Flann wrote:
Are they rushing to award this a Nobel prize?
They are more interested at this point in keeping the current paradigm alive and well.
Just for starters regarding how much this announcement of discovery and confirmation, there's nothing planned to independently replicate and confirm what these "1000 scientists" have declared.
General thoughts:
Other interferometers were not running and therefore not able to DETECT and CONFIRM the twin interferometers data set. What if the data they generated had been different? How would that have been interpreted?
This was the first "confirmatory" observation and detection of gravity waves to date because the technology had not been sensitive enough till now. Therefore, there has been no replication as of yet. How could there have been. That is key to the scientific method. This seems irresponsible of the scientific community - again. Its happened before.
It's interesting that the twin interferometers were scheduled for a software upgrade just before the detection. Maybe nothing to that at all. Likely not. But it just stuck out to me.
The gravitational waves were detected by us from a source 1.8 billion years in the past.
What was the method of noise filtering used? From the article, it seems they relied on sporadic false positives fed into the interferometers to test their ability to detect true from false signals.
Really? How might scientists been able to accurately mimic false positives of "chirping" from two black holes over a billion miles away and in the past?
I am skeptical.
Rather than openly admitting skepticism, a couple of BT members chose to either divert the question altogether, or just ask me to what I thought, not out of genuineness. The person was being haughty.
There is no true humility here. Pleae stop pretending.
And stop playing innocent, people (you know who you are). The rhetorical pattern has always been to never commit to anything, but instead attack someone's worldview, while characterizing them as anti science, believers in magic, deniers, or drooling idiots that dont know science.
Most of you should hope youre never put on the witness stand to represent and defend science.
I'd shred you to pieces during cross examination.
It was an honest question from the start.
You resorted to your usual rhetoric.