Pretty much everything here seems wrong to me. Some comments, in rough order of appearance:
You call the EHT a multi-billion-dollar project. I don’t think I believe you. Can you provide some actual figures?
You say that LIGO-VIRGO “filters their noisy data with a template of what they want to see”. _Every_ kind of filtering can, with a sufficient lack of charity, be described that way. (E.g., even the most simple-minded moving-average filter amounts to saying that you’re looking for signals with relatively little very high-frequency content, but you expect there to he high frequencies present in the noise.) There is nothing wrong with doing it, either; what matters is how you then analyse the results. If you think LIGO’s analysis is wrong, you need to explain how it’s wrong; making a complaint that amounts to “they filter their data” is no good; that’s what everyone does and there’s nothing wrong with it.
You say that it’s circular reasoning if you say you’ve confirmed GR by using GR to construct theories and then checking that your observations match the theories. It’s not circular reasoning at all, it’s how science works. You take a theory, you put some effort into working out what the theory says you should see, and you look at whether you see that or not. Again, it’s very possible to do that wrongly—confirmation bias is a thing—but a complaint that amounts to “they claimed to have confirmed a theory by doing experiments based on that theory” is no good; that’s what everyone does and there’s nothing wrong with it.
You say the gravitational wave community has exhibited a “lack of attention to earlier measurements”, on the basis that earlier measurements claimed to have found black holes and turned out to be wrong, and LIGO/VIRGO isn’t doing the _exact same thing_ that made it possible to check that the earlier claims were wrong, namely combining large numbers of independent verifications. But (1) your description of those earlier measurements doesn’t match what’s in the article you link to (you say hundreds of independent groups all thought they’d found GWs and they only discovered they were wrong when they combined their results; the article says _one_ researcher claimed to have found GWs, everyone else disagreed, and when they looked they found errors in his analysis), and (2) it is not always the case that when something goes wrong and gets fixed, next time around you should apply the exact same fix in advance; sometimes there are better ways. Repeating an experiment N times reduces the noise by a factor of sqrt(N) (at least for certain common kinds of noise) and there may be ways to reduce it more effectively per dollar spent.
You say LIGO fails to use “control variables”. This is nonsense. Anything they don’t vary is a control variable, and “using control variables” is not a virtue. What you’re actually describing in the paragraph beginning “In a well-designed experiment” is a control _group_ or simply a _control_. Some experiments use controls, some don’t; it’s not clear to me what it would _mean_ to use a control in the case of LIGO, and it seems to me that you could consider _all the times it doesn’t detect anything_ to constitute control measurements.
You say LIGO “had announced 50 detections” as of 2019-12 but as of 2020-12 “are only standing by 10 of those”. But you don’t quote what they actually said, or provide any links. The “Open data from the first and second observing runs of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo” paper published on 2020-12-25 says that those runs produced “11 confident detections and 14 marginal triggers”. That doesn’t look to me like a claim of 50 detections. Could you please be more specific about what they claimed in 2019-12 and what they said in 2020-05? I am betting that if there is anything resembling a “50 detections” claim, it was something like “50 candidate events” and confirming only 10 of them is in no way evidence of anything wrong.
You say “They expected to see at least a few black hole collisions and at least one neutron star collision per month since August 2019. It has been 9 months”. (Obvious implication: they aren’t seeing what they said they would see.) According to https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/news/ligo20200326, when they suspended their third observing run near the end of 2020-03 (because of COVID-19) they had seen 56 detections (I don’t know whether this means candidates, fully confirmed detections, or what) in the ~400 days of run 3. That’s about four per month. Seems to fit their prediction just fine.
You complain, again, about LIGO’s use of “templates” and compare a couple of graphs to show how different less-filtered data look compared with their published plots. But your plot purporting to be “the same data … with only a whitening filter and a Fourier transform” is no such thing. Look at the y-axis label: “Cross-correlation”. This is the cross-correlation between the Hanford and Livingston signals. It is nothing remotely like the raw data, nor should it be.
So far as I can see, in the plot you show (“This was what LIGO published and used to win a Nobel Prize”)the data in the top frames is _not_ the result of any sort of template-filtering at all. (I think there’s some bandpass filtering, which is absolutely routine, and that’s it.)
You quote some accusations of “misconduct” on the basis that “pieces of that figure were illustrative and the detection claim is not based on that plot”. The thing that’s “illustrative” is the _second_ row in the “Nobel Prize” plot, and the point of the remark about how it’s only “illustrative” is that the properly-done fit (which _was_ the basis for the detection claim) matches the observed signals _better_. The point of the “illustrative” plots is to let you see by eye that the actually-observed signals have the right sort of shape.
You object to the LIGO researchers’ response to the Copenhagen objectors because they said (in your paraphrase) “you forgot to use an FFT windowing function even though that is a mistake no physicist would ever make”. Well, sometimes physicists make mistakes you wouldn’t think they would. The relevant question here is: _Did_ Cresswell et al fail to do it, or didn’t they? Green and Moffatt say their results look like they did fail. I haven’t seen any rebuttal to that.
