Far out cosmology: gravitational waves not doubted (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, December 19, 2018, 22:02 (1954 days ago) @ David Turell

A battle back and forth and the LIGO folks have won. they are seeing gravitational waves, gen so far:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/studies-rescue-ligos-gravitational-wave-signal-from-the-...

" The detection of these feeble undulations in the fabric of space and time by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) was said to have opened a new ear on the cosmos. But the following year, a group of physicists at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen published a paper casting doubt on LIGO’s analysis. They focused their criticism on the experiment’s famous first signal, a squiggly line — representing the collision of giant black holes more than a billion light-years away — that was printed in newspapers worldwide and tattooed on bodies.

"Even as LIGO sensed more gravitational-wave signals and its founders received Nobel Prizes, the Copenhagen researchers, led by professor emeritus Andrew Jackson, claimed to have found unexplained correlations in the “noise” picked up by LIGO’s twin detectors.

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"Now both groups have completed their studies. The new papers explain different aspects of the problem that led Jackson and his coauthors to make their claim. Both analyses definitively conclude that the claim is wrong: There are no unexplained correlations in LIGO’s noise.
“We see no justification for lingering doubts about the discovery of gravitational waves,” the authors of one of the papers, the physicists Martin Green and John Moffat of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, said in an email.

"The pair has no direct ties to LIGO. “It’s important for science for people to do analysis of data and results independently of the group,” Moffat said, “especially for such a historic event in the history of physics.”

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“'If LIGO did anything wrong,” he added, “it was not making it crystal-clear that pieces of that figure were illustrative and the detection claim is not based on that plot.” Jackson, however, accused LIGO scientists in an email of “misconduct” and making “the conscious decision not to inform the reader that they were violating one of the central canons of good scientific practice.”

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"... both new papers reviewed and reanalyzed LIGO’s raw data and rediscovered the gravitational-wave signals within it, using different algorithms than LIGO’s. Other researchers have done the same."

Comment: Legitimate science allows itself to be tested by outside investigators and validated