Gravitational Waves May Have Been Detected In 1987 221
KentuckyFC writes "In 1987, a physicist called Joe Weber claimed to have detected gravitational waves at the same time that other scientists spotted a supernova called SN1987A. His claims were largely ignored because of calculations showing that gravitational waves could not be strong enough to be picked up by Weber's equipment, a set of giant aluminium cylinders designed to vibrate as the waves passed by. But these calculations were based on first order effects in the way spacetime can be distorted. Now a new analysis shows that second order effects can enhance gravitational waves by four orders of magnitude, but only when certain asymmetries are present. It turns out that SN1987A possesses just the right kind of asymmetries to make this enhancement possible because the supernova wasn't entirely spherical. Which means that Weber, who died in 2000, may have been the first to see gravitational waves after all."
Honor (Score:5, Funny)
Gravity waves? I thought they'd never be observed! Impeller Drive [wikipedia.org], here we come! Now all we need is to prove hyperspace as a viable means of travel and invent Warshawski sails. :-P
(Joking aside, this is great news! Gravity waves have been one of the most difficult aspects of relativistic physics to pin down.)
Re:Honor (Score:5, Insightful)
We are talking '87 and there are too many unknowns in the experimental setup, that no-one can clarify now. Did a truck drive by here in '87?
Re:Honor (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Honor (Score:5, Funny)
Well there *is* this star close by...
Re:Honor (Score:5, Funny)
[10:01:14] This is the sun that Earth is orbiting. It's a regular main sequence star with a core temperature of about sixteen million degrees and enough hydrogen to burn for another five billion years.
[10:01:27] Yeah?
[10:01:30] We wanna blow it up.
[10:01:38] Wow.
[10:01:42] That's, uh...
[10:01:47] Ambitious.
[10:01:47] Ambitious.
Re:Honor (Score:4, Funny)
I have the solution! (Score:4, Funny)
All we need to do is hire Malcom McDowell [wikipedia.org] to destroy the Sun! Just tell him that it will get him into the Nexus, he'll do it for free!
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Be thankful for that. In another 1,000 years, someone will post simple instructions on how to create a supernova in your basement on the InterGalacticNextGenerationNet (powered by IPv9). And someone will download it, do it, and, for whomever is alive at that time, things will not be very pleasant.
I'd personally hold out for the Gamma Ray Burst recipe. Now *that* would be cooler than an M80 flushed down the toilet, but equally unpleasant, if you happen to be in the path of the gamma rays.
Although this i
Re:Honor (Score:4, Funny)
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IPv9 would be the testing branch. IPv10 would be production.
What. Ever.
You and I both know we'll barely be finished the IPv6 roll out by then.
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I saw the setup (Score:5, Interesting)
I saw the setup in the winter of late 1986. It was deep (many levels) under the physics department's machine shop, deep underground, at the University of Maryland & you had to go down several ladders to get there. It was hanging from the ceiling, big giant (I thought hollow, but apparently solid) cylinders of what looked like aluminum, hanging from thin wires. Does anyone know if it is still there?
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Re:Honor (Score:5, Insightful)
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You are both right. Skepticism is key to science (see: peer review, falsifiability requirements). So is the process you mentioned. Without both, science is worthless.
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There are no golden plates handed down from on high telling us what science is supposed to be like. Science as it is practiced by working scientists is complicated, and it often bears only a passing resemblance to the idealized "scientific method" you learned in elementary school.
Sometimes we are completely justified in throwing away or shelving observations that don't fit with established theories. In the real world, experimental observations can't be neatly disentangled from scientific theory. To test
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No, science is supposed to be a process of observe, hypothesise, test, repeat. You can discard theories that don't fit hypotheses, but discarding observations because they don't fit theories is the exact opposite of science.
Note that this was an observation that was impossible to reproduce. It's impossible to rule out error or coincidence, so you simply don't have enough to throw out the current theory.
Of course you're free to develop a theory that fits the observation anyway, but nobody did that. Until now, apparently. But we still need a lot more observations to be sure. A single incident is just not enough.
Re:Honor (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, discarding observations because the error margin was then considered too big makes a lot of sense. That is what happened.
