
Danish physicists claim to cast doubt on detection of gravitational waves - okket
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/10/danish-physicists-claim-to-cast-doubt-on-detection-of-gravitational-waves/
======
JohannesH
I find it odd that the responses from the LIGO team and supporters are so
hostile, while it seems Jackson have a fairly constructive perspective:

Jackson says he hope that “our concerns will be taken constructively and lead
both to improved methods for data analysis and to a better understanding of
LIGO’s results and its exciting long-term potential.”

It seems to me that Jackson just wants to eliminate potential flaws in the
result rather than overturn the result itself. Isn't that exactly what we
expect from the scientific method?

I wonder if it is a media created image that the tone between the teams are so
hostile instead of collaborative.

~~~
TrinTragula
The article clearly states:

"While LIGO has gained a (not entirely undeserved) reputation for excessive
secrecy, Shoemaker says the collaboration has spent a great deal of time
interacting with Jackson and his group over the last two years to improve
their understanding of LIGO's methods, including extended visits to the Niels
Bohr Institute and inviting Jackson et al. to discuss the issue in depth in
teleconferences with LIGO team members. So if LIGO's response whenever that
drum begins banging anew sometimes comes off as a bit exasperated, there's a
very good reason for it."

I think you are overlooking into this, there is no hostility whatsoever.

~~~
ianai
I have two coworkers like that. No matter how much communication we have
seemingly nothing ever gets settled nor progress made. The one calls himself
an anarchist. There’s a large difference between constructive “skepticism” and
destruction of progress - but so much can hide under the false umbrella of
“just trying to understand.”

~~~
tandr
I am genuinely curious - how do you (did?) resolve that kind of work-place
conflict?

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _how do you (did?) resolve that kind of work-place conflict?_

Figure out a domain they operate exceedingly well in, determine the minimum
amount of information they need and firewall them from everything else. A side
effect of such disagreeability is not being involved in the sort of open-ended
discussions which delineate upper from middle management.

------
torpfactory
The detection of GW170817 is the nail in the coffin here. A gravitational wave
corroborated by numerous other teams and instruments detecting the same event
using completely different physical principles. There is almost zero
likelihood of such a coincidence.

~~~
jschwartzi
Yes, in this case the theoretical models predict a gravitational wave to
coincide with the observations from other trusted instruments. There may be
systematic issues with LIGO's analysis, but it would appear that LIGO also
reliably detects astronomical events which suggests that it does actually
detect the waves themselves and not just coincidental artifacts in the
analysis.

------
splittingTimes
"the controversy all boils down to a misunderstanding about LIGO's methods for
analyzing its data." This plus the mentioned secrecy is the modus operandi in
the physics community.

No open data, no open calculation how you reached a certain theoretical result
and no open code with which the simulation/analysis is done.

There is also the case to be made for a reproducibility crisis in the hard
sciences.

~~~
dschuetz
The Nobel Prize Committee doesn't do mistakes, right? Right?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_controversies#Phys...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_controversies#Physics)

Thousands of people worked on gravitational waves, but somehow only LIGO is
the one taking credit. I'd like to know what other physicists think of the
LIGO results and methods.

~~~
maxnoe
Astroparticle physicist here.

I work in gammay-ray astronomy. We work closely together with LIGO, they alert
us in case something interesting happens so we can observe the same position.

This is e.g. what happened with the Neutron star merger.

The community has great respect for the awesome work our colleagues at LIGO
do.

Especially since they made data and code public, which sadly is something that
just starts gaining track in gammaray astronomy.

------
CamperBob2
At least a few other detections have been reported by LIGO, and I assume that
they, like the first one, are correlated in the data from Hanford WA and
Livingston LA.

Doesn't anyone looking to debunk the LIGO results need to first explain what
_is_ producing correlated signals at interferometers thousands of miles apart?

Also, are the incidents we're receiving in the US producing similar data at
VIRGO in Italy?

If so, then wow, Jackson has a tough case to make.

If not, then why not?

~~~
raverbashing
> Doesn't anyone looking to debunk the LIGO results need to first explain what
> is producing correlated signals at interferometers thousands of miles apart?

> Also, are the incidents we're receiving in the US producing similar data at
> VIRGO in Italy?

Yes and yes (also there was the optical/GRB confirmation for one of the
events)

That's why I'm siding on the LIGO side of this

The whole article sounds like some "skeptics gone wild" trying to start a car
with a banana then saying cars are fake because of it (and that's my behaved
way of phrasing it)

~~~
scott_s
I'm on LIGO's side on this one, but I disagree that one must be able to offer
an alternative explanation in order to claim a result is bogus. That is, I
don't need an alternate theory in order to falsify yours.

