Gravitational Waves

[Rajan Parrikar]

The first guy to spot them -

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/02/here-s-first-person-spot-those-gravitational-waves

[Nelsonretreat]

Ray, the measurement is nothing more than natural equipment expansion (in Louisiana, what else could you expect - even the rain comes preheated) creating an 'interesting' result that will bring in more funds - just like with NASA, though I gather they are getting less these days.


Rob

There's nothing like a knowledgeable persn to put those ignorant scientists in their place. Imagine wasting all that time and money on actually trying to do a scientific experiment when they could just have written an unsunstantiated opinion on some forum, or even better, as you point out, falsify the result in front of the whole world.  For, goodness sake, let the real experts have a say on this. Keep it up Rob. Those money grabbing self-serving scientists need a dose of reality from people like you who obviously know what they are talking about.

[pcgpcg]

You and I create teeny tiny weak GWs—many orders of magnitude tinier than even the crazy small disturbances detected by LIGO—every time we breath in or out or blink our eyes. But the amplitudes of GWs will be greater with more massive objects moving at higher speeds.

Thanks, I wondered about that and that makes sense.

[Rob C]

There's nothing like a knowledgeable persn to put those ignorant scientists in their place. Imagine wasting all that time and money on actually trying to do a scientific experiment when they could just have written an unsunstantiated opinion on some forum, or even better, as you point out, falsify the result in front of the whole world.  For, goodness sake, let the real experts have a say on this. Keep it up Rob. Those money grabbing self-serving scientists need a dose of reality from people like you who obviously know what they are talking about.

Thank you Nelson; I had to reach the tender age of 107 to have the confidence in myself to know all of this as truth! I'm thrilled that the knowledge now extends to a younger person like yourself! Don't let it slip away, as it so easily can, what with being subverted from the left and the right as both sides try to gain populist clout and executive power.

But the fight isn't over: today, drinking my first mug of breakfast tea, I managed to deposit some of it onto my lap: Sky News ran a spot on a gentleman who is now selling bottles of fresh air! His argumant was delightfully clear - just like the air - I spilled the tea in anger at not having had the guts to promote that self-same idea years ago when it first struck me as a convenient adjunct to my reglar job selling dreams on celluloid. That's the problem with linear thinking: it can lead right over cliffs, one good reason not to work on foggy days.

The world belongs to us - let us seize it in both hands and choke the hell out of it!

Rob C

[stamper]

Why, do you think our politicians would listen to what scientists had to say?

You could make the same argument for every art gallery. Or the military. Or casinos. Or pro sports (oh wait, that was covered by casinos). How about if we shut down international tax havens. Or college sports (pro league farm teams more than educational opportunities). Or arms manufacturers. Or tobacco companies. Or subsidized corn growers. Feel free to add to the list.

How useful to society is it to produce millions of photos every minute that get uploaded to some server? Wouldn't all that time and money be better spent elsewhere?

We're conducting this conversation on a platform made possible because during the 1920s to 1950s, governments the world over (and a very few private labs) subsidized thousands and thousands of students and researchers that over time built up a body of knowledge we now call solid state physics.

One of the dreamers? I have nothing against research that helps mankind on earth. In outer space  - discounting satellites that orbit the earth - there is nothing that I have read about that can help us here on earth which means the money spent would be better spent on medicine, eradicating wars and other problems that plague us. It apparently took a billion years for the gravitational waves to reach us. I look at issues from a practical point of view and don't day dream about distant galaxies. How much money was spent on this experiment?

[Rob C]

One of the dreamers? I have nothing against research that helps mankind on earth. In outer space  - discounting satellites that orbit the earth - there is nothing that I have read about that can help us here on earth which means the money spent would be better spent on medicine, eradicating wars and other problems that plague us. It apparently took a billion years for the gravitational waves to reach us. I look at issues from a practical point of view and don't day dream about distant galaxies. How much money was spent on this experiment?

I wonder if that's even the question: so much esoteric education in so many heads means that something has to be provided in order to employ at least a good number of those heads. I suspect a similar position holds in the armed forces: we have to keep people off the streets, and even if we have learned better than to engage in as many foreign adventures, it's still important to look as if you perhaps could, should you need so to do. You have to support the numbers either through direct pay or unemployment benefits - so give 'em a uniform, spend money and 'create' jobs by making them their trade-toys, and let's get something out of the system and massage the figures.

