Crossing my fingers for verification. It seems like the Nobel committee should have waited for multiple third-party verifications of LIGO's results.
It would be pretty terrible if we found out the detections were mistaken or even fraudulent.
From what I can understand, LIGO's results seem very open to interpretation. It seems like they could be mistaking noise for signal. And it even seems possible that some unscrupulous person(s) could have created fake signals, using something like the "blind injection" mechanism.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It doesn't seem like the evidence is strong enough yet to say definitively that GW even exist.
Also, are there any peer-reviewed, serious criticisms of the existing gravitational wave observations papers that I could read? I've read the objections a few times now, but only in popular media, not in scientific discourse.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." I don't think the detection of GW falls into the category of an extraordinary claim. Gravitational waves are a clear prediction of general relativity, and general relativity has passed many tests (precession of Mercury, gravitational lensing, gravitational time dilation, etc). In addition, the Hulse–Taylor binary pulsar's orbit decay provides strong evidence of the existance of gravitational waves, completely independently from the evidence from LIGO-like detectors.
I work on gravitational wave related science. I am not part of LIGO, so I speak only for myself. I think that most people in the scientific community have no doubts on the interpretation of the LIGO data for which they were awarded the Nobel prize. There is only one group who claim to have found problems with the data, but their analysis is problematic in several ways... The controversy has been largely exaggerated by the media.
Creating a blind injection without many people knowing about it and without leaving a trace in the detector diagnostics is also extremely unlikely.
This article leaves me with more questions than answers :-)
I seem to recall that LIGO budget was in the billions, this on the order of 150M. Where does this huge difference in costs come from? Is it related to LIGO being the first, and now some previous unknowns are now known? Or something else entirely? Digging those tunnels can't have been cheap...
What's the expected sensitivity, compared to LIGO and Virgo?
As far as I can tell, the 1.1 billion figure for LIGO includes[1] all of the test projects and other stuff. As far as I can tell it seems the ~150M figure for KAGRA is just for the KAGRA project.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 27.8 ms ] threadIt would be pretty terrible if we found out the detections were mistaken or even fraudulent.
From what I can understand, LIGO's results seem very open to interpretation. It seems like they could be mistaking noise for signal. And it even seems possible that some unscrupulous person(s) could have created fake signals, using something like the "blind injection" mechanism.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It doesn't seem like the evidence is strong enough yet to say definitively that GW even exist.
I mean, how else would they have known what to look for?
Update: this is the event I'm talking about: https://astrobites.org/2017/10/16/multi-messenger-observatio...
Also, are there any peer-reviewed, serious criticisms of the existing gravitational wave observations papers that I could read? I've read the objections a few times now, but only in popular media, not in scientific discourse.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/12/two-independent-anal...
Creating a blind injection without many people knowing about it and without leaving a trace in the detector diagnostics is also extremely unlikely.
I seem to recall that LIGO budget was in the billions, this on the order of 150M. Where does this huge difference in costs come from? Is it related to LIGO being the first, and now some previous unknowns are now known? Or something else entirely? Digging those tunnels can't have been cheap...
What's the expected sensitivity, compared to LIGO and Virgo?
[1]: https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/system/media_files/binaries/300...