at both zero and infinity (which are not actually defined), I'm not convinced in any way by 'evidence' that is stacked upon such speculation and is itself entirely dependent upon artificial signals being matched against artificial templates based entirely of WAGs. LIGO is more about fundraising for HEP than actual scientific discovery.

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