Gravitational waves discovery wins Nobel of Physics 2017

The Peace of God to all that belong to the Light
Dear Readers,

During decades Gravitational waves was a kind of sophisticate research arena that consumed important amount of resources but for many seemed to be highly speculative and even living in the middle of reality and myth.

In the early 2000s there was a lot of skepticism even in Physics circles that this part of the Relativity theory was really correct and that could be verified, however, there were important minds in the world of Astronomy wishing to confirm their existence to have the most powerful spectrum ever known for humanity able to provide us information about points of the cosmos that are unreachable with Light, Radio , X rays, infrared waves.

Giant interferometers were built to try to get this elusive goal, in particular teams of scientists worked in projects like LIGO or VIRGO trusting that the those devices some day might receive a kind of signal that only can be generated by catastrophic events in the Universe, like supernovas explosions or events taken place with black holes.

Finally, since the beginning of 2016 to just few weeks ago there were observations that gave full confirmation from collision of black holes about the production of those precious signals by two gravitational waves detectors in the world.

Please check:
www.nytimes.com...

This has opened an entire new horizon of mapping the unknown parts of the Universes, what in the long run will open for us new frontiers of discovery and who knows perhaps of unsuspected opportunities.

The Scientists that made this possible, two American born and one German born, Reiner Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne with affiliations to CalTech and MIT have this week crowned their careers thanks to this finding with the Nobel of Physics.

Pls check:
www.chicagotribune.com...

Gravitational waves have been detected four times so far. Three times by the two LIGO detectors in Washington and Louisiana and one, most recently, by the VIRGO detector in Italy. These three detectors are laser interferometers. They are L-shaped facilities that can shoot laser beams at mirrors located kilometers away from the central hub. Two laser beams are shot perpendicularly to each other and scientists determine whether they look the same when they return. If they don’t, there might have been a gravitational wave stretching or compressing the light in one direction but not the other.

Please check:
www.iflscience.com...

Gravitational waves discovery is for our generation what for the XVII was the invention of the telescope, or for the generation of late 1950s and early 1960s was to have the first images gotten of the outer space taken by artificial satellites, and the kind of findings that this will bring are comparable when we saw first time the hidden face of Moon.

please check:
www.scientificamerican.com...

Thanks for your attention,

The Angel of Lightness

Wow! If gravity does travel in waves then that opens up a lot of possibilities. Maybe gravity could be canceled the same way noise canceling headphones work. Of course, you would have to be able to generate gravity waves without large amounts of mass.

originally posted by: VictorVonDoom
Wow! If gravity does travel in waves then that opens up a lot of possibilities. Maybe gravity could be canceled the same way noise canceling headphones work. Of course, you would have to be able to generate gravity waves without large amounts of mass.

It is my opinion that Tesla was on to this research in the late 1800's and was the key the warpigs needed in our gov. They moved quick and take his research then mark it "Above Top Secret" , well probably just "Top Secret".

Could Time travel be a part of gravity waves?

After all gravity and time are connected.
en.wikipedia.org...


science.nasa.gov...

"ripples in space time"
www.sciencemag.org...

a reply to: Justoneman

Tesla came up with: The Dynamic Theory of Gravity
and Modern Science came up with Dark Energy and dark Matter....go figure

a reply to: The angel of light

The Peace of God to all that belong to the Light

You say this on all of your posts.

What qualifies someone as 'belonging to the light'?

I have always been curious who you include and who you exclude when you say this...because I would rather say peace to all than exclude anyone from peace.

a reply to: The angel of light

Their interferometers picked up hiccups from lightyears away. I don't think they've exhausted all possible alternative explanations. There are plenty of other possible causes of destructive interference.

Transverse gravitational waves? Maybe, but probably not. I would expect gravity to be the absence of waves in a field.

I have no problem with the scientists getting together and saying they believe they may have discovered the existence of gravitational waves, but to award them a Nobel Prize for something they cant even artificially create in a laboratory, seems ridiculous to me.

originally posted by: manuelram16
a reply to: Justoneman

Tesla came up with: The Dynamic Theory of Gravity
and Modern Science came up with Dark Energy and dark Matter....go figure

Then he had his work belittled after that work showing great promise, making him a pauper, all done by the Robber Barons. We didn't get the ray guns then but his work spawned some cool Sci Fi writing.

a reply to: Justoneman

He was the ultimate scientist, but a very poor businessman. Edison screwed him over big time, but the deals he made later left him unprotected. He needed a financial mentor and confidant.

None the less, he is the Father of A.C., and no one cant ever take that away from him.

originally posted by: charlyv
a reply to: Justoneman

He was the ultimate scientist, but a very poor businessman. Edison screwed him over big time, but the deals he made later left him unprotected. He needed a financial mentor and confidant.

None the less, he is the Father of A.C., and no one cant ever take that away from him.

AND the radio waves that Marconni was credited with inventing.

