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Comment by stefco_ | Hacker News Reader

I'm a LIGO Ph.D. student and this is a crackpot hit piece. I won't go through everything, but let me address this point:

> But, as critics have pointed out correctly, the LIGO alert for this event came 40 minutes after NASA’s gamma-ray alert.

I was there the day of, when this alert went out, and the reason for that delay was that one of our detectors had its data vetoed due to a loud glitch minutes earlier and our European counterparts, Virgo, had problems getting us their data in a timely manner. As a result of that, and the fact that we had human-in-the-loop checks for everything that went public, our first announcement was slow and poorly localized, with improved data products being released throughout the day. All of this is well-described in our publications [0] on the event and can be corroborated by any one of hundreds of scientists who know what they are talking about.

[0] https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/detection-companion-papers

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But, as critics have pointed out correctly, the LIGO alert for this event came 40 minutes after NASA’s gamma-ray alert. For this reason, the event cannot be used as an independent confirmation of LIGO’s detection capacity.

Leaving aside the question of why there was a "delay", this is a fundamentally incoherent and meaningless critique on Hossenfelder's part. (Well, unless you want to take seriously the implication that the LIGO team could have used that 40 minutes to create a fake alert to go with the gamma-ray alert.)

As long as we have reason to believe (and we do) that the LIGO data record is valid, then when the alert was issued is irrelevant to whether it is "an independent confirmation of LIGO's detection capacity."

(The detection of neutrinos from Supernova 1987A was reported about two weeks after the optical detection of the supernova [optical detection: 24 February 1987; Hirata et al. Kamiokande paper submitted to Physical Review Letters in early March of 1987]. So I guess we should question whether neutrinos from SN 1987A were ever really detected?)

Hossenfelder is not a crackpot: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=NaQZcyYAAAAJ

No, but these LIGO pieces do get pretty thin.

I've been following her writing for a long time, and it seems that writing a book about how "naturalness" hasn't been very good for particle physics got her somewhat radicalised, having far more scepticism than what seems warranted.

When BICEP2 was announced in 2014 Hossenfelder wrote "some people say this is wrong, I'll just say what it might mean" and then never returned to the topic with a full post as far my searches can tell. Now some danes wrote a paper with a pretty large technical flaw and LIGO representatives where a bit rude to a theorist asking about said paper and apparently this is a controversy good enough for at least 3 posts about how shaky the detections are...

She may not be a crackpot within her field of expertise, but she is writing confidently without doing background research. I stand by my characterization of this piece as being of crackpot quality, and while I trust that she is perfectly capable in her own field, I think her willingness to write such a slapdash post—a post that will be read and trusted by very many given her large platform—indicates a pretty cavalier approach to physics writing in general. As someone with a reasonably large platform, I think she has a responsibility to do more research before writing a piece like this; I can immediately tell that she didn’t talk to any one of the hundreds of people who could have addressed many of her points. Instead, she cites hearsay that has been addressed in detail. I don’t consider that to be good faith writing; it’s lazy and she doesn’t deserve praise for it, regardless of the quality of her other work.

As an indicator of the slapdash quality: she calls into question the neutron-star merger by saying, "Furthermore, the interpretation of this signal as a neutron-star merger has also been criticized."

But if you follow the link in that statement, it leads to a previous post of hers (from November 16, 2018), which concludes:

"Basically, I feel reassured in my conclusion that you can safely ignore the Italian paper [which questions the NS-merger]."

It's more than a little odd to imply that there has been potentially meaningful criticism of GW170817 by referring to a post in which she herself concluded that there hasn't.

I think a lot of people that you could dismiss with terms like "crackpot" are more accurately described as "gradually slipping into writing clickbait for economic reasons".

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