tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1055612246610286525.post5435591728456094850..comments2024-03-01T08:23:13.398+00:00Comments on The Fictional Aether: The Irresistible Allure of ControversyUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1055612246610286525.post-82410055778119541662018-11-02T15:16:34.065+00:002018-11-02T15:16:34.065+00:00Yes, there is a Part 2: http://fictionalaether.blo...Yes, there is a Part 2: http://fictionalaether.blogspot.com/2018/06/the-danish-paper-one-year-later.html<br /><br />I sincerely hope there does not need to be a Part 3. Mark Hannamhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06011146336221492349noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1055612246610286525.post-86534801944223051882018-11-02T14:58:56.844+00:002018-11-02T14:58:56.844+00:00Very descriptive post, I loved that a lot. Will th...Very descriptive post, I loved that a lot. Will there <br />be a part 2?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1055612246610286525.post-50261851420301199012018-05-21T08:35:54.124+01:002018-05-21T08:35:54.124+01:00Congratulations on your work and recognition!
I c...Congratulations on your work and recognition! <br />I can’t wait for the update (having originally read this post during the late June weeks following the availability of the Creswell et al. preprint). I haven't accessed reports from the LISA Pathfinder mission test mass study regarding the periodicity of space weather-related transients and correlated noise sources from solar wind and IMF (although tested in a different orbital regime than the planned orbit of LISA). Hopefully transverse/self-affine field components, oft overlooked, don’t render the exceedingly long array length merely an amplifier for quasiperiodic transients due to excess charge and quantum effects on lasers and clocks, as the laser system cannot yet be evaluated due to obvious limitations. I regard the Pathfinder mission a success for the era of independent replication and for hypotheses regarding the degree of intermittent mutual test mass gravitational stability expected in geostationary orbit, as LISA becomes operational after 2030. Until then, LIGO findings are not just convincing, they’re also difficult to refute, as residual correlations from subtraction of model from unwhitened data indicate only the presence of this kind of noise if there exists a unique random transient that is uncorrelated spectrally with this noise (assuming that non-random detector noise is not itself modulated by very weak disturbances to a propagating background potential preceding a gravitational wave). <br />Of course a noise floor is expected due to shot noise and various environmental coupling resonances at levels below confident signal. Long periods of LIGO data have not been examined by critics to reveal the frequency of extended time lag correlations that may discount the uniqueness of those associated with significant transients. <br />I can only imagine that LIGO GW will successfully withstand falsification and tenacious critics. If critics cannot produce an equally-convincing, controlled suite of correlated natural or instrumental explanatory variables that appear as fundamental components in time evolution of LIGO spectra, synchronized with both the phase locked behavior of noise around events that is being focused on in the work of critics of LIGO signal processing techniques, and can demonstrate that LIGO events also are not mutually independent (e.g., not a quasiperiodic event in itself that is indicative of an as yet unknown solar-planetary field or geophysical system, or some kind of propagating quantum glitch), there will be no further loopholes to close beyond the level of set paradoxes and metalogic. To render LIGO an experiment that detects something entirely unexpected, however – truly new physics – may be an even greater victory for LIGO than our early picture from theoretically-predicted GW source dynamics.<br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1055612246610286525.post-60456349644447757452017-06-24T13:55:22.634+01:002017-06-24T13:55:22.634+01:00Get outside opinion indeed: here's my understa...Get outside opinion indeed: here's my understanding of what happened. <br /><br />- Some weeks or months ago Sabine got wind of the new paper the NBI group were writing. She interpreted it as a concerted effort to discredit the LIGO detection. (Note that the group had already written 2 papers along similar lines in terms of calculations but with entirely different conclusions.) She had miscellaneous exchanges with people at AEI Hannover - some of us are LSC members but we don't speak officially for the LSC - and maybe others, but since a draft was not available no-one could say or do anything specific about the rumours.<br /><br />Then some days before the paper was put on the arxiv, the NBI group decided to send it to A. Buonanno (LSC principal investigator at AEI Potsdam) for comment. She in turn asked her data analysis postdoc (Ian Harry) to look into it, however given the length and unfamiliarity of the paper he could not provide an instantaneous response ; in the event it took a week or so to write up the main issues, and in the intervening time the NBI people decided to go ahead and post to arxiv anyway. <br /><br />Then Sabine H. went to her junior LSC member contacts again and asked - not what their opinion of the paper was, but just whether the collaboration intended to make any response to the preprint. And at that time, indeed there was no plan to issue any formal response. <br /><br />This falls short of what a journalist would/should have done - i.e. going to the collaboration management, saying that she was writing an article about