Danish physicists claim to cast doubt on detection of gravitational waves

The article clearly states:

"While LIGO has gained a (not entirely undeserved) reputation for excessive secrecy, Shoemaker says the collaboration has spent a great deal of time interacting with Jackson and his group over the last two years to improve their understanding of LIGO's methods, including extended visits to the Niels Bohr Institute and inviting Jackson et al. to discuss the issue in depth in teleconferences with LIGO team members. So if LIGO's response whenever that drum begins banging anew sometimes comes off as a bit exasperated, there's a very good reason for it."

I think you are overlooking into this, there is no hostility whatsoever.

"LIGO spokesperson David Shoemaker of MIT thinks the controversy all boils down to a misunderstanding about LIGO's methods for analyzing its data. "[Jackson et al.] came to it skeptically, and I think skepticism in science is a really important thing. You have to question results," he says."

The statement of the Jackson's team can be read as constructive skepticism or it can be read as FUD. In both cases they can use the same polite tone. It's difficult to distinguish them without reading carefully the technical objections to understand if they have some specific criticism or just generic concern.

My guess is that the easiest way to solve the controversy is to build three or four more detectors, and try to build a second team to make an independent analysis of the data. (But this is not cheap.)

(This is similar to the Atlas/CMS teams at CERN. They share the accelerator but they have independent detectors and analysis.)

Anyone who's spent any amount of time in academia knows it's the other way around: extreme [1] internal viciousness, external kumbaya PR for the tax-paying public.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law

Yes, in this case the theoretical models predict a gravitational wave to coincide with the observations from other trusted instruments. There may be systematic issues with LIGO's analysis, but it would appear that LIGO also reliably detects astronomical events which suggests that it does actually detect the waves themselves and not just coincidental artifacts in the analysis.

the article states:

> “But Reitze counters that the complete data from that first run is already available online. According to Shoemaker, this includes the relevant time series data and the programs used, but "it's not a trivial matter to use them." Caltech even held a training workshop on how to deal with gravitational-wave data. That's a pretty far cry from asking the physics community to take its analysis on faith...”

Are you refuting this statement? To me, it looks like the data/analysis are open, but not yet independently verified due to difficult nature of problem space.

The Nobel Prize Committee doesn't do mistakes, right? Right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_controversies#Phys...

Thousands of people worked on gravitational waves, but somehow only LIGO is the one taking credit. I'd like to know what other physicists think of the LIGO results and methods.

Well the equipment to reproduce the findings includes multimillion dollar lasers that are required to have precision under a nanometre. If I understand correctly, gravational waves require data to line up between multiple telescopes around the world, right? So all these labs have to be sharing their data through some organized means, right?

Here's a podcast I head recently that went over gravational waves in detail: https://www.danielandjorge.com/podcasts/what-are-gravitation...

All three points you mentioned are true for large parts of physics research. The point is: Not so for LIGO.

The data is open, the code is open. They even had Jupiter notebooks doing the later parts of the analysis when they published the first detection.

And, one cannot overstate that while the black hole mergers might have been bogus for some reason, the neutron star merger as been observed by over 80 different experiments in all wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum.

I don't want to pile on, but I worked in numrel on binary blackholes and I have my gripes about the general gw community, but this is definitely not one of them. In fact, the GW community is probably one of the most open ones in physics. It's just such a hard subject that no one would survive acting like you describe.

Ummm... where are you getting this idea from? Nearly every field I've worked in, and any NSF funded facility has the requirement to publish and open source the data collected.

I will admit that most telescopes operate on a rolling window of privacy (usually 12-18 months) so that an observer with an original idea can't have their research snatched out from under them, but most will gladly share their data for someone who has doubts or wants to open up communications on reproducibility.

I worked very closely with this field, participating with a similar experiment to use frequent observations of accurately modeled millisecond pulsars to study and detect gravitational wave, and while we did have that rolling window, nearly all of our data was shared far and wide often well before that window was up.

Perhaps LIGO's behavior seems secretive, but they have a multi-national group with hundreds of researchers working on it, so if you're even remotely within the field, I don't see how you can come to that conclusion at all. Their analysis techniques have been public for at least the last 5 years (some of their repos go back at least 7 years: https://github.com/gwastro). Their data is completely available (https://www.gw-openscience.org/data/), and even have an entire series of materials on how they perform their techniques (https://www.gw-openscience.org/static/workshop1/course.html).

I've found Astrophysics to be one of the most reproducible and open fields in science, since it rarely has the same kind of financial motivations that bio-med, minerals and materials science, and even environmental science can have.

> Doesn't anyone looking to debunk the LIGO results need to first explain what is producing correlated signals at interferometers thousands of miles apart?

> Also, are the incidents we're receiving in the US producing similar data at VIRGO in Italy?

Yes and yes (also there was the optical/GRB confirmation for one of the events)

That's why I'm siding on the LIGO side of this

The whole article sounds like some "skeptics gone wild" trying to start a car with a banana then saying cars are fake because of it (and that's my behaved way of phrasing it)

The question is as follows:. How frequent are all blips that might be classified as X overall, and from that, what is the expected rate of spurious correlation? To arrive at this one must have access to quite a bit of comprehensive data collected in an unbiased fashion.

