The Emergence of Gravitational Wave Science [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

The Emergence of Gravitational Wave Science [pdf]

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This article makes it clear that I'm missing a lot of math background. Anyone have a good source for getting up to speed on tensors and manifolds?

Here's a standard Topology textbook which will get you up to speed on manifolds: http://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~aar/papers/munkres2.pdf

And here's Schroedinger's Space-Time Structure which has an intro to tensors: http://strangebeautiful.com/other-texts/schrodinger-st-struc...

   s/Science/Sect/

Not following you here.

I think that's a vim replace command, swapping 'Science' with 'Sect'

Yeah I got that much, but what does "The Emergence of Gravitational Wave Sect" mean?

The meaning is the difference between a verified by the scientific method approximation to the truth (some aspect of it) and a chimera, created from math formulas.

Not everything which could be described with a set of equations necessarily exist as a physical phenomena. Most of abstractions have no existence outside peoples heads, except those verified by scientific method, which means multiple independent replicable experiments which exactly the same results.

Unverified assumptions are called beliefs. Followers of some set of beliefs and dogmas together is called a sect.

From the philosophical point of view, strictly speaking, this is a non-science. When people trying to "prove" an abstract theory (a product of imagination instead of a product of a process of reduction) they perform not scientific tests, but complicated simulations. Any simulation, by definition, cannot prove anything about existence or non-existence of a simulated model, not even validity of the model. What could be concluded is only that the simulation matches the model. Or not.

This performing of a simulation instead of controlled observations is the essence of modern bad science, be it in economics, "medicine" or whatever is based on a sophisticated models based on abstractions.

Simulation prove nothing. Observations do.

Have you heard about the (relatively) recent results coming from experiments testing gravity waves?

Hopefully they live up to your standard of science.

Even if they don't, I think labelling maths and models and simulations as 'non-science'is disengenuous.

First, theorycrafting is an important step in science, it is a formalised way of building hypotheses. If an individual or an entire discipline is devoted to theorising what may be, while others test those theories, they are doing science.

It is also science to test models with simulation. Proving a model does not prove the system being modelled, but we still need to know if, for example, the model is consistent. There are many situations where a model has no closed solution, and so the only way to test it is through simulation. Models are a key part of science; claiming that the testing of those models is somehow not science seems a pointless pedantry even if it were true.

The very first paragraph of the abstract details the first direct observation of GW.

An important part of a scientific theory is to predict new phenomena, and GW are a prediction of general relativity, a theory that has been put to test experimentally countless times. Many talented people have worked for many many years to detect experimentally GW (replicated simultaneously in two detectors), and now that they achieved experimental confirmation of this prediction you accuse them of being a "sect" and not doing proper science?

Exactly which part of the whole process is not up to your standard?

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