Comments on: No Gravitational Waves Yet

By: katesisco

katesisco — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 21:54:55 +0000

Well, we spent a quarter of a century in love with string theory, guess our new sweetheart will be gravity waves. Even tho nothing to support it.

By: LIGO to Collaboration Members: There Is No Santa Claus | Cosmic Variance — Ace Campaign

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 03:13:15 +0000

[...] experiment and its friend the Virgo experiment are hot on the trail of gravitational waves. They haven’t found any yet, but given the current sensitivity, that’s not too much of a surprise. Advanced LIGO is [...]

By: LIGO to Collaboration Members: There Is No Santa Claus | Cosmic Variance | Theoretical Physics

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 00:57:54 +0000

[...] LIGO experiment and itsfriend the Virgo experiment are hot on the trail of gravitational waves. Theyhaven’t found any yet, but given the current sensitivity, that’s not toomuch of a surprise. Advanced LIGO is moving [...]

By: LIGO to Collaboration Members: There Is No Santa Claus | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 18:59:46 +0000

[...] experiment (and its friend the Virgo experiment) is hot on the trail of gravitational waves. They haven’t found any yet, but given the current sensitivity, that’s not too much of a surprise. Advanced LIGO is [...]

By: RR

RR — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 20:20:34 +0000

You know right away that they didn’t find anything – papers titled “A Search for…” always mean the answer is negative…

By: réalta fuar

réalta fuar — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 15:32:35 +0000

As I recall, LIGO and Advanced LIGO were actually “sold” honestly, that they had little chance of detecting anything (essentially zero for LIGO). That’s the most remarkable thing about the project, from an outsider’s viewpoint. It’s the only really expensive pure science project I can think of for which this has been true.

By: Jimbo

Jimbo — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 06:40:47 +0000

Some Observations of my own. Sort of like referees in college basketball are portrayed as infallible saints by telecasters, so too with Everthing I have ever read about LIGO (modulo a small political criticism about the WA & LA site selections). The technology, developed at MIT & Caltech, was rock-solid by all reviews, including NSF’s; hence the first 280M$$, (approx. 1/40 the cost of the SSC) was doled w/out so much as the blink of an eye almost 20 yrs ago.
Naturally. It had the halo of Einstein’s creation, & in `1974, a binary pulsar was measured by Hulse & Taylor to be spinning down precisely at the rate GR predicted for grav wave emission. Everything seemed to be, in basketball parlance, a `SlamDunk’: GR’s predix of grav waves seemed to be an inevitable discovery, just waiting to happen.
However, after ~ a decade, as one science run after another was published with Null results, we got suspicious, but were told to keep the faith, & that `advanced’ LIGO would save the day.
But really, will it ? Why was LIGO built in the first place: A test bed for Adv. LIGO ??
That is not how I recall the sales pitch. It’s almost like the `fall-back’ position of the SUSY proponents, who will never accept reality & clamor for the ILC to vindicate them. One upmanship seems to be the norm.
Meanwhile GEO600 seems to have preliminary evidence for a noise source traceable to the Planck scale, sufficiently solid that Argonne labs is now building a dedicated interferometer, a `holometer’, to nail it down precisely. Would’nt it be spookily ironic if the grav wave antennas, built like `pyramids in the desert’ as monuments to classical gravity theory, inadvertently found the empirical basis for quantum gravity instead ? Einstein would turn over in his grave if he had one.

By: ohwilleke

ohwilleke — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 01:31:05 +0000

What are the expectations and how are they derived? Is there are more fruitful way to look?

What does a merger rate denote? It is hard to tell if it refers to the implicit strength of the G constant or some feature of gravity waves themselves. Normally I would think it was talking about strength of gravitational attraction.

If we didn’t expect LIGO and VIRGO to have the power to detect gravity waves in anywhere near the range that theory predicted, why did we bother launching those projects? It seems a bit like building a telescope to look at the next valley over in the bottom of your own valley instead of at the top of the hill because it is too much work to climb the hill.

By: Shantanu

Shantanu — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 19:50:59 +0000

Zephir,
How then do you explain the orbital decay of Hulse-Taylor binary pulsar ?

By: diogenes

diogenes — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 19:35:41 +0000

LIGO has to be unique among modern “big-science” experiments as it was designed and built knowing full well it almost certainly would not see ANYTHING! What are the odds, in 5 years of so, of Advanced LIGO, seeing exactly the same nothing? It’s absolutely amazing that any government would fund such an expensive fundamental project with so long a “pay-back” time.