Newton’s Bad Apples

After spending 20 years within the physics communitee, there are three things I know to be true.

• Bad apples don’t fall far from the tree and if the guy at the top of a scientific heirarchy is a scheming liar, it is likely that those he hires to manage his projects will share similar traits.
• If you want to play a liar’s game, you have to be comfortable with looking in the other direction when you see a lie.
• The rot of a bad apple will draw flies and when a scientific hive buzzes with lies, irony runs thicker than honey.

Rainier Weiss was a college dropout who talked his way into a PhD at MIT. He saw how other physicists were able to secure funding and build careers by selling scam science, so it was perfectly natural for him to emulate the con artists by coming up with his own scam. The only requirement for success was that his idea needed to be so complicated and convoluted that even really smart people would have a hard time understanding that it is nonsense. In physics, there are lots of con artists like this, so he was in good company.

Weiss sought out Kip Thorne, a guy from Cal Tech who understood complicated ideas but who also understood that there was a lot of money in making physics look impenetrable and in selling the government a big pile of nonsense. He probably saw through Weiss’ nonsense, but decided that building an army of physics soldiers was always a good thing, so he gave his name and reputation to the project and gullible politicians signed off on it.

Thus, LIGO – the gravitational wave observatory was born. Little did the politicians know that gravitational wave measurements had been in general disrepute ever since the debacle in the 1960s in which labs across the world claimed to measure gravity waves when all that they were really measuring was noise. Little did the politcians know that because of the scale of earthbound noise, claiming to measure gravity waves from impossibly distant cosmic sources was scam science and always will be.

While I think it is neat to have a seismometer that is so sensitive that it notices when the earth or the sun burps, I am reluctant to believe claims about measurements of invisible, impossibly distant objects which have been invented by theorists. The numbers just do not add up.

In 1991, congress agreed to fund the design phase of LIGO to the tune of 23 million dollars. The construction phase ended in 2002 and was funded by the NSF with an initial grant of 400 million dollars, making it the largest project ever funded by the NSF. The first version didn’t work so more money was spent through other grant requests. I can’t find a tally of how over budget they went or the other grants which they were able to secure, but there were surely many. The grand total between 1990 and 2010 could’ve been a billion dollars or more.

Over the 5 years between 2010 and 2015, another 620 million dollars was spent on the “Advanced LIGO upgrade”. More money from international collaborators also flowed in, but that is hard to tally.

Some first results were announced with great fanfare starting in 2017 and they plan to continue spending money on LIGO until it reaches its “design sensitivity” in 2021. More billion dollar facilities are planned in India and Europe. This is big business and leading such a business pays off. After announcing first results, the project leaders collected millions of dollars in prize money.

Taken altogether, you have a ~2 billion dollar project which has supported a couple thousand professors, students, and scientific equipment manufacturers since the 1990s. On average that would be 35k per year per person – unevenly distributed. I find this appalling not because I hate scientists, but because I don’t believe in their interpretation of their experiment and think that the educations the people in this project got about how science should be done were very bad. They would’ve been better off paying 2000 people to just think about things carefully for 30 years rather than organizing them into an anthill which builds nonsense. Meanwhile, nobody in the scientific community can openly criticize LIGO because if you want to get a grant, you will probably need approval from a LIGOnaut.

With all of this influence and money to spend, Weiss would recruit his science soldiers from MIT and Kip Thorne would recruit his army from Cal Tech. But who were these soldiers? They were smart enough to gain admittance to top universities, they were good at jumping through academic hoops, and good at internalizing the self-contradictions of modern physics, but what sort of people were they?

Rainier Weiss hired a young man named Shoemaker, and like Weiss, Shoemaker was also a college flunk-out, so he felt a lot of loyalty to Weiss for helping him get back into the academic PhD racket. What could be better than a team composed of people who skipped college physics and only learned graduate level physics? For those in the know, college and graduate physics are very different beasts. College physics maintains a degree of consistency while graduate physics fragments into self-contradictory, hyperspecialization and inconsistent semantics – a perfect environment for con artists.

Kip Thorne, a friend of the notorious Jeffrey Epstein, hired a young man named Ott and Ott knew how to squeeze money out of the grant system. He was good at flattering those above him while stepping on those below him and, in the end, those he flattered helped him get tenure, even though he, a married man, was sexually harrassing female students, behaving like an ass, and inventing fake female phd candidates to increase his “diversity score” in grant applications.

