A lot of this reads like you are trying to apply the structure of an experiment to a thing that is, um, not an experiment. Like, we all learn the steps of an experiment in school (where they often incorrectly call the experimental method “the scientific method”). But there are whole sciences, like astronomy, and cosmology, and geology, that don’t do experiments, they just make observations and analyze them in the context of what we already know from experiments in other areas of science. That is what LIGO does. We can’t do experiments on gravitational ways, because we don’t have the capacity to produce gravitational waves. All we can do is observe them. And that is still a perfectly valid scientific endeavor. And in particular, it is a scientific endeavor in which the notion of a “control” doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense. Now, I don’t have the technical competence to evaluate these kinds of high level physics things for myself, I don’t know the math of general relativity, so I’m not going to try. But I generally trust the scientific community, and I’m not going to update much on a blog post that seems to misunderstand what these things are trying to do.
A lot of this reads like you are trying to apply the structure of an experiment to a thing that is, um, not an experiment. Like, we all learn the steps of an experiment in school (where they often incorrectly call the experimental method “the scientific method”). But there are whole sciences, like astronomy, and cosmology, and geology, that don’t do experiments, they just make observations and analyze them in the context of what we already know from experiments in other areas of science. That is what LIGO does. We can’t do experiments on gravitational ways, because we don’t have the capacity to produce gravitational waves. All we can do is observe them. And that is still a perfectly valid scientific endeavor. And in particular, it is a scientific endeavor in which the notion of a “control” doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense. Now, I don’t have the technical competence to evaluate these kinds of high level physics things for myself, I don’t know the math of general relativity, so I’m not going to try. But I generally trust the scientific community, and I’m not going to update much on a blog post that seems to misunderstand what these things are trying to do.