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Physicists Detect Gravitational Waves, Proving Einstein Right

nytimes.com

181–190 of 502 posts

Re: Physicists Detect Gravitational Waves, Proving Einstein Right

#181

This made me wonder how far we are from being able to create and detect gravitons. The Wikipedia page on gravitons [0] addresses this question: Unambiguous detection of individual gravitons, though not prohibited by any fundamental law, is impossible with any physically reasonable detector. The reason is the extremely low cross section for the interaction of gravitons with matter. For example, a detector with the mas…

If gravitons have mass, then the universe is too strange to exist. Gravity is an interaction that defines the presence of matter (see dark matter). For the object that transmits that force between masses to itself have mass ... how can a black hole then project gravity?

Imho whatever is carrying gravity between masses cannot itself have a mass.

Re: Physicists Detect Gravitational Waves, Proving Einstein Right

#183

I am a bit skeptical of the conclusion given the methods. Here, there's no observable phenomena independent of the test apparatus that corresponds to the proposed cause. The conclusion is circular. 1. Theory predicts gravitational waves when massive objects collide and that the gravitational waves would have an effect that could be measured by the experimental instruments. 2. The experimental instruments measure some…

I think your argument fails for a few reasons: (1) It simply fails to understand the scientific method, which is empiricism, not mathematical/logical proof. Scientific evidence is essentially failed disproof, not logical proof. (2) It mischaracterizes the nature of the prediction, which includes not merely that something will be measured, but that a particular pattern will be measured. (3) It proposes unspecified "ge…

Under the theory of science as the study of what is falsifiable, there's nothing here to falsify because there is no way to disprove that a conjectured but unobserved collision of two massive bodies was something else or didn't occur. Which is to say that it is impossible to falsify that a conjecture is a conjecture.

That there is not a geophysical theory, doesn't have a bearing on the correctness of the gravitational wave theory one way or the other...anymore than the absence of a helio-centric model for the solar system made the geocentric model more correct or the absence of a theory of oxygen made the theory of pholgiston more correct. More importantly, both these incorrect theories had reasonable explanatory power to the point that they were useful.

The reason they were useful theories is because they were predictive, pholgiston allowed a person to calculate the weight of ashes after burning and the geocentric solar model made the prediction of the location of stars possible with reasonable precision. On the other hand, theories that offer conclusions about unfalsifiable propositions are what Carnap and the Vienna circle termed "metaphysics".

The conclusion that the experiment justifies is that the Earth resonates. There is no external event to which the measurements can be correlated to establish causality. There's no confidence interval. It's a case where the observations confirm a pre-existing world view under the same human cognitive structures by which seashells on mountain tops confirm a world-wide flood. It assumes that because we live on the Earth we know everything about it.

Anyway, it's a case of over-reaching with the conclusions. It's an argument from design.

Re: Physicists Detect Gravitational Waves, Proving Einstein Right

#184

I am a bit skeptical of the conclusion given the methods. Here, there's no observable phenomena independent of the test apparatus that corresponds to the proposed cause. The conclusion is circular. 1. Theory predicts gravitational waves when massive objects collide and that the gravitational waves would have an effect that could be measured by the experimental instruments. 2. The experimental instruments measure some…

I think your argument fails for a few reasons: (1) It simply fails to understand the scientific method, which is empiricism, not mathematical/logical proof. Scientific evidence is essentially failed disproof, not logical proof. (2) It mischaracterizes the nature of the prediction, which includes not merely that something will be measured, but that a particular pattern will be measured. (3) It proposes unspecified "ge…

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Re: Physicists Detect Gravitational Waves, Proving Einstein Right

#185
post #178

On November 25, 1915 (at the time of WWI) Einstein presented the actual Einstein field equations to the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Almost exactly 100 years later on September 14, 2015 LIGO observed the first gravitational-wave signal. Is that a coincidence?

Yes

Re: Physicists Detect Gravitational Waves, Proving Einstein Right

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do we know dark matter is some mysterious form of matter and not just small distributed particles (gas or solid) that are beyond our ability to detect? Do we have proof of a specific, exotic, non-atomic matter?

Scientists are pretty sure that dark matter is not just regular gas and dust because the amount required to create the gravity we see, would be visible. It would block or reflect a lot of the nearby starlight. Just on the back of an envelope: If we assume the percentages in my post above apply to an individual galaxy, then there has to be 5x as much dark matter mass as lit mass. There's no way you could have 5x as mu…

That always confused me. We have an Oort cloud, whose members we cannot resolve very well/at all. Why do we assume only our star has such a thing? If all stars did, that isn't enough mass to explain dark matter?

Re: Physicists Detect Gravitational Waves, Proving Einstein Right

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My intuition is that this is unlikely, but I'd love to see someone do the math. Given the scale of interstellar distances, any locations on our planet (and even in our solar system) are going to effectively function as a single point. Given arbitrarily-accurate measurement, it could work, but I'd bet physical limitations will prevent that from being a possibility. To my mind, it'd be roughly like trying to triangulat…

It would work. The delta-t is a few miliseconds. This gives enough precision for a decent estimate of the direction of the signal. Now estimating the distance is a different matter.

The gravity waves redshift just like any other wave. So, they have estimated a distance: 1.3B light-years.

Re: Physicists Detect Gravitational Waves, Proving Einstein Right

#188
post #4

> And then the ringing stopped as the two holes coalesced into a single black hole, a trapdoor in space with the equivalent mass of 62 suns. All in a fifth of a second, Earth time. Am I reading this correctly, that shortly after the detector came online we just happened to observe the exact moment a billion years ago that two black holes collided? Was that extremely coincidental? Or do these events happen all the tim…

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Re: Physicists Detect Gravitational Waves, Proving Einstein Right

#190
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big question is how much of the energy would get transferred in practice. I agree that 3 solar masses worth of electromagnetic radiation at 1 light year distance would feel like a nuke going off. What I don't know is to what extent the energy of the equivalent gravitational waves (which _would_ have a lot of energy I agree) would actually get transferred to things we care about, like the atmosphere and us. If it'…

I would like to understand why a gravitational wave distorts length in relation to normal gravity wells; specifically is this particular to waves? Why don't lengths get distorted in a normal gravity well, or do they? In essence, what is different between a gravity wave and a gravity well, which i understand both distort space, but only the wave distorts it in a way we can measure? Does the gravity well change lengths…

A gravity well also distorts lengths, as best I understand (which is not very well, to be honest; take everything I'm saying here with a big grain of salt).

The difference in terms of detection is that the wave does this in a time-varying, periodic fashion.

For something like LIGO, we're trying to measure length changes on the order of 1e-18 meters. We're not actually measuring the lengths of LIGO's arms to that accuracy, though. What we're measuring is the difference between the times light takes to travel down those arms. And even that's hard to measure on an absolute scale, so what we really measure is how that difference changes in time.

Or put another way, the effect of Earth's gravitational well is not really distinguishable from inaccuracies in making the two legs of the interferometer equal length to start with, and is a much smaller effect than those inaccuracies. Again, if I understand this right...

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