Ott, who was about 34 at the time and married, appears to have become creepily and secretly obsessed with Kleiser, who was about 23, and who he barely knew. Kleiser had no knowledge of this obsession until some time after she was fired, apparently for failing to live up to Ott’s fantasy. Kleiser was shown a blog where Ott pseudonymously published nearly a hundred bizarre “love” poems. 

Despite many complaints of this sort, Ott still got tenure at Cal Tech. I can only conclude that he had dirt on some powerful friends. Sometimes, it pays to be in on a lie.

But what is this great lie? Heh. It is a doozy.

When I see a question on gravity waves, Emily Dickenson’s poem often comes to mind.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth’s superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind —

The reason for this is that everybody approaches the topic with a different angle and it becomes very hard to figure out who is correct but speaking in an obscure language and who is incorrect but speaking in a popular language. When the tower of Babel gets high, everyone starts speaking different languages. I’ll try to use the most jargon-free language I can summon so that even non-physicists can understand the scam.

Q: A gravity wave is a change in gravity as a function of time and space. What is the effect of a change in gravity on mass?

A: The amount of mass would change as a function of space and time, but if every mass in a system changes at precisely the same rate, no single mass would have any ability to detect any change because a measurement of mass is relative. This is why LIGO is a scam.

Q: A bubble held underwater in Archimedes’ bathtub is slowly squeezed by a pressure-wave. At the same time, short, transverse waves reflect off of the compressed bubble and experience a slight phase shift as a result of the pressure wave. What is the effect of the pressure wave on the mass of the bubble and how does this relate to the phase shift?

A: If the mass of the bubble is defined by the motion of the particles in the bubble relative to the water, then pressurization produces a change in mass through temperature change and rotation change. If there is a significant delay between the compression and the increase in internal motion, then the reflected transverse waves will measure the pressure-wave. If there is not a significant delay, they will not. This is why LIGO is a scam.

This picture could be redefined such that the bubble is the earth and the long, slow pressure wave is a gravity wave coming in from deep space. If gravity waves change the relative masses of the earth and the moon, then we would detect small changes in the phase of light waves reflected off of the moon – not because the distance to the center of the moon changed, but because the moon itself changed in diameter. Unfortunately, due to the divergence of a laser beam and the precision requirements, this isn’t an experimentally feasible measurement.

Meanwhile, LIGO attempts to measure gravitational-wave-induced phase shifts produced by reflections between earthbound mirrors, but

• this change is really too small of a quantity to measure. The phase shift is supposed to be a fraction of the width of a proton – or the width of a hair relative to the distance to Alpha Centauri and back.
• we have no experimental knowledge of how atomic dimensions within mirrors respond to changes in gravity and we have no direct knowledge of how gravitational waves couple to individual particles. (note that I used the words ‘changes’ and ‘couple to’ because we are not concerned with steady states of acoustic streaming.)

That is probably the reason that LIGO avoids framing their experiment in terms of atomic contraction as I have done and instead they tell us that space stretches and contracts at different rates for gravitational and light waves. I wholly disapprove of this manner of speech because it is based on an unverified assumption and it invites sloppy thinking – the sort of thinking that a con-artist uses bewilder a mark.

One can describe space as a coordinate system against which matter moves, stretches, and contracts, or one can describe space as something which contracts and stretches when waves travel through it. LIGO has chosen the latter convention and it is bad because it avoids any description of a physical mechanism.

The difficult issue which LIGO waves away is that, as far as we know, a particle of mass or a particle of light will change size in just about the same way when a gravitational wave hits it, so how can you measure a gravitational wave with light? You can’t. The bubbles in Archimedes’ bathtub make this clear. The original Michelson-Morely experiment made this clear as well.

I would believe in LIGO if there were an experiment running in parallel which used a completely different mechanism to measure the same effect, but the other options are no more promising.

You could try to measure a relative change in mass via tiny temperature changes or by counting the number of particles popping into and out of existence, but we can’t get enough statistics over a short enough time step to measure this with the required precision.

The point I’m trying to make is that twenty years ago, there were many, valid doubts about LIGO which were widely discussed on university campuses. But as the experiment slogged along for decades with no results, the critics lost interest and their voices faded away. The critics no longer felt needed because the experiment would surely die out on its own without any damage to the scientific record.

Meanwhile, even if LIGO was not really as useful for astronomy as hoped, the people who funded the project were interested in the byproducts of the endeavor.