Let's say you see foot prints outside your house. And they look like deer footprints, and so you say they are. Somebody then shows that a small moose could have left similar tracks. You don't need to state what definitively left those tracks to say that it's premature to declare them deer footprints.

In the signal world this is even more true, because with signals this faint everything is going to come down to probabilistic analysis. And so the real question is not binary (gravitational waves or not gravitational waves), but rather the chance that what was detected was caused by gravitational waves. And so anything that could confound those probabilities is as good as a refutation, even without any explanation for what did cause the observed phenomena.

I have no opinion on the issue one way or the other, but I do have to say that the large numbers of appeals to authority and ad hominem from the LIGO researchers do not inspire confidence. People tend to resort to these sorts of responses for the lack of a rational refutation. I found a much more informative article on the issue here [1], surprisingly from Forbes. There too, the responses from the LIGO team feel off. For instance they were criticizing the Danish team for using the tutorials LIGO provided on their site alongside the data! I mean...??? Did LIGO ever publish the exact method used to obtain their results?

[1] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/06/16/was-...

In the general case no, you don't need to present an alternative theory to proove that a given existing theory is flawed or not self consistent or not consistent with observed data.

They claim it’s noise and pure coincidence. Some trains may have shaken the earth at the exact time the cosmic event happened. At least that’s what I take from the article.

Apparently jackson just don’t trust the GW collaborations at all, so I guess he just puts it down to chance?

If you're going to downvote, at least have the courage to voice your objection. I thought that was supposed to be a privilege here, not an opportunity to skulk behind a rock.

I'll reply with a similar but lengthier remark from another contributor. Possibly it won't go over your head.

-------------

I've thought for some time that the slow down in "fundamental invention" that some have observed since roughly the late 1960s to early 1970s is the result of "scientific fundamentalism" and Skepticism. Look into the backgrounds and thoughts of people like Einstein, Tesla, Engelbart, Turing, Edison, or Schrodinger, and you generally will not find them to be fundamentalist-positivist Skeptics.

It seems like the general intellectual trend from roughly 1970 until maybe 2010 or so was the rise of fundamentalism of every kind, both religious and secular... - (api; 2015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10288033)

You could call Einstein one of those labels and it wouldn't be much odder than calling him German. He was actually born in The Kingdom of Würtemburg, at the beginning of the "German Empire" (a federation of kingdoms whose borders were very different from today's Germany). And even then, what we now call "Germany" is something that only came into existence in the 1990s. A lot of people try to project nation-states backwards through history, but they're a relatively recent notion, and their current configuration even more so.

Specifically, he lived in the German speaking part of two of those countries, and it doesn't make sense to refer to German-speaking regions of the late 1800s and early 1900s by 21st century labels.

I have no idea with what nationality Andrew Jackson identifies with, but as an immigrant myself, your comment puts my back up a bit. How much of one's life must be spent in a country before being considered "from" that country in your philosophy? If you are born in one country does it indelibly mark you for life? Do you have to be raised in a country in order to identify with it? If you move somewhere, live many years there, have a family there, speak the language, follow the customs, have citizenship there and have no intention of every living anywhere else are you still cursed with your original nationality? Do you feel that such people who have not spent the entirety of their life in a single location need some sort of asterisk next to their nationality? Not a "real" Danish person. Can never become one.

I can understand your question: are they really Danish physicists, or simply physicists working in Denmark. Personally, I don't care but I suppose if you are thinking that Denmark is claiming something they don't deserve, then I suppose it's not a crazy question. However, I hope you can see that the way you put it could be pretty insulting to someone who literally is Danish, but just happens not to be born there.

He has been in Denmark for the past 23 years according to https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_D._Jackson

How many years does someone need to live in USA before you will call them American?

Doesn't a field emanate outwards from a point, but may draw things inwards? Both the gravitational and electric fields can attract. Of course the fields don't work as waves but they is emanation restricted to waves?

Is this logic also violated by seeing a magnet pick up a piece of metal? Something is clearly emanating outwards from the magnet, yet the piece of metal is attracted inwards. It doesn't have to make sense to you, but the experimental evidence seems pretty solid.

some fundamental aspect of space itself we are missing which is a purely inward phenomenon

A fundamental aspect of space... purely inward phenomenon... That sounds like gravity, as described by general relativity.

A simple example i'm thinking would be to imagine a flat road with a ball on it at x_ball. (x_ball > 0).

Starting at x=0 a machine begins raising the road, adding gradually as it moves in the x-direction (creating a sloped road). Once the bulldozer raises the road under the ball it would roll towards x = 0.

This machine moving in the positive x-direction is kind of "emanating outward" but it results in the ball rolling towards the origin.

> It doesn’t make sense to me that something which emanates outward can in any way cause things to move inward.

If it doesn't make sense to you, that's normal. It doesn't make sense to a lot of people. It's very unintuitive. You should probably make the effort to actually learn the math and physics behind it before just dismissing it, though.

Throw a rock in a pond sometime, and watch what happens to the weeds when the waves reach them.