You say that the LIGO researchers have no way to distinguish distant gravitational waves from other possible sources nearer-by. Well, obviously one can never prove that an observation doesn’t come from some currently unknown source producing signals by currently unknown means, but that criticism applies equally to _all_ observational science. We think we see a supernova a long way off, but maybe it’s actually some thing much nearer to us that _just happens_ to have happened exactly in between us and the star we think went supernova. Sure, it’s possible, but we have a simpler explanation! And so it is for LIGO. If you have a specific alternative theory for what LIGO has been detecting, let’s hear it. (You kinda-sorta, I assume mostly frivolously, mention a possible string of events. “After all, if something dark and mysterious happens in deep space and causes the sun to burp and that causes the Earth’s core to gurgle and that causes a lake to heat up which causes a thunderstorm which causes a lightning strike which hits a Schumann resonance and LIGO detects that …”. But obviously that’s not relevant because (1) it has no details that would enable us to tell what sort of observations such a sequence of events might produce and (2) something _that_ local would not produce results that would fool LIGO except by extreme coincidence; that’s why they have multiple detectors thousands of miles apart.)
You complain that the black-hole events LIGO claims to have found “are absurdly larger than what they had expected to see based on other measurements and based on the theory of black holes”. I would like some details substantiating that complaint. I remark that LIGO would _always_ tend to detect larger-mass black-hole events for the obvious reason that they produce stronger gravitational waves and LIGO needs to be staggeringly sensitive to detect anything at all.
Your theoretical objections to the whole mode of operation of LIGO looks all wrong to me, in multiple ways, but I am not a general-relativist and won’t get into that particular argument (but I remark that if you were right, that seems like the sort of error that I would expect The Scientific Establishment to pounce on instantly, so the fact that LIGO is generally a respectable high-prestige operation is evidence against).
And, while we’re talking about the actual physics, the following sentence seems to me like evidence of hopeless confusion (on your part, I’m afraid, not that of the scientific establishment): “there will be discontinuities between transverse and longitudinal waves which might be measured as a sort of friction coefficient [...] In olden times, one would call these discontinuities magnetic monopoles, but today, we call them all sorts of things—displacement currents, positrons, electrons, matter, antimatter, … black holes”. I don’t think this makes contact with reality at any point.
Somewhere around here, I lost the will to live, so I’ve paid less detailed attention to the end than to the beginning.
(I am very fallible and the chances are that there is at least one mistake in what I’ve written above. But there would need to be one hell of a lot of mistakes for your complaints about gravitational wave detection to be convincing to me.)
Pretty much everything here seems wrong to me. Some comments, in rough order of appearance:
You call the EHT a multi-billion-dollar project. I don’t think I believe you. Can you provide some actual figures?
You say that LIGO-VIRGO “filters their noisy data with a template of what they want to see”. _Every_ kind of filtering can, with a sufficient lack of charity, be described that way. (E.g., even the most simple-minded moving-average filter amounts to saying that you’re looking for signals with relatively little very high-frequency content, but you expect there to he high frequencies present in the noise.) There is nothing wrong with doing it, either; what matters is how you then analyse the results. If you think LIGO’s analysis is wrong, you need to explain how it’s wrong; making a complaint that amounts to “they filter their data” is no good; that’s what everyone does and there’s nothing wrong with it.
You say that it’s circular reasoning if you say you’ve confirmed GR by using GR to construct theories and then checking that your observations match the theories. It’s not circular reasoning at all, it’s how science works. You take a theory, you put some effort into working out what the theory says you should see, and you look at whether you see that or not. Again, it’s very possible to do that wrongly—confirmation bias is a thing—but a complaint that amounts to “they claimed to have confirmed a theory by doing experiments based on that theory” is no good; that’s what everyone does and there’s nothing wrong with it.
You say the gravitational wave community has exhibited a “lack of attention to earlier measurements”, on the basis that earlier measurements claimed to have found black holes and turned out to be wrong, and LIGO/VIRGO isn’t doing the _exact same thing_ that made it possible to check that the earlier claims were wrong, namely combining large numbers of independent verifications. But (1) your description of those earlier measurements doesn’t match what’s in the article you link to (you say hundreds of independent groups all thought they’d found GWs and they only discovered they were wrong when they combined their results; the article says _one_ researcher claimed to have found GWs, everyone else disagreed, and when they looked they found errors in his analysis), and (2) it is not always the case that when something goes wrong and gets fixed, next time around you should apply the exact same fix in advance; sometimes there are better ways. Repeating an experiment N times reduces the noise by a factor of sqrt(N) (at least for certain common kinds of noise) and there may be ways to reduce it more effectively per dollar spent.
You say LIGO fails to use “control variables”. This is nonsense. Anything they don’t vary is a control variable, and “using control variables” is not a virtue. What you’re actually describing in the paragraph beginning “In a well-designed experiment” is a control _group_ or simply a _control_. Some experiments use controls, some don’t; it’s not clear to me what it would _mean_ to use a control in the case of LIGO, and it seems to me that you could consider _all the times it doesn’t detect anything_ to constitute control measurements.