The theory that was used to reject the observations was the same one being tested. That's circular. God forbid anyone actually inject reality into that feedback loop of the purely theoretical.
I can't tell you how many times truly new knowledge about the universe was ignored because the scientific orthodoxy claimed "that *can't* be right" based on nothing but assertion.
Re:Honor (Score:5, Insightful)
If I release a ball and it goes up, the first thing I check for is the helium balloon attached with string. Then, I check to see if the ball itself is full of helium. Then, after a few more checks, I get people in to go "oh yeah, huh, it does go up.", but not before discounting the obvious boring explanations . Failure to do otherwise isn't science.
This is a bit of real science that fell through the cracks because it wasn't exactly repeatable.
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Can you name one?
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The theory that was used to reject the observations was the same one being tested. That's circular. God forbid anyone actually inject reality into that feedback loop of the purely theoretical.
Yes, except that same theory was the only thing that would have suggested that he did find a gravity wave. When you're dealing with this kind of fringe physics, where the things you're trying to measure are minute, poorly understood, and largely detectable only through inference, there's often a circular relationship
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We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher. Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of - this history - because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong - and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease.
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not on a single observation. but if said observation is repated, but independent parties, then one can start to talk about a revision of the theory.
if not, one start to look for other reasons why the original experiment got a reading outside the norm...
Re:Honor (Score:4, Insightful)
No, that is exactly how science is supposed to work.
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But if this Weber (Joe) detected the gravity waves at the same time as SN1987A lit up, the Honorverse has a major problem as that Weber (David) assumed that gravity waves would be FTL.
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As I recall, only the grav waves traveling through hyperspace were FTL. So grav waves could be read by sensors at superluminal velocities, but the impeller drive functioned on the light-speed grav waves. I think. :-P
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For a start it means gravity affects itself in the same way it bends and affects light. As light travels away from a gravity well it's redshifted, bringing it down to a lower energy state. Light can also be focused by a gravity well (gravitational lensing). Since gravity arrived at the same time it can also do all these things to itself. So why aren't we seeing a whole lot of unpredicted gravitational anomolies
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could it be that he didn't detect the first wave? or am i totally of target?
i'm envisioning something like ripples in a pond after a rock is thrown in.
basically the star going nova yanks at the gravity "fabric", and said "fabric" then vibrates for a while, setting of weaker and weaker waves as the nearby masses acts as "shock absorbers".
and it could be that said wave action plays tricks on the light, as it has to deal with the changes in the gravity...
so, maybe the light from the nova was carried on a wave
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It also raises the question: if light waves can't escape a black hole then why can gravitational waves?
indeed. one would almost think light and gravity waves are not the same kind of thing.
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Gravity, as is currently understood, is a depression on the fabric of spacetime, and a gravity wave could be considered a ripple on that fabric. Fact is, according to current theory, information can't propagate faster than light in a vacuum, so if the sun instantly blinked out of existence, the earth would still feel a tug of the sun's gravity for eight minutes before we finally flew off like the string had been severed.
Gravity isn't exactly like light though, because gravity "escapes" from black holes. Y
FTFS (Score:2, Funny)
So, what was his real name? Also, editors, the last statement of your summary is a sentence fragment. Please fix this.
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I used to be a grammar nazi. Then I dated someone who spoke English as her second language (after French). Such an experience will thoroughly train you to suppress your nazi tendencies. Trust me.
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You should look up "sense of humor" on Wikipedia while you're busy busting people's balls.
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Dude, (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Dude, (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Dude, (Score:4, Funny)
Nobel prize (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Nobel prize (Score:5, Informative)
No Nobel Peace Prize was awarded in 1948 because, "there was no suitable living candidate". It's generally believed that Mahatma Gandhi would have got it if he had not been assassinated on January 30, 1948.
Re:Nobel prize (Score:5, Informative)
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Please mod my post down. It is not informative. It is actually wrong as pointed out by others.
Waves? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Waves? (Score:5, Funny)
And here I was always convinced they were Gravity Particles.
The lawyers for the Standard Model called. They mentioned something about a Cease and Desist Order: You're not allowed to discuss gravity around anyone schooled in quantum mechanics-- It apparently causes emotional duress.