Was a time in Italy when almost every family was feeding its own unemployed graduate off the earnings of the lesser-educated members of the family. (No, I don't mean those families.) Today, I know teachers in Spain who are waiters...  Highly advanced state-provided education per se can be a waste of resources. Yes, advanced education if you can buy it by yourself even without the prospect of a job, but the state shouldn't push the idea of very advanced education as a necessary and universal right of passage. It's not. And if people spend years of their lives studying 'soft' courses without employment prospects at the end of it all, it creates a lot of wasted lives filled with frustration when doors they thought would automatically swing open do not. For full employment at any level, you need first the jobs to fill, not hundreds of seekers for what doesn't exist. Seems to me that what we face is a gigantic mismatch; unemployed people chasing job vacancies that they really weren't trained to fill, and employers unable to fill the gaps in their workforce without importing people from elsewhere, leading to political problems and resultant hatreds. I seem to remember a time when IT was considered a passport for life; apparently, that passport has now expired.

And now we have globalization on top of it all; our steel mills close because they can't compete with dumping; savings become almost pointless because no interest gets paid (but the banker's bonus still seems largely immune); the handy little cafés that once lived on our high streets long ago stopped being able to compete with the rents and business rates that the multi companies sniff at...

Somebody suggested I might be a cynic. I wonder why? It's a minor miracle, but I can still find it in myself to be a semi-optimist!

Rob C

[Telecaster]

Rob, your determination to yuk this particular yum suggests there's something darker than mere cynicism going on. Whatever it is, go start your own thread about it.

-Dave-

[Nelsonretreat]

the money spent would be better spent on medicine, eradicating wars and other problems that plague us.

Ummmm... where exactly would you have spent the money to 'eradicate' the invasion of Iraq by the US.... Oh I know, on intelligence that would have revealed that there were no weapons of mass destruction.. I mean the US had already spent gazallions on 'intelligence' so diverting a few more quadrillions from science research would have paid huge dividends in ensuring better 'intelligence' and avoiding that particular war.

[Torbjörn Tapani]

For the cost of the F35 project you could get 1000 LIGOs.

[Telecaster]

Here's an interesting thing I just read, sent by an acquaintance who's involved in the gravitational wave detection field (though not affiliated with LIGO…her area of research involves longer wavelengths than LIGO can "see"). It seems the orbiting Fermi Gamma Ray detector spotted a brief & weak Gamma Ray Burst, in the general direction of the gravitational wave detected by LIGO, within .4 seconds of the GW event. It's unknown whether or not the two are related, but intriguing at least. AFAIK no-one has ever correlated a GRB with already-existing black hole activity…but then we've never knowingly detected a black hole merger before now.

Here's the paper:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.03920

Now we need more LIGO gravitational wave detections so we can get some sort of handle on the type(s) of electromagnetic emissions that may accompany them.

-Dave-

[Telecaster]

No matter what you spend a particular sum of your money on as a government, business, co-op or individual it usually means not spending that money on something else. Many countries have a Science budget, and some of them invested part of that in LIGO over a fairly long time period. This means other science projects were either funded at lower levels or not funded at all. Such is the way it is.

But when I consider the vast sums—quadrillions of dollars & still counting—the USA in particular wasted on a blindly triumphalist, even quasi-messianic fantasy in Iraq, tens of thousands of people killed for nothing…I find complaints about funding LIGO in particular, a project intended to broaden our understanding of the universe we live in…and with possible technological spin-off benefits in the coming years, to be beyond absurd.

BTW, the cost of LIGO to American taxpayers comes out so far to ~1.1 billion US dollars total. Those same taxpayers have just spent nearly $20 billion this year on Valentine's Day gifts.

-Dave-

[Ray]

The problems of the world are due to imcompetence, corruption and stupidity. Every year we waste about 1.4 billion tonnes of food (tonnes not dollars), world-wide, due to incompetence, fussy buyers who are mainly concerned about the cosmetic appearance of the food, gluttonous buyers who buy too much food then throw it away when it's passed its use-by date, inadequate storage facilities and inadequate transport facilities, particularly in undeveloped countries.

In addition to the uneaten food that is wasted, there is an excess of food that is eaten, resulting not only in an unnecessary expenditure, but an obesity epidemic which results in yet further expenditure on medical services to fix the self-induced health problems.

World-wide we waste many trillions of dollars annually on armed forces because we are too stupid to live  together harmoniously. We also waste billions of dollars on silly litigation procedures because people don't have the intelligence to come to an amicable agreement without making huge donations to lawyers.

There is also a long list of unnecessary but expensive items that simply appeal to people's vanity and ego, such as designer clothes, fancy cars and so on.
Adding up all this unnecessary expenditure, one might conclude that 3/4ths of the entire world production and expenditure is effectively thrown down the drain, serving no useful purpose at all.

