Cosmology Views

LIGO Explains the LIGO Failure

LIGO Scientific Collaboration posted a video where several LIGO personnel unknowingly reveal how LIGO fails to detect gravitational waves (GW).

excerpt from the April 29, 2020 post:

Need a 13 minute escape from reality? Deep dive with us into the tiny world of #GravitationalWaves. Einstein thought they were invisible, but this MIT professor (Rai Weiss) proved him wrong and won a Nobel Prize together with Caltech colleagues Kip Thorne and Barry Barish.

(excerpt end)

The video is titled the Sound of Gravity

That video is hosted by the NY Times; I watched it once and I cannot view it again. I am not a subscriber so that is probably the reason.

I found a similar YouTube video from MIT titled: LIGO Detects Gravitational Waves

I believe some people are in both but are in different clips.

link-MIT



My observations:

This 5.5 minute video reveals an escape from reality taken by the LIGO team. LIGO escapes when claiming a detection of something not real, which is the theoretical and undetectable (by a direct measurement) gravitational wave.

At 1:00 LIGO declares this effort was visionary. That is because it had no firm basis in classical physics.

At 2:00 we are told nobody believed this theoretical signal could be detected because its effect was too tiny.

We are told even Einstein did not believe gravitational waves could be detected.

This is rather misleading. Einstein actually changed his mind whether or not they even existed.

My October 21, 2019 post titled Gravitational Physics had an initial crisis

described several several events about a GW preceding LIGO.

In 1936 Einstein published a paper stating they were not compatible with relativity but after criticism (including ridicule from Eddington) he withdrew the paper. With his assistant the paper was revised for the opposite conclusion.

A 1957 meeting of physicists discussing relativity concluded a gravitational wave must be something so then it could be detected.

The gravitational wave itself was never defined but remains just 'a ripple in fabric of space-time'  but this is meaningless because a theoretical fabric is not a propagation medium.

This vacuous definition allows no direct measurement.

At 1:35 we are told the ripples in space-time are just like ripples in  water. However space-time is not a medium and the wave itself is still undefined.

At 2:00 we are told the ripple, with no defined characteristics like even a basic wavelength description, has an effect smaller than the size of a proton!

LIGO can describe only  a concept.

At 2:05 LIGO admits Einstein thought a GW detection is impossible, skipping  Einstein questioned their existence.

At 2:40 we are told the inherent flaw in LIGO's design.

These interferometers will detect any stretching of the Earth. They are extremely long to get the extreme sensitivity required to detect a very tiny change in the surface.

They simply ignore there could be something else that disturbs Earth's surface at the hemispheric scale: an earth tide caused by the Moon during Earth's rotation.

LIGO cannot know for certain what disturbs the interferometers. They just assume any disturbance is a GW. That unjustified assumption is the crucial flaw.

The interferometers  are not designed for a GW; they are designed for only a detection of a disturbance. Software is required to find the cause of a disturbance.

At 3:40 we are told their conclusion: the first gravitational wave ever detected by humanity came from the merger of 2 black holes.

If there were any false detections, like from a merger of 2 stars like the Sun. these were not revealed.

A black hole is also called a singularity in space-time, or a single point in a coordinate system.

The preceding graphics showed 2 spheres in a spiral but this is a deliberate deception. In relativity, this merger sequence  should be shown as 2 points, each representing a singularity. I posted about this deception on April 29.

Depending on the reference, a neutron star diameter is only 10 to 20 km, or negligible on the galactic distance scale (or almost a point).

The merger claimed by LIGO is between 2 points like putting 2 adjacent dots on a sheet of graph paper where the graph is 2-D space-time. The result of the merger of 2 dots is 1 dot.

At 4:39 we are told the strong field of gravity is in Einstein's equations.

This is wrong; Einstein removed gravity and replaced it with space-time curvature. His equations never use the force of gravity.

I am sorry the longer video from NY Times is unreliable. It contained the surprise of the first detection.

I believe it was impossible to predict what a supposed gravitational wave would do to the interferometers, The supposed space-time ripple must lag in the energy transfer to a physical move in the rigid Earth's crust.

The sound of a gravitational wave is called a chirp because a tiny edge in a signal's transition is extremely amplified resulting in ringing.

Rai Weiss makes the laughable statement the ringing was exactly as expected and as predicted.

Here is the link to the LIGO SC Facebook post.


Click on and watch the video from NY Times: The Sound of Gravity

Hopefully others can view it.

My observations:

The essential sequence of LIGO from their own words:

1) a gravitational wave has no definition but only an analogy with a ripple in water,

2) a super sensitive system was built to amplify a super tiny signal so it could be detected using huge devices on Earth's surface.

3) only a gravitational wave could affect multiple interferometers.

4) software must analyze the tiny amplified blips among the interferometers.

5) they could see a blip on a screen.

6) they are certain they observed a gravitational wave.

7) With no tests using an actual inspiral merger event to verify the system, LIGO software would analyze those blips and provide a detailed description of the merger event including:

a) the binary pair (one or both a BH or NS though neither has ever been observed and measured directly)

b) their individual masses,

c) the distance to the location in the universe for the merger event possibly thousands of light-years away.

The determination of this merger location in the universe accounted for 2 unverified times:

1) the time required by wave propagation from the merger through space-time  and

2) the lag for their later detection by the dispersed interferometers on the globe where the rigid crust could cause a lag in detection from disturbance by space-time.

With multiple interferometers, the software can triangulate these separate measurements for the merger's location in the universe.

Even the word incredulous cannot capture the feeling after this reading this sequence.

There are other LIGO videos with the surprise for the first detection.

I sincerely doubt anyone in the LIGO staff thought to consider the moon and its essentially invisible perigee event when checking for other causes of their first detection. They were ecstatic they had detected anything.. They had expected a long wait.

LIGO will always be an irritant for me.

Lacking access to the individuals involved, I believe the first detection was totally unexpected. In their excitement they just fabricated an explanation for the public claiming 2 black holes.

With no software testing such a detailed description for the first event having no basis in other observations is just impossible. My career in complex software applications gives me a basis for my skepticism for their claims using unverified software, further justified when knowing no claimed merger ever had evidence even after more than 4 years of LIGO claims.

Every software application must have a first success verified simply because the luck of coincidences could look like success.

LIGO has never had a verification so to me it remains unjustified and all LIGO claims must be ignored.

I have never found a description for the inspiral orbit parameters used to justify the calculated masses, nor how they are derived from just blips detected at the widely dispersed detectors. An inspiral is definitely not a Kepler ellipse. Probably students of gravitational physics are given that data for their studies in this new branch of physics. Classical physics is based on evidence obtained by experiments and predictions. Gravitational physics seems to be missing that foundation.

My September 11, 2019 post titled LIGO controversy

described the disclosure: the 2017 Nobel Prize winning event was false, a fabrication where the rare gamma ray burst was detected first, then LIGO team fabricated a GW event to match that location and the figures in the often cited paper were manually edited to support the narrative. This is just bad science.

Despite that disclosure, LIGO continues and posts videos like one a few days ago.

LIGO and NSF are quite proud of their unjustified claims.