Again, to be clear: I think the LIGO results are probably correct. There's a
bunch of corroborating evidence, and from the outside it appears they've been
acting is very much good faith. I'm just making an epistemology quibble.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Agreed: the scientific community is supposed to havea consensus on [Popperian]
falsificationism but seem to act like they don't really believe it quite
often.

~~~
no_identd
> the scientific community is supposed to havea consensus on [Popperian]
> falsificationism

You couldn't have it more wrong. See here, with more physics relevant points:

[http://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/3/3/611](http://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/3/3/611)
[PDF only]

And here with more science relevant points:

[http://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/2/4/635/htm](http://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/2/4/635/htm)
[Different article, mobile friendly]

------
spuz
Presumably if LIGO fell victim to a statistical fluke of noise in the data
because they underestimated the likelihood of such a fluke then those flukes
should have happened during the decades when they were running multiple
detectors at lower sensitivity. Is it possible that the probability of these
flukes occurring sits just within the window of "likely enough to happen and
still be mistaken for a true signal" and "not so likely that it would have
happened more than once in the last 10 years". My question is, are the Danish
considering the fact that this kind of noise will occur regardless of the
sensitivity of the detectors?

------
consp
How does this interpretation error result in the actual finding of an optical
counterpart to the gravitational wave in the region it was supposed to be in?
(see GW170817)

Or are they only trying to weigh in on the first detection?

~~~
SiempreViernes
Apparently jackson just don’t trust the GW collaborations at all, so I guess
he just puts it down to chance?

~~~
perlgeek
My understanding is that the neutron star merger observation was the first of
this kind that humanity has ever done.

Calling that a coincidence isn't a very convincing argument.

~~~
SiempreViernes
It was the first time we recogniced these transients as ns-ns mergers, but
there is very likely other events hidden in archival data. Simply put,
gw170817 looked fairly boring in the waveband that has good skycoverage, so
without the ligo trigger most observatories wouldn’t have bothered looking.

The article states that jackson had some objection to the signal processing
done for gw170817, but nothing really about what he has to say regarding the
transient found in the ligo-virgo error contours.

------
DoctorOetker
"And contrary to Jackson's assertion in the article, a technical paper really
is in the works at the LIGO collaboration detailing how it has handled the
noise in its data—noise just hasn't been a top priority."

where in which article is Jackson claiming that "LIGO does not have a noise-
handling technical paper in the pipeline" so to speak?

this is a really weird comment in the conclusion...

------
DoctorOetker
>On that point, people seem to be in agreement. But Reitze counters that the
complete data from that first run is _already available_ online.

The italics are the link to [https://www.gw-
openscience.org/about/](https://www.gw-openscience.org/about/)

is this hug of death? where can I actually find their data and materials?

------
8bitsrule
Science needs to re-learn how to live without so much religion. Observation is
expensive, interpretation is cheap.

~~~
8bitsrule
If you're going to downvote, at least have the courage to voice your
objection. I thought that was supposed to be a privilege here, not an
opportunity to skulk behind a rock.

I'll reply with a similar but lengthier remark from another contributor.
Possibly _it_ won't go over your head.

\-------------

 _I 've thought for some time that the slow down in "fundamental invention"
that some have observed since roughly the late 1960s to early 1970s is the
result of "scientific fundamentalism" and Skepticism. Look into the
backgrounds and thoughts of people like Einstein, Tesla, Engelbart, Turing,
Edison, or Schrodinger, and you generally will not find them to be
fundamentalist-positivist Skeptics.

It seems like the general intellectual trend from roughly 1970 until maybe
2010 or so was the rise of fundamentalism of every kind, both religious and
secular..._ \- (api; 2015
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10288033](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10288033))

------
flexie
The article keeps talking about "Danish" this and that.

The only one of the so called Danish physicists quoted in the article is
Andrew Jackson who is American. I believe this is the paper it all relates to:
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.04191](https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.04191) None of
the authors are Danish, but most are related to the Niels Bohr Institute.

Andrew Jackson probably has a lot of Danish colleagues at the Niels Bohr
Institute, which of course is in Copenhagen, and many of them might agree with
him and some might have been involved in the study. He probably also lived in
Denmark for many years and he might even have gotten Danish citizenship,
family and he might even speak Danish. The same might apply to some of the
other authors.

But you wouldn't call Einstein a Swiss, Austro-Hungarian or American physicist
although he did most of his important work in those countries (and actually
obtained both Austrian and American citizenship), would you?

I am aware of the Copenhagen school quantum physics/ the Copenhagen
interpretation, and that the article might try to play on that old thing in
the hopes that we might see a new Danish school in physics. But why?