• You get civilian research on laser systems which are powerful enough to instantaneously fry your head off from a distance of 4 kilometers.
• You get an army of group-thinkers with technical know-how.
• You get an unusually sensitive seismometer and some nice research on finding signals in noisy data (a useful tool for the NSA when they are listening to telephone conversations).
• You get a great recruitment tool for the next generation of science-soldiers.
• You subsidize companies which produce the products you want for high power laser systems with other applications.

The early criticisms and unresolved debates had been largely forgotten by the time an announcement of a gravitational wave detection was made and science cheerleaders in the media began to jump around and wave their pom-poms. Meanwhile, professional physicists briefly glanced up from their highly specialized work, said ‘nicely done’ and went back to their favorite obsession. They didn’t think that critically analyzing the ‘major result’ was in their purview.

The reason for this is that there is a cultural problem in physics. The sorts of physicists who are critical or distrustful of their colleagues are thought of as asocial and are generally driven away from the government-funded, academic monasteries. This means that practicing physicists are not accustomed to criticizing other physicists’ work, especially if it doesn’t lie within their narrow research area. Even then, open, direct criticism is discouraged. You have to use an oblique approach. I think this is why LIGO escaped criticism for 20 years.

All at once, with millions in funding at stake, LIGO launches a PR blitz about their first results and people who’ve never thought about LIGO before are given the job of granting million dollar awards to the LIGO project leader even though they don’t know much about the details of the experiment.

They may not have been aware that one of LIGO’s top experts is this guy:

The guy is not dumb, of course, but I am not at all satisfied with his sidestepping of the basic mechanism of a Michelson interferometer with some hand-waving about ‘fresh light’. His musings about deep space cello music and black hole hairs also give me pause.

When space stretches due to a gravitational wave, the wavelength of light stretches, so you can’t measure gravitational waves with light. End of story. The experiment shouldn’t work for the same reason that the original, Michelson-Morely experiment didn’t show evidence of luminiferous ether.

The guy interviewing him is smart enough not to show his cards, but if you listen closely to his video on the experiment, you’ll see skepticism. “A tiny fraction of the width of the proton? Really? This is like measuring changes in the distance between Earth and Alpha Centauri with an accuracy of the width of a hair.”

That is one criticism of the experimental design, but there are others.

Respected researchers from Niels Bohr Institue have questioned LIGO’s data analysis methods and shown that local sources of noise could’ve easily looked like what they claimed could only be caused by black hole mergers in distant galaxies. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.02350…

What surprises me is that this is what the LIGO data really looks like without “stronger processing methods” than just a whitening filter and an FFT.

A Response to “On the time lags of the LIGO signals” (Guest Post)

Their filtered and FFTd data looks nothing like the famous “ringdown” in their original paper because “stronger processing methods” refers to having a “template” of the signal they want to find and scanning through their random data until they find something similar and then subtracting away the parts of the signal which don’t look like the template. (That’s not the scientific method I learned.)

Even if you accept that the signal comes from black holes, there is a lot to criticize about how the data is interpreted.

If you detect a wave at two locations and you know its propagation speed, you can determine the direction from which the wave came, but not the distance to the thing that caused the wave. LIGO claims that they can determine the size of the objects which created the wave they detected based on the frequency of the wave. Then they use the estimates of how big they think the objects were together with guesses about how far away such objects typically are to make an estimate of how big the wave should be when it gets to us. Ignoring circularity of logic, an absolute measurement of the amplitude of the wave should then tell you more about how far away it was and since they assume that the signal traveled at the speed of light, they conclude when the event occurred.

There are a lot of assumptions in this chain of logic and while it makes sense at first glance, an absolute measurement of the amplitude of the wave isn’t really possible with their apparatus. Every redshift, amplification, or filtering of the signal is associated with a factor which adds an error to a determination of the absolute amplitude of the signal, and by tuning these difficult to determine error estimates, you can give yourself just about any result you want.

The size of the events LIGO detected also casts doubt on the measurements because either the events are much larger than what astronomers expected or LIGO’s interpretation of the data is wrong.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/06/16/was-it-all-just-noise-independent-analysis-casts-doubt-on-ligos-detections/#231838145516

None of these doubts rely on the fact that there are still many scientists who don’t believe in black holes, but that is also a good reason to doubt the experiment. Twenty years ago, most scientists still viewed black holes as a thought experiment gone wrong, but today we have phd students who think they’ve taken pictures of them. What is certain ist that if black holes are a just-so story we’ve come up with to explain the behavior of dots of light in the sky, then LIGO will go down as one of the greatest cases of group delusion in scientific history.

Just because theory suggests that a certain type of object might exist doesn’t mean that it does exist. Unicorns are perfectly consistent with biology and evolution, but they don’t exist.