Re:Waves? (Score:4, Funny)
You're not allowed to discuss ANYTHING near folks who have dabbled around with Quantum Mechanics. Most statements not formulated as probabilities cause them to cry, or at least fart loudly.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graviton [wikipedia.org]
"In physics, the graviton is a hypothetical elementary particle that mediates the force of gravity in the framework of quantum field theory. "
In laymans talk - Gravity Particles.
How much (Score:5, Insightful)
How much does it have to suck to die, with your observations being discredited, and your claims laughed at? Then a decade later, the scientific community goes "oops, you were right".
And now, in Slashdot's infinite wisdom, I am required to wait five minutes between posts.
Re:How much (Score:4, Informative)
How much does it have to suck to die, with your observations being discredited, and your claims laughed at? Then a decade later, the scientific community goes "oops, you were right".
This guy had a carrier shot out from under him. I don't think the naysaying of a bunch of geek theorists bothered him much.
Re:How much (Score:4, Insightful)
I would argue it might upset him more. I mean, this is his work. You do not get to this level without putting a lot of your heart and soul into it. To be convinced that you are on the edge of a major discovery only to have it rejected has to be disheartening.
Re:How much (Score:5, Informative)
This guy had a carrier shot out from under him.
For those wondering, he was a crew member of the USS Lexington [wikipedia.org], which was lost at the Battle of the Coral Sea.
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The ship that bore the name Lexington was CV-2 and was sunk at Coral Sea. The Lexington lives, however, when CV-16 [usslexington.com] was rechristened Lexington. The Lex is moored in Corpus Christi, TX.
Re:How much (Score:4, Funny)
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Probably doesn't suck at all for this guy, I'm sure he doesn't care at all. Maybe his family and friends, but he probably doesn't care one bit.
"Probably"?... (Score:2)
Now, Slashdot is a US based site, but I'd guess you don't have to be so cautious among as...
You can safely say "almost certainly".
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Ask Alfred Wegener.
Bah, just ask me!
I invent the time machine, but die before getting credit because some corporation sent an assassin back in time..hold on, there's the doorbell.
>BANG!
Aaagghh!...NO_CARRIER
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What a brave man this Mr. Wegener was.
His theory on continental drift was pretty accurate, but like Weber he never got the credit.
Back in 1952 I was in the 3rd grade (Ohio) and remember Mrs. Beard the teacher showing us a pull down map on the world in geography class. I raised my hand and said "Look Mrs Beard... if you push all of the continents together they fit together like a puzzle... she said "Sanat, don't be ridiculous, that is the stupidest thing I have ever heard."
Seeing patterns is one of the best
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How much does it have to suck to die, with your observations being discredited, and your claims laughed at? Then a decade later, the scientific community goes "oops, you were right".
Isn't that what they say about great artists too? IMO it's just bullshit to soothe the 99% who'll remain utterly insignificant after their death too, but it's not like scientists are the only ones not to be understood by their contemporaries.
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Hopefully not too much.
If I die before my Hambuger Earmuffs are finished thought, I may get the opportunity to find out though.
*glaven* warm ears...
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Science should be a marathon, not a sprint.
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the patent lawyers disagree with you...
Re:How much (Score:5, Informative)
Then a decade later, the scientific community goes "oops, you were right".
Hm. But this raises an interesting question. Was he actually right?
Let's assume for the moment that TFA is correct, that higher-order terms can enhance gravity waves and that this is the case for SN1987A. So Weber's measurements in 1987 contained a valid signature of a gravity wave.
In a sense, then, he did detect gravity waves. And so he was right in saying "I detected gravity waves". However, he may have been right for the wrong reasons. Science works by interpreting data, and convincing others that your interpretation is correct. Weber was not able to do so. He was not able to convince others because he couldn't provide a way to connect the magnitude of the signal in his measurements to the available theory.
Now, if he had done what the present scientists have done, and demonstrate that the higher-order terms make gravity waves detectable in his apparatus, then he might have been able to convince his colleagues. Then he would really have been right (and for the right reasons). But he didn't (as far as I can tell). He incorrectly said "gravity waves, as described by these theories/equations, have been measured on my instrument"... which is wrong.