The few areas of intelligent activity would include theoretical scientific research on projects such as LIGO, and practical research into more efficient rockets. The spin-off from theoretical research sometimes takes a while, but without it there would be no progress.

If our telescopes detect a large meteorite heading towards planet Earth some time in the future, we should be able to deflect it or destroy it due to our rocket technology, thus avoiding the extinction of the human race and other life forms. Expenditure on fancy clothes and tasty food will not achieve that result.

That's my rant for today. 

[stamper]

Here's an interesting thing I just read, sent by an acquaintance who's involved in the gravitational wave detection field (though not affiliated with LIGO…her area of research involves longer wavelengths than LIGO can "see"). It seems the orbiting Fermi Gamma Ray detector spotted a brief & weak Gamma Ray Burst, in the general direction of the gravitational wave detected by LIGO, within .4 seconds of the GW event. It's unknown whether or not the two are related, but intriguing at least. AFAIK no-one has ever correlated a GRB with already-existing black hole activity…but then we've never knowingly detected a black hole merger before now.

Here's the paper:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.03920

Now we need more LIGO gravitational wave detections so we can get some sort of handle on the type(s) of electromagnetic emissions that may accompany them.

-Dave-

Spaced out thinking?

[Rob C]

Rob, your determination to yuk this particular yum suggests there's something darker than mere cynicism going on. Whatever it is, go start your own thread about it.

-Dave-

You surprise me, Dave.

Rob C

[Rand47]

I'm interested in the potential of this to bridge the breach between general relativity and quantum mechanics.  On the other hand, it doesn't do much to help me decide whether it is better to help an old lady across the street, or have her euthanized to get her off the Medicare rolls.

Rand

[Telecaster]

Spaced out thinking?

Hehe. Maybe someone's been messing with Major Tom.      Seriously, Fermi's detection is at this point no more than an interesting bit of maybe-related data.

Aside: I remember the first time I heard Bowie's Ashes To Ashes. I was riveted. Now that, I thought, is an effing sequel!

-Dave-

[Telecaster]

I'm interested in the potential of this to bridge the breach between general relativity and quantum mechanics.

Yeah. The fact that they don't play well together IMO suggests we're missing something, or multiple somethings, big & very important. Being able to observe in a new way how gravitational interactions behave could prove helpful. For example, theory says gravitons should be massless. This is what allows gravitational waves, again in theory, to propagate at the speed of light. LIGO shows that if gravitons have mass it's a very small amount. But if further detections were to peg the graviton's mass at >0 this would give theorists something new & puzzling to work with. Or if a wide range of gravitational wave observations were to suggest gravity isn't a fundamental thing—thus no gravitons at all—that would really send folks back to their chalkboards.

As for the other issue you raise    if you were to follow the diktat of your namesake, your choice re. helping the old woman across the street should be clear. But then I guess abolishing Medicare would be on the table too. 

-Dave-

[stamper]

No matter what you spend a particular sum of your money on as a government, business, co-op or individual it usually means not spending that money on something else. Many countries have a Science budget, and some of them invested part of that in LIGO over a fairly long time period. This means other science projects were either funded at lower levels or not funded at all. Such is the way it is.

But when I consider the vast sums—quadrillions of dollars & still counting—the USA in particular wasted on a blindly triumphalist, even quasi-messianic fantasy in Iraq, tens of thousands of people killed for nothing…I find complaints about funding LIGO in particular, a project intended to broaden our understanding of the universe we live in…and with possible technological spin-off benefits in the coming years, to be beyond absurd.

BTW, the cost of LIGO to American taxpayers comes out so far to ~1.1 billion US dollars total. Those same taxpayers have just spent nearly $20 billion this year on Valentine's Day gifts.

-Dave-

Flawed logic and thinking? If something that is wasteful costs less than an illegal war then it doesn't justify the cost? What is logical is that BOTH are wrong and the money spent on more useful projects. However the USA doesn't see it that way.

[Telecaster]

I'm not gonna continue arguing the point. LIGO exists and I'm glad it does.

-Dave-

[Rand47]

As for the other issue you raise    if you were to follow the diktat of your namesake, your choice re. helping the old woman across the street should be clear. But then I guess abolishing Medicare would be on the table too. 

Good one!      But on the other hand, Rand can mean:  "Wolf Shield," protector . . .
In which case the old woman would be in better shape.

A careful reading of Atlas Shrugged, however, reveals a messianic kind of story that, taken that way, would have poor Ayn spinning in her grave I suspect.  And, in which case the old woman might not fare too badly either.  John Galt would probably have helped her across the street, I suspect.  But he'd then have to "talk" for 100 pages to explain why it fit his world-view.   

Rand