Tesla's remote control was radio waves...

originally posted by: Justoneman

originally posted by: charlyv
a reply to: Justoneman

He was the ultimate scientist, but a very poor businessman. Edison screwed him over big time, but the deals he made later left him unprotected. He needed a financial mentor and confidant.

None the less, he is the Father of A.C., and no one cant ever take that away from him.

AND the radio waves that Marconni was credited with inventing.

Tesla's remote control was radio waves...

A good point. If Tesla had come up with a protocol, it would all have been his. Marconi used Morse, which became the standard protocol of the telegraph. Just a simple sequence of on-off (dot-dash) to represent every letter.

originally posted by: BELIEVERpriest
I have no problem with the scientists getting together and saying they believe they may have discovered the existence of gravitational waves, but to award them a Nobel Prize for something they cant even artificially create in a laboratory, seems ridiculous to me.

Good job you are not on the Nobel committee then, otherwise no one would ever get recognized for their achievements thanks to a very very narrow vision of the universe. What the collaboration did with LIGO is phenomenal and had never been done before. To create a instrument capable of detecting something predicted by GR, as a speculative scope on some extreme events that occur in the universe is one of the greatest achievements in physics to date...

And there you say "Not impressed"

a reply to: ErosA433

Funny how physicists keep saying the Standard Model is by no means complete, yet they keep "finding" their predictions to be true. There is a such thing as confirmation bias. Im just saying we should be more cautious. Reserve the prizes for phenomena that can be replicated in the lab. Nobel Prizes are not chocolate coins. Save them for rare occasions.

a reply to: BELIEVERpriest

They already are hard to get, they are not given out as chocolate coins, and you diminish the achievement of the experiment as though what they did was easy.

I disagree with your assessment, it shows you do not understand the difficulties or anything about the measurement that was made. It places you clearly unable to really make a judgement call in regard to who should get a Nobel prize in physics.

Confirmation bias exists, though something about, performing months of analysis and checks and running exercizes such as salting the data to see how bias the analsis is, or if people are getting things right or wrong... if there was a fundamental bias they would have gotten the publication out within 30 seconds of the trigger and have gotten the prize the next month...

its not what happened

a reply to: ErosA433

Im not saying they didn't discover gravitational waves. I'm just saying they have not proven that their very careful, sensitive, and expensive observations are the actual detection of gravitational waves. It could be something else.

a reply to: ErosA433

For all we know, they could be picking up field distortion caused by the fluctuation of a constantly changing gravitational field. That could especially be the case if they're watching binary systems. So maybe they're detecting the presence of gravity, but that doesn't necessarily mean it moves in transverse waves.

a reply to: BELIEVERpriest

I have no problem with the scientists getting together and saying they believe they may have discovered the existence of gravitational waves, but to award them a Nobel Prize for something they cant even artificially create in a laboratory, seems ridiculous to me.

It's not possible to design an experiment on Earth to detect gravitational waves because they're too small.

This whole project was about measurement and instrumentation. Gravitational waves are interesting but secondary in my mind - instruments are my thing. The origin, design and development of LIGO is really the crux of the experiment and deserves the Nobel for anything it detects IMO. Until now, detection in the electromagnetic spectrum was the best we had. Now, because of LIGO, the door is open for experiments thought impossible before.

But I thought your question about ruling out other possibilities was a good one. That's a critical part of any research. Below is a general description as to how they ruled out other wave-like phenomenon through improvements in LIGO technology. Note that iLIGO operated for 9 years without seeing anything! The link under the image gives further detail about the changes from iLIGO to aLIGO.



www.ligo.caltech.edu...

I'm researching original papers to get a grip on the whole project. If anyone has relevant links, I would appreciate them. As mentioned before, I'm primarily interested in the instrument itself i.e. the engineering, testing, etc.

One more thing - listen to gravitational waves! Spooky.

I just found the publication links:

www.lsc-group.phys.uwm.edu...

www.lsc-group.phys.uwm.edu...

www.ligo.org...

a reply to: Phantom423

Thanks for the info.

I'll look at it. Interferometry is a vital part of field physics. I agree that LIGO is a monumental accomplishment with tremendous potential. I would not be opposed to a Nobel prize for the machinery itself. However, until we can synthetically replicate gravity in a lab and measure our own creation, I don't think there is anyway to prove or disprove the detection of gravitational waves. We've had to discard too many accepted theories in the past simply because we think we know enough to justify our conclusions. Appended to these observations are the assumptions that Relativity has been proven true. So what if we are shutting the door on a more simple, elegant, and functional Unified Theory in the future. I think people should exercise more scepticism when it comes to observation made on object that are so far away from us. There are simply too many variables to know anything for sure.

You do make some very important points. Thank you again for providing information, and for your objectivity.

Why do they have to shine lasers? Shouldn't their be examples of gravitational waves fricking everywhere?