the NBI paper for Forbes.com and asking for any official response that could be quoted. <br /><br />Note that the Forbes article does have some paraphrase of a technical critique of the NBI paper, but does not directly quote any LSC member. Though I am pretty sure a few of us told her, quite definitely and quotably, what we thought of the paper ... it is still a mystery why Sabine effectively refused to give anyone from LSC a voice.Thomas Denthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16355010444546331416noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1055612246610286525.post-87656900133327783372017-06-24T09:56:50.790+01:002017-06-24T09:56:50.790+01:00Let’s not go down that road. But this touches on a...Let’s not go down that road. But this touches on an interesting question. How do we decide who to trust on science, or any highly technical issues? Someone who writes on a wide range of topics will not be an expert on most of them, or perhaps any. I wrote a lot about <a href="http://fictionalaether.blogspot.com/2015/04/a-rant-puckish-provocative-science.html" rel="nofollow">this expertise stuff</a> in the past, and see the link in the previous comment reply. I think that people trying to report or debate science disagreements are deluding themselves — and the public — and that’s why I say that the best thing to do is wait until the dust settles.Mark Hannamhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06011146336221492349noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1055612246610286525.post-24213792648352021192017-06-24T09:49:55.460+01:002017-06-24T09:49:55.460+01:00I am a scientist, not a journalist. I have no idea...I am a scientist, not a journalist. I have no idea what a journalist would do. As a scientist, if I were shown a paper that, for example, claimed to have found flaws in the discovery of the Higgs boson, and asked to write about it, I would decline. There would be a HUGE probability that the paper was not only wrong, but ignorable, but I would not have the knowledge, resources, or a network of trusted expert contacts, to properly assess it. Checking with outside experts is exactly what you say should happen, but there's the intermediate "meta-expertise" of knowing who the experts are, and being able to speak to them. I worried about that in <a href="http://fictionalaether.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/a-sociologist-scientist-and-slow-leak.html" rel="nofollow">an old post about Harry Collins</a>.Mark Hannamhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06011146336221492349noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1055612246610286525.post-79201693567300345862017-06-24T03:20:10.392+01:002017-06-24T03:20:10.392+01:00"The writer has a blog that I have always rea..."The writer has a blog that I have always read as an honest, professional effort to communicate how science is really done,"<br /><br />Well, the people in other fields who have been treated by her in precisely the same way arrived at your conclusion a long time ago.....Rastus Odinga Odingahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09615544434035028500noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1055612246610286525.post-11140251291794455062017-06-23T18:27:14.735+01:002017-06-23T18:27:14.735+01:00So I'm curious - if you were a science journal...So I'm curious - if you were a science journalist (as in, whether you make a living depends on the content you produce), would you really wait a year to publish results that had just been announced, watching all the other stories go up online and make your reporting irrelevant, all so that you could read the peer-reviewed paper once it finally comes out? (And that's assuming that peer review even shuts out all errors - it does not.) I agree that science journalism that responds to the news cycle isn't ideal, but the alternative is bankruptcy. That's why, generally speaking, the rule is to get outside expert opinion on the research before moving forward, where "outside expert" here should have been "someone at LIGO who really understands the data." Even if LIGO wasn't planning an official response, a LIGO-affiliated scientist could have better addressed the paper's claims, even off the record, and would have helped in the decision on whether to move forward with the article.<br /><br />All that said, I agree wholeheartedly that this wasn't at all an illustration of the way science works - I don't see how anyone could make that claim. This was about science journalism and communication.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1055612246610286525.post-39809845659145616682017-06-23T17:21:44.626+01:002017-06-23T17:21:44.626+01:00When you have a breakthrough result, you can show ...When you have a breakthrough result, you can show us how an announcement is supposed to made. Mark Hannamhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06011146336221492349noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1055612246610286525.post-85340713174739113592017-06-21T18:02:56.005+01:002017-06-21T18:02:56.005+01:00I found the "new movie release" format o...I found the "new movie release" format of announcing the discovery of gravitational waves as fame seeking as the two critics who said it is all noise. You reap what you sow.<br />GSShttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05163465034357764659noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1055612246610286525.post-16557260322515538812017-06-20T23:13:42.259+01:002017-06-20T23:13:42.259+01:00Cold and deadly -- like well-served revenge.Cold and deadly -- like well-served revenge.Thomas Denthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16355010444546331416noreply@blogger.com