~~~
mikekchar
I have no idea with what nationality Andrew Jackson identifies with, but as an
immigrant myself, your comment puts my back up a bit. How much of one's life
must be spent in a country before being considered "from" that country in your
philosophy? If you are born in one country does it indelibly mark you for
life? Do you have to be raised in a country in order to identify with it? If
you move somewhere, live many years there, have a family there, speak the
language, follow the customs, have citizenship there and have no intention of
every living anywhere else are you _still_ cursed with your original
nationality? Do you feel that such people who have not spent the entirety of
their life in a single location need some sort of asterisk next to their
nationality? Not a "real" Danish person. Can never become one.

I can understand your question: are they really Danish physicists, or simply
physicists working in Denmark. Personally, I don't care but I suppose if you
are thinking that Denmark is claiming something they don't deserve, then I
suppose it's not a crazy question. However, I hope you can see that the way
you put it could be pretty insulting to someone who literally _is_ Danish, but
just happens not to be born there.

~~~
flexie
I think you misread my comment. I have nothing against immigrants. I am an
immigrant as well, and I have lived in 4 different countries.

I also think it's a bit hard to say that he is "cursed" with his original
nationality or "marked" for life. I don't know him but from his own page on
the Niels Bohr Institute, he sure doesn't seem embarrassed or sad with his
American background:
[http://nbia.nbi.ku.dk/members/jackson/](http://nbia.nbi.ku.dk/members/jackson/)
And why should he be.

I was simply asking why they call it the "Danish" 5 times in the article. I
believe the answer is that they really want to stir up the idea of another
Danish/Copenhagen school as opposed to the mainstream views in physics. That's
it. And I doubt this little debacle will ever evolve into anything as
important as the original Copenhagen school.

Now, I don't think it necessarily matters what nationality we identify with.
To many people, nationality is a legal concept, not a matter of feelings. That
view on nationality has the advantage of being clear. It's hard to know what
people identify with. I am not even sure what I identify with anymore. A bit
of different countries, I guess. Maybe none. As a legal concept, however,
nationality becomes something that is objectively right or wrong.

As to who deserves the credit or blame (Denmark or the US), I have no idea. A
huge part of what makes a great scientist is his upbringing, primary and
secondary education. In this case, they guy got his entire formal education in
the US, and spent several decades there before going to Denmark. Maybe it's
not nation states that deserve credit. Did Argentina make Messi or did Spain?
Or was is just genes and the fact that his family of football players? I don't
know...

~~~
iguy
Agree this usage is odd. My guess is that they are used to describing people
by their institutions: writing things like "Caltech scientists showed..." etc.
is very common in such articles, to save readers from having to keep the names
straight. And of course this identifier is uncontroversial the day after they
got hired.

But who counts as Danish is obviously a thornier question. I don't know that
"nationality we identify with" captures it, as it's mostly about what others
think of the person. It doesn't line up perfectly with having been issued a
passport either. And being Danish is also different to being American...

This applies to sub-national identities too: Wasn't the old-time saying
(something like) that you could become a New Yorker in 6 months, but to come
from Boston took generations?

------
deytempo
It doesn’t make sense to me that something which emanates outward can in any
way cause things to move inward. It just seems to violate logic itself. I find
it more likely that there’s some fundamental aspect of space itself we are
missing which is a purely inward phenomenon. I suppose that force itself too
could be described as a wave but more in the way that you can describe pulling
on an elastic rope that’s tied to something can be described as a wave. Also
if we did live in a holographic universe, there could exist forces which are
simply there and are completely unexplainable from within the hologram.

~~~
EliRivers
Is this logic also violated by seeing a magnet pick up a piece of metal?
Something is clearly emanating outwards from the magnet, yet the piece of
metal is attracted inwards. It doesn't have to make sense to you, but the
experimental evidence seems pretty solid.

 _some fundamental aspect of space itself we are missing which is a purely
inward phenomenon_

A fundamental aspect of space... purely inward phenomenon... That sounds like
gravity, as described by general relativity.

~~~
deytempo
Nothing Eminates from the magnet. The magnet is distorting a field that exists
with or without the magnet

~~~
EliRivers
So a distortion emanates from the magnet? So there is something emanating from
the magnet; a distortion.

That said, in the particle model, there are force carrier particles.