You say LIGO “had announced 50 detections” as of 2019-12 but as of 2020-12 “are only standing by 10 of those”. But you don’t quote what they actually said, or provide any links. The “Open data from the first and second observing runs of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo” paper published on 2020-12-25 says that those runs produced “11 confident detections and 14 marginal triggers”. That doesn’t look to me like a claim of 50 detections. Could you please be more specific about what they claimed in 2019-12 and what they said in 2020-05? I am betting that if there is anything resembling a “50 detections” claim, it was something like “50 candidate events” and confirming only 10 of them is in no way evidence of anything wrong.
You say “They expected to see at least a few black hole collisions and at least one neutron star collision per month since August 2019. It has been 9 months”. (Obvious implication: they aren’t seeing what they said they would see.) According to https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/news/ligo20200326, when they suspended their third observing run near the end of 2020-03 (because of COVID-19) they had seen 56 detections (I don’t know whether this means candidates, fully confirmed detections, or what) in the ~400 days of run 3. That’s about four per month. Seems to fit their prediction just fine.
You complain, again, about LIGO’s use of “templates” and compare a couple of graphs to show how different less-filtered data look compared with their published plots. But your plot purporting to be “the same data … with only a whitening filter and a Fourier transform” is no such thing. Look at the y-axis label: “Cross-correlation”. This is the cross-correlation between the Hanford and Livingston signals. It is nothing remotely like the raw data, nor should it be.
So far as I can see, in the plot you show (“This was what LIGO published and used to win a Nobel Prize”)the data in the top frames is _not_ the result of any sort of template-filtering at all. (I think there’s some bandpass filtering, which is absolutely routine, and that’s it.)
You quote some accusations of “misconduct” on the basis that “pieces of that figure were illustrative and the detection claim is not based on that plot”. The thing that’s “illustrative” is the _second_ row in the “Nobel Prize” plot, and the point of the remark about how it’s only “illustrative” is that the properly-done fit (which _was_ the basis for the detection claim) matches the observed signals _better_. The point of the “illustrative” plots is to let you see by eye that the actually-observed signals have the right sort of shape.
You object to the LIGO researchers’ response to the Copenhagen objectors because they said (in your paraphrase) “you forgot to use an FFT windowing function even though that is a mistake no physicist would ever make”. Well, sometimes physicists make mistakes you wouldn’t think they would. The relevant question here is: _Did_ Cresswell et al fail to do it, or didn’t they? Green and Moffatt say their results look like they did fail. I haven’t seen any rebuttal to that.
You say that the LIGO researchers have no way to distinguish distant gravitational waves from other possible sources nearer-by. Well, obviously one can never prove that an observation doesn’t come from some currently unknown source producing signals by currently unknown means, but that criticism applies equally to _all_ observational science. We think we see a supernova a long way off, but maybe it’s actually some thing much nearer to us that _just happens_ to have happened exactly in between us and the star we think went supernova. Sure, it’s possible, but we have a simpler explanation! And so it is for LIGO. If you have a specific alternative theory for what LIGO has been detecting, let’s hear it. (You kinda-sorta, I assume mostly frivolously, mention a possible string of events. “After all, if something dark and mysterious happens in deep space and causes the sun to burp and that causes the Earth’s core to gurgle and that causes a lake to heat up which causes a thunderstorm which causes a lightning strike which hits a Schumann resonance and LIGO detects that …”. But obviously that’s not relevant because (1) it has no details that would enable us to tell what sort of observations such a sequence of events might produce and (2) something _that_ local would not produce results that would fool LIGO except by extreme coincidence; that’s why they have multiple detectors thousands of miles apart.)
You complain that the black-hole events LIGO claims to have found “are absurdly larger than what they had expected to see based on other measurements and based on the theory of black holes”. I would like some details substantiating that complaint. I remark that LIGO would _always_ tend to detect larger-mass black-hole events for the obvious reason that they produce stronger gravitational waves and LIGO needs to be staggeringly sensitive to detect anything at all.
Your theoretical objections to the whole mode of operation of LIGO looks all wrong to me, in multiple ways, but I am not a general-relativist and won’t get into that particular argument (but I remark that if you were right, that seems like the sort of error that I would expect The Scientific Establishment to pounce on instantly, so the fact that LIGO is generally a respectable high-prestige operation is evidence against).
And, while we’re talking about the actual physics, the following sentence seems to me like evidence of hopeless confusion (on your part, I’m afraid, not that of the scientific establishment): “there will be discontinuities between transverse and longitudinal waves which might be measured as a sort of friction coefficient [...] In olden times, one would call these discontinuities magnetic monopoles, but today, we call them all sorts of things—displacement currents, positrons, electrons, matter, antimatter, … black holes”. I don’t think this makes contact with reality at any point.
Somewhere around here, I lost the will to live, so I’ve paid less detailed attention to the end than to the beginning.
(I am very fallible and the chances are that there is at least one mistake in what I’ve written above. But there would need to be one hell of a lot of mistakes for your complaints about gravitational wave detection to be convincing to me.)