Is there a simple way to detect gravitational waves?

brucep said:
A lot of strong field physics is esoteric. That's why it's fun. For danshawen he must feel intimidated by esoteric fun derivations from gravitational physics.
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Agreed...The thing is Thorne is speculating on what is allowed by the laws of physics and GR, and anyone worth his salt knows that.
But this highly emotive rant smells of sour grapes to me. sheesh!
 
jcc said:
fair enough, opinion various.
so far 1:1, you are not winning yet. any 1 else support you?
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Lots of reputable scientists who have experimental and theoretical physics careers to support their claim understand as I do that quantum entanglement is not a means to bulk transport of matter or energy. And exotic matter the way Thorne uses it is about as valid a scientific principle as sprinkling a wormhole with some fairy dust. Even if the exotic matter is entangled, you still must get it where it needs to go, and a wormhole (even if one existed) cannot accomplish this, even in small measure, Such things are not traversible by energy or matter. End of story.

Mainstream quantum theory says that the sigma field is entangled everywhere with itself. How does something like a wormhole modify this idea? Pick a theory (NOT several theories) nd run with it, but not the way Thorne did. It's a dead end. That's what pseudoscience and pseudomath does for you. It is a contradiction engine.

Any other opinions expressed here on the subject, in the absence of experimental or observational evidence to the contrary, are in actual fact no more or less valid than my own, or for that matter, Kip Thorne's. The difference is, this is a man who built a career selling fairy dust as a substitute for science.

People are treating the man like he is Walt Disney or something. Fine by me, but don't pretend it's anything but entertainment, like Mickey Mouse was. Mickey Mouse may have built a few bridges, but not by means of any physics Walt developed.
 
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1. sun light is photon emitted by electrons change orbitals in hot atoms on the sun.

2. sun light is gravitational waves produced by vibrating hot atoms on the sun.

which one is logically/factly bullshit? which 1 is your pick?
 
jcc said:
1. sun light is photon emitted by electrons change orbitals in hot atoms on the sun.

2. sun light is gravitational waves produced by vibrating hot atoms on the sun.

which one is logically/factly bullshit? which 1 is your pick?
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#1 has been observed by means of spectrographic analysis of its chemical components for over two centuries.

#2 has yet to be confirmed observationally because, for one thing, Thorne has been a consultant on LIGO. If it was the wrong instrument to be able to do this, he wouldn't be able to tell you. I've seen him present his "data" on this.

It's like waiting to see the first proton decay, and soliciting for more funding for as long as it takes. Nice work if you can get it.
 
Kittamaru said:
I think we are done with this particular farce... To pseudoscience we go
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So, you really think that this is pseudoscience, and that Kip Thorne's wormholes are nothing of the sort?

Incredible. But, as I said, your opinion is as good as mine, or any of Thorne's colleagues, evidently, so dispense with this thread as you like.

Ordinarily, I don't move to change subjects on a thread, but since you insist on dispensing with this PERFECTLY civil and considerate discussion on the topic of science fraud:

Twenty years ago (about the same time I saw Thorne's proposal for making a traversable wormhole) I had an extended online conversation with a member or the Sons of Confederate Veterans over the subject of their having a Confederate flag displayed prominently on government property and elsewhere. I told him (and others since then) that it was a symbol of hate and of racism, and that if he wished it to symbolize something else, it was too late to change perceptions of it. Who was right about that? I can easily substantiate this discussion for you if you wish. I was not nasty about my opinion during the exchange, but the political climate was much different then.

Have a care about which opinions you favor. Some of my more vocal critics here have written 10 times as many posts as I have, and haven't garnered near as many "likes". Science is no popularity contest, or so I thought about 20 years ago. I'm big enough to admit when I'm wrong, as many of my critics can attest. Almost none of them ever address the substance or science of most of my arguments. Have you not noticed? Is this going to be a science discussion board or not?
 
You haven't made any arguments, other than you don't like Kip Thorne and his theories.
 
I was actually a big fan of Kip Thorne (25 years ago) until I read that wikipedia article about threading a non-traversible wormhole with negative energy exotic matter in order to make it traversable. It just totally tore it for me; his credibility was replaced by one of his traversable wormholes.

So that I don't come off sounding like Louis Savain (who hates basically everyone in physics), I'm going to go out on a limb and list the physicists and physics texts for whom /which I have a great deal of respect and admiration, in no particular order:

Galileo (managed to work out t^2 dependence of gravity acceleration)
Isaac Newton (obviously)
Mendeleev (periodic table of the elements- at first not so popular, but excelled in an area Newton had no clue about)
Niels Bohr (sometimes abrasive, but effective physics style)
Albert Einstein (almost always right; the genuine article)
Kurt Gödel (many viewed him as a one trick pony, without too many variations on his most famous work, but it was a very good one)
Enrico Fermi (in many ways, a man far ahead of his time)
Emmy Noether (identified conservation laws associated with gauge theory and Lagrangian / Hamiltonian dynamics)
Paul Dirac (brilliant and edgy, not afraid to go where no theorist has gone before)
Resnick and Halliday (college physics textbook for decades)
Thomas, Calculus and Analytic Geometry, any edition (vector calculus textbook for decades)
Edward M. Purcell (Nobel Laureate for MRI technology, author of Berkely Physics Vol II- Electricity and Magnetism)
Any other 20th century Nobel Laureate for physics, and there are a lot of those too numerous to name
John D. Nolan (university of Pittsburg)
Richard Feynman (I have all of his lecture series books, and an audio book with several recorded lectures which I treasure)
Wolfgang Pauli (brilliant, but could not seem to get along with a lot of his colleagues)
Wilhelm Röntgen (the identification of the atomic nucleus with crude equipment)
Nikola Tesla (a better man than Edison ever was, and was kind to animals, especially pigeons)
Max Planck (needs no explanation)
Werner Heisenberg (uncertainty principle genius)
Robert Townsend (laser optics pioneer)
Carroll O. Alley (first aircraft/atomic clock verification of GR, now key to GPS-- almost my physics mentor)
Arthur C. Clarke (invented geostationary satellites, launched my engineering career doing Intelsat R&D)
Bill Phillips (NIST, atomic clocks)
Any physicist associated even peripherally with the Large Hadron Collider, which includes our own rpenner
Carl Sagan (needs no intro, and the ONLY cosmologist other than Einstein on this list)
Claude Shannon (information theory)
Stephen Hawking (needs no intro)
Roger Penrose (occasionally wrong, but so what?)
Phillip Morris (diminuative physicist of the 1970s)
Vera Rubin (astrophysicst, friend of a number of close friends)
Neil De Grasse Tyson (needs no intro)
Bill Nye (undeniably belongs here)
Michau Kaku (my kind of physics nut ball)
Ray Davis (early neutrino detector, Nobel Laureate, friend of a friend)
Sean Carroll (even though badly influenced by Kip Thorne, is still a first-rate physicist from Cal Tech)
Bolzman (thermodynamics/entropy pioneer)
Irwin Schrödinger (didn't deserve the grilling Bohr afforded him)
John Archibald Wheeler (together with Taylor, authored 'Spacetime Physics', one of my favorite supplemental relativity textbooks from college.
Minkowski (because no one should be on the "bad" list for making what could have been an honest misapplied math mistake)
George Gamow (1, 2, 3, Infinity)
Martin Gardner (Scientific American)
Douglas Hofstadter (Gödel, Escher, Bach, the Eternal Gold Braid, Scientific American)
Jearl Walker (Flying Circus of Physics, Scientific American)


And my much shorter (but growing) list of "no, gracias" physics cranks;

David de Hilster ('Autodynamics lunatic - relativity with only ONE observer)
Louis Savain (anti-physics curmudgeon from Usenet)
Archemedes Plutonium (restaurant bus boy at Stanford in the early days of Usenet pretending to be a physics guru)
John Doan (endless internet rant about the twin paradox in the internet)
Anyone or anything associated with Metapedia (Neo-Nazi version of Wikipedia, Internet central Einstein haters club)
Anyone or anything that suggests Einstein was wrong about his SINGLE assumption to create relativity.
Kip Thorne (don't get me started)
Edward Witten (so honored for string 'M' theory arrived at by means of committee consensus)
Brian Greene (should have stuck with a sequel to "Last Mimsy" rather than embarrass himself on PBS.)
The Bogdanovich Brothers (switched from cosmology to Botox, but their paper, although trash, was never actually refuted by means of science peer review).
No one on Sciforums so far.
 
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paddoboy said:
Agreed...The thing is Thorne is speculating on what is allowed by the laws of physics and GR, and anyone worth his salt knows that.
But this highly emotive rant smells of sour grapes to me. sheesh!
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Not really. I wouldn't want a career / reputation like Thorne's under any circumstances, nor would I wish it on my worst enemy. See the list above for whom I still admire very much in physics/astrophysics/science. I've moved Minkowski back to my A list,. which is progress I suppose.

Quantum gravity so far doesn't work, and everyone knows it. Why bother to "play" with a toy that is broken, if not to "fix" it so that it does?
 
danshawen said:
Not really. I wouldn't want a career / reputation like Thorne's under any circumstances, nor would I wish it on my worst enemy. See the list above for whom I still admire very much in physics/astrophysics/science. I've moved Minkowski back to my A list,. which is progress I suppose.

Quantum gravity so far doesn't work, and everyone knows it. Why bother to "play" with a toy that is broken, if not to "fix" it so that it does?
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Actually, "sour grapes" seems far more likely after that post!
And may I say a nice list of generally reputable scientists, including the greatest educator of our time Carl Sagan, whom was a fan also of time travel.
But again, like the reputable Thorne, he made know it was speculative thought experiments.
 
danshawen said:
So, you really think that this is pseudoscience, and that Kip Thorne's wormholes are nothing of the sort?
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Totally agree. Difference of course and as you should know, is that jcc is a total troll and wants us to believe that "sun light is gravitational waves produced by vibrating hot atoms on the sun"...Your answer also smells of pseudoscience, LIGO of course employs light beams or laser beams and mirrors to detect gravitational radiation which has nothing to do with atoms vibrating in the Sun nor light or photons as such.
danshawen said:
Incredible. But, as I said, your opinion is as good as mine, or any of Thorne's colleagues, evidently, so dispense with this thread as you like.

Ordinarily, I don't move to change subjects on a thread, but