Some of you may think I'm just splitting hairs or something. But it's important because in science being right is not about randomly guessing the right answer... it's about providing a robust argument based on repeatable measurements. In science, happening upon the right answer using the wrong logic isn't really considered a good thing. As an extreme analogy, imagine that I am trying to predict when the next volcanic eruption will be, and I come up with a complicated theory based on tides. Then I correctly predict an eruption. A few years later some smarter guys come along and create a really great theory that predicts volcanic eruptions, and show that it is really based on magma flow... and that I was just lucky to have predicted the eruption. Was I "right" in my prediction?
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That depends on whether there's any causal link between the tide and magma flow. (There is)
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In a sense, then, he did detect gravity waves. And so he was right in saying "I detected gravity waves". However, he may have been right for the wrong reasons. Science works by interpreting data, and convincing others that your interpretation is correct.
Not necessarily. There's different things under the title of science, and one of them is black-box science, when you're investigating something that you don't know the slightest thing about, and seeing what happens. We don't know exactly how gravity waves sh
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> We don't know exactly how gravity waves should behave...
That isn't exactly true. General Relativity predicts exactly how they should behave. However, computing the amplitude for a real event such as an asymmetric supernova is very difficult, and in Weber's day they settled for approximations such as assuming symmetry. Thus they had reason to suspect there was a small chance that their calculations were wrong and Weber's measurements right.
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But it was known that the calculations were approximations.
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How much does it have to suck to die, with your observations being discredited, and your claims laughed at? Then a decade later, the scientific community goes "oops, you were right".
You obviously didn't read the actual paper. This is in no way a rigorous theoretical argument that Weber saw gravitational waves. It's nothing more than a rough order of magnitude calculation. A second look should be taken, but we should not start handing out posthumous awards right away.
And who was laughing at him? Weber was regarded as a pioneer of gravitational wave experiments. You can find a discussion of his work in standard textbooks. You seem to assume that anyone who doesn't succeed in every one
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The most telling part of the paper comes at the end: "It would also be necessary to check that the predictions of this proposal do not violate the absence of observed gravitational waves from other sources." To me, this 10^4 enhancement factor is probably enough that we'd have seen GW from a variety of sources by now in our more sophisticated detectors (which are interferometers, and are unrelated to Weber's setup), which leads me to be dubious about the claims of enhancement.
But I gather those aren't as sensitive to the second order effects in question, right?
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But I gather those aren't as sensitive to the second order effects in question, right?
Wrong. The supposed 10^4 enhancement factor is in the magnitude of the GW waves and would be seen by any detector.
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In further news, a sharp jump in gravity waves being detected since this new discovery was announced have now been determined to have been caused by Joe Weber rapidly spinning in his grave.
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What more could a scientist hope for? You're ostracized your entire life, and after you're dead and forgotten, your research comes back to the forefront and people realize you were onto something.
Surely Copernicus and Galileo would be psyched to be part of the group who resurrected the concept of science. What about Darwin? Darwin's ideas were good, but not good enough. He had a mechanism for evolution, but no way of allowing the mutations to be passed on. With the synthesis of genetics, Darwin's name
Gravity model (Score:3, Interesting)
Isn't that like using gravity to explain the effect of gravity?
Re:Gravity model (Score:4, Insightful)
It's only a very crude analogy. In reality, it's both space *and* time that are being distorted. Gravity causes all the "straight lines" (geodesics) in space-time to become curved. So the Earth orbits around the Sun and a thrown ball follows a parabolic arc because it's actually a "straight line" in space-time that gravity has curved just like a Great Circle on the Earth is a "straight line" (i.e. the shortest distance between two points) with respect to the surface of the Earth.
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It's only a very crude analogy.
That's a good point, and it should be elaborated as the proper response
to cyberchondriac.
cyberchondriac identifies the grid-bent-by-balls as "the current popular
gravity model". It is in fact a popular model, which I remember from
watching PBS even as far back as the 1970s. The good thing about this
model is that it allows one to visualize how a mass both distorts space
and moves in response to the distortion caused by another object. But
its goodness as a model of gravity ends there, in part due to
cyberchond
Not really. (Score:3, Informative)
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Actually you could probably visualize a simple case of one dimension motion with a traditional 2D space-time diagram (1 spatial + 1 time dimension) and curve that into three dimensions. You could at least visualize why a dropped ball would accelerate downwards along a straight line. Starting at 0 velocity (a straight line upwards along the t-axis) that "straight line" would start to curve in the direction of gravitational source, which translates into an increasing velocity (the slope of the curve).