If I am being particularly uncharitable, I look at LIGO and think, “When unicorns collide in deep space, I can detect it through changes in pixie dust concentration.”

Most people are more charitable than that and to them, the neutron star collision detection is LIGO’s ace in the hole. They believe they saw evidence of a collision when they saw bursts of light emerging from the same section of the sky from which the gravitational wave came, but there are good reasons to be skeptical there, as well.

The more recent neutron star collision measurement in which a gamma-ray burst was measured at the same time that blips were detected at the two sites in the US and at one site in Italy. Four faint, noisy events occurring at the same time, what are the odds?

Seriously, that is a legitimate question since the first neutron star binary was presented in 1993 and until 2003, people thought that they would merge in our galaxy once every few hundred years. Nowadays, it is thought that mergers will happen once every two years. Opinions about astronomy sure change fast.

When you look at the details of the LIGO neutron star merger, you can still see room for doubt:

Merging neutron stars generate gravitational waves and a celestial light show

New paper claims that LIGO’s gravitational wave detection from a neutron star merger can’t be right

When your results suggest that the speed of light has been exceeded, that usually means that you have made an error in the interpretation or execution of your measurement. This is yet another reason to believe that LIGO doesn’t understand what they are measuring.

It wasn’t as though all 4 locations were independently looking at the sky and they all simultaneously saw something and simultaneously said, “Wow! I’ve got to call the other guys and find out if they all saw the same thing that I saw!”

It wasn’t like that at all.

There was a game of telephone in which one group found something and told the next group to double check their data from 6 minutes ago and so on down the line for four different labs: Fermi, Hanford, Livingston, Virgo. Then they all combined the delays between the blips that they found buried in noise and used that to triangulate a patch of space in the sky which was several times larger than the moon.

After that, every telescope on earth was searching for something odd happening in that section of the sky. Did they find something? Sure they did. A faint, weird thing that everybody started studying all at once. I’m a bit confused by the fact that the timing of pulses from all of the different wavelength ranges don’t line up perfectly (or at all, in some cases).

http://iopscience.iop.org/articl… (the big Science magazine issue dedicated to the measurements was behind a paywall)

The paper they ended up writing had 4600 authors. This is roughly one third of all astronomers in existence. That is weird.

This all sounds okay until you realize that one year earlier, Fermi sounded a false alarm about a weak gamma ray detection which they associated with one of LIGO’s black hole mergers.

“The Fermi team calculated the odds of such an event being the result of a coincidence or noise at 0.22%. However, observations from the INTEGRALtelescope’s all-sky SPI-ACS instrument indicated that any energy emission in gamma-rays and hard X-rays from the event was less than one millionth of the energy emitted as gravitational waves, concluding that “this limit excludes the possibility that the event is associated with substantial gamma-ray radiation, directed towards the observer.” If the signal observed by the Fermi GBM was genuinely astrophysical, SPI-ACS would have detected it with a significance of 15 sigma above the background. The AGILE space telescope also did not detect a gamma-ray counterpart of the event.

A follow-up analysis of the Fermi report by an independent group, released in June 2016, purported to identify statistical flaws in the initial analysis, concluding that the observation was consistent with a statistical fluctuation or an Earth albedo transient on a 1-second timescale.”

Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope – Wikipedia

The sort of gamma ray detection at Fermi that initiates the search for correlations with LIGO happens many times per day.

It is easy to fool yourself in these matters and when thousands of people are all expecting to see something buried in noise, I think a fluke is still a possibility.

Call me crazy, but I think that skepticism is a good thing to hold onto when you are dealing with noisy, sensitive measurements taken by highly motivated groups of people.

If you’d like my opinion on the scam science of neutron stars, read this.

More details on LIGO skepticism can be found in: https://www.quora.com/profile/Kirsten-Hacker/answers/Laser-Interferometer-Gravitational-wave-Observatory-LIGO

Thaddeus Guttierez also posts regularly about LIGO skepticism. His style involves a feast of academic keywords. I try to avoid jargon in my writing, but he embraces it with a fantastically ironic effect. It is the perfect way to say to the academy: “I see your nonsense for what it is. I know your language and you can’t get past me with a gish gallop.”

I know the language too, but academia is not my target audience. I want to let regular people in on the joke. Much of big science research is not nearly as solid as portrayed in the media and it has been like this ever since the government funded science community was created as an offshoot of the Manhattan project.

The tree picture is from Sean of https://arbtalk.co.uk/forums/topic/107132-underwater-trees/