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Comment by CamperBob2 | Hacker News Reader

At least a few other detections have been reported by LIGO, and I assume that they, like the first one, are correlated in the data from Hanford WA and Livingston LA.

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?

If so, then wow, Jackson has a tough case to make.

If not, then why not?

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> 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)

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

Are you sure? Because then you must accept that c≠const, thus Ether exists.

I don't remember anything being discussed on that area based on LIGO data

Then remember me (Volodymyr M. Lisivka) and this moment, when you will need to quote.

Or this my message is even better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18196952 .

No, I don't have to accept that, because I already know from my undergraduate physics that light doesn't travel at c in a medium.

LIGO measurements are performed in ultra-high-vacuum[0], so it's not a "speed of light in a medium" it's "speed of light in the vacuum", AKA c.

[0]: https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/vacuum

Ultra high vacuum isn't vacuum. Achieving an actual vacuum is practically impossible in my understanding. Even in deep space you will probably have a few stray hydrogen atoms floating around.

Yes, this is problem, but two 200W lasers[0] separated by thousands of kilometres are able to filter out noise created by atoms or electrons easily. Moreover, 200W of energy applied to single atom will put away it from path of laser very quickly. At such powers and precision we may need to take into account flow of neutrino. It's possible that distant event created blast of neutrinos, which affected speed of light in vacuum.

[0]:https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/laser

I'm on LIGO's side on this one, but I disagree that one must be able to offer an alternative explanation in order to claim a result is bogus. That is, I don't need an alternate theory in order to falsify yours.

Again, to be clear: I think the LIGO results are probably correct. There's a bunch of corroborating evidence, and from the outside it appears they've been acting is very much good faith. I'm just making an epistemology quibble.

Agreed: the scientific community is supposed to havea consensus on [Popperian] falsificationism but seem to act like they don't really believe it quite often.

> the scientific community is supposed to havea consensus on [Popperian] falsificationism

You couldn't have it more wrong. See here, with more physics relevant points:

http://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/3/3/611 [PDF only]

And here with more science relevant points:

http://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/2/4/635/htm [Different article, mobile friendly]

That is, I don't need an alternate theory in order to falsify yours.

I phrased that poorly: what the critics need to explain is the apparent agreement between the prior model and the observations. It wasn't just a case where someone looked at an oscilloscope screen and said, "Whoa. Look at that. Aliens!" As I understand it, the LIGO results showed good conformance to their predictions.

Does that make their position completely bulletproof? No, nothing in science ever is, but it does place Jackson's dispute into the category of "extraordinary claims."

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-...

How is your analogy fit with the fact that there was a case where LIGO had a detection then many telescopes were pointing into that region of sky and "seen" the cause.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2150418-gravitational-w...

This is evidence enough for me that LIGO is not detecting noise.

I think Hossenfelder did a pretty bad jounalistic job in that column, which she defended by pointing out that she is not a journalist. Even reading that it was clear Jackson was probably wrong and had she not been an angry german she would have written that as her conclusion.

Also the article you are commenting on directly cites that column by Hossenfelder.

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.

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.

True enough in the general case as you say, but in this specific case, the data in question was (reportedly) a good fit for a pre-existing model. They made a prediction, ran an experiment, observed the predicted effect, drew a conclusion, and got a Nobel for their trouble.

So the burden of proof is decisively on the accuser here, I'd think.

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.

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