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Re:Not really. (Score:4, Interesting)
Er, no, you don't "truly" see anything. Your brain forms a representation of reality based on sensory input. In the visual side of that, the spatial representation is 3D.
Furthermore, you don't "see" in 2 dimensions, in your understanding of the word (which is kinda meaningless, cf visual illusions, hallucinations etc), because of the parallax effect afforded by having two eyes.
Also, the complete internal representation of a thrown ball is fundamentally 4 dimensional (3 spatial + 1 temporal). But it's hard to visualize curvature of 4 dimensional spacetime.
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It's even worse than that. To visualize a curved 4-dimensional space you'd need 5 dimensions to embed it in. Not to mention the fact that time is a different type of dimension so distances are measured differently in space-time. t^2 - x^2 (or "proper time", the time a object would experience traveling along that line) instead of pythagorean x^2 + y^2. So the distance between all points along a light cone is 0 and every outside is imaginary!
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It's not trying to explain, it's an analogy that gives an example of how distortion in topology can affect motion.
The reason they use it in pop science programs is it's hard to visualize 4 dimensions of curvature.
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Well if it's a CGI animation, then you're not really using gravity, you're just using fancy rendering. But ignoring that technicality, it's not really that much different than using a substance made out of molecules to build a scale model of a molecule. You're just using what's available to you in order to make a simplified model. There's not any easy and intuitive way to represent some aspects of physics in a manner that relates directly to the normal human experience of the universe. So you have to make
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and then you get to see a CGI animation of a large ball on a rubber like grid -drawn as a 2 dimensional analogy
Actually, it's a four dimensional analogy.
You have your x/y dimensions (forwards/backwards,left/right) as noormal, but they have flattened the z (up/down) as it's not important for the visualization. Now, instead of there being an up/down they have used that axis to show gravity.
Trying to draw something in four dimensions and hoping that the audience watching the show will make heads or tails of it would be like trying to nail jelly to a tree.
Re:Gravity model (Score:4, Interesting)
Isn't that like using gravity to explain the effect of gravity?
Sure, but it's just an analogy. It's not supposed to explain why masses warp space-time, only to show how a mass causing space-time to warp gives rise to effect we call gravity. In the analogy, the curvature of the space-time sheet is caused by gravity pulling downward on a ball to create the curve. In the reality the analogy is supposed to represent, the curvature of space-time is gravity. The analogy just gives you an easy way to ignore the "why" that theory can't answer, so you can focus on understanding the effect.
If it makes you feel better, you can just ignore the gravity-pulling-the-balls-down part of the analogy, and replace it with a simple assumption that a ball on the sheet causes the sheet to bend, and that other balls tend to move towards "low" spots in the sheet, with no explanation for why this happens.
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It's just a convenient visual model to explain the idea of gravity distorting space-time.
those weren't gravity waves (Score:4, Funny)
it was the pure amazement of my high school teachers that I was graduating. I was pretty shocked too.
I detect gravity waves all the time (Score:2, Funny)
Poor guy (Score:3, Interesting)
What are they going to name the gravity SI unit, Webers? Right...
In 1987, Joe Weber, a physicist ... (Score:2)
Why wouldn't you say Joe Weber discovered this, instead of some random physicist? Is his name Joe Weber or is that just what people called him?
I don't know anyone else named Joe Weber so you would not have to say Joe Weber the physicist to clarify either, although I appreciate the additional information. I would have said maybe a dog called Joe or a robot called Joe, but it sounds awkward and a bit insulting talking about people.
Me, I'm a poster called b4dc0d3r - you don't know if this is a person or mach
Some more info (Score:5, Interesting)
As already mentioned in a previous comment, the article is somewhat speculative and it is a little bit late to verify the experiment. The standard accepted practice for claiming the detection of a GW is to observe the event with at least 2 detectors which are separated far enough to not measure the same external disturbances (but preferably 3 or more spread around the world so that you can do proper triangulation of the source). One single glitch might be a cosmic ray, lightning, dust falling before your detector, an earthquake, an instrumental error, anything. We see more of those than we like. One glitch measured at different observatories within the time it takes to travel at lightspeed (a few ms) at different observatories around the world might give you a nobel prize.
