Gravitational Waves May Have Been Detected In 1987
5 Mar 2009 11:01:36 UTC
Topic 194215
(moderation:
For those of you, who don't read Slashdot, here is a pointer to an artcle there, that points to an article ;-) about some speculations that gravitational waves might already have been measured.
Link to the Slashdot-article:
http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/_tIrjtItWTg/article.pl
Link to the refered article:
http://arxivblog.com/?p=1271
Regards, Lothar
Gravitational Waves May Have Been Detected In 1987
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Thanks for the interesting links!
There have been other claims surrounding the SN1987A event as well, e.g. see this thread in the Science section.
The problem with the Weber claims is that he made so many coincidence claims, none could be reproduced by others at that time and in one event, he even observed some statistically significant coincidences that turned out to be based on raw data that was pure noise by accident. So evidently his statistical analysis software was able to turn pure noise into signals sometimes, which didn't help the credibility of his claims.
The case surrounding Joseph
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The case surrounding Joseph Weber is well documented in the gravitational wave community. He first reported a detection in Dec. 1968. For the next 81 days, Weber's team observed 17 signficant double coincident events. After an extended period of verification, Weber announced the discovery at a relativity conference in June, 1969. The news was met with applause, and it also provided motivation for a series of experimentalists to attempt to repeat Weber's searches. But by 1972, all attempts to repeat Weber's claims were unsuccessful, and the GW community began to doubt the validity of Weber's detection even though Weber's group continued to report signals on a daily basis.
In the decade that followed, and with a number of acrimonious confrontations at conferences, the Weber bar approach faded from view, along with his claim of detection.
RE: The case surrounding
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Independently from Weber's result, the resonant mass approach is still alive. See this link on the GEO600 home page:
Resonant detectors
Tullio
RE: Independently from
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And it's good that alternative approaches are still explored, I guess. However, at least the MiniGRAIL project listed on that page seems barely to be alive. The last update of the project's homepage dates from "October 6 - 2007". I wonder what happened to them.
CU
Bikeman