One book that is high on my 'to read' list is Gravity's shadow [amazon.com], which supposedly describes not only Weber's experiments, but also its reception by the scientific community and the eventual downfall of Weber's reputation.
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"eventual downfall of Weber's reputation."
I think this type of thinking is a problem with the scientific community. It prevents people from admitting mistakes and moving on. If someones hypothesis is wrong that shouldn't be the end of their reputation. It doesn't necessarily make them a bad scientist and shouldn't be mean the ruination of their careers and the destruction of their reputation. Whats important is the process. Its quite possible that with limited data two different possible hypotheses cou
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It's when you don't admit that you are wrong that your reputation suffers.
Too early to celebrate (Score:5, Informative)
Since I work in gravitational wave physics, I read this article with great interest when I saw it. I'm afraid, the arguments are far from compelling. Some of the many problems:
1) The proposal for the calculation of the energy content of the gravitational wave is speculative at best. There is no agreed upon quantity for the energy of spacetime curvature, as the author himself points out.
2) The only calculation of the claimed non-linear enhancement seems to be in a paper which is cited by title and author only - there is no way to find and read the paper which this calculation was supposed to be in.
3) There seems to be some confusion between cylindrical gravitational waves and cylindrical gravitational wave sources. His method using approximate lie symmetries would correspond to the symmetry of the spacetime - ie the matter. I don't believe there is any way to produce cylindrical (or spherical) gravitational waves since you need a time-varying mass quadrupole to create them. Axisymmetric sources do not produce such waves. In short, there are exact (non-linear) solutions to the Einstein equations with no sources that have a gravitational wave-like nature, but they are not the solutions you get for (linear) gravitational waves from sources, and it is misleading to confuse them.
4) His supposition that 10% asphericity of the source is somehow related to a gravitational wave which is 90% spherical and 10% cylindrical is just bizarre. The gravitational waves from a rotating ellipsoid which has a 0.1 asphericity (assuming it is rotating about one of it's minor axes, since if it was rotating about the major axis it would be axisymmetric and give of no gravitational waves) is not really like an exact spherical wave or an exact cylindrical wave solution.
So, all told, this is still very early and very speculative. The safe money at this point is still that Weber (who had other irreproducable "detections") did not see a gravitational wave. While the non-linear nature of gravity would in principle allow for some sort of self-amplification, there has been to my knowledge no paper that claims to show this kind of amplification by four orders of magnitude available to view, let alone verified by other calculations or observations. Until something like that is available, this is at best speculation and hype, not science.
He was right, you know. (Score:4, Funny)
I remember because I was alive in 1987 and I felt it too when it happened. It was just as that star was exploding as a matter of fact. But it was hard to notice and you had to be paying really close attention. I take a lot of mind-altering drugs so I was able to sit still and concentrate on the physics.
Basically gravitational waves have a quadrupole moment so you feel your ears move apart slightly and your face contracting vertically. Then your face expands vertically as your ears move together. This happens a bunch of times and the effect is very slight- just a few femtometers- so you might not notice. But once you feel that cool wind of neutrinos flowing up from the floor and blowing through your hair, that should be a fairly obvious hint that a star is exploding somewhere and deserving of your attention.
I don't think so. (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't like to speak ill of the dead, so I will leave it at that.
Joe Weber (Score:4, Interesting)
In 1980 I met with Joe Weber at the Jet Propulsion Lab.
He had been reducing the noise in his experiment over the decades was still confident that the disturbances he was recording were gravitational waves.
Rather that being bitter about the 20 years of skepticism concerning his experiment, he was upbeat and optimistic. He understood that the theorists claimed that he could not possibly being seeing gravitational waves, but, as he told me, "You are not going to see them if you don't look!"
The reason he was at JPL was that John Anderson, Frank Estabrook, and Hugo Walquist conducted searches for gravitational waves using high precision spacecraft tracking during the 1970s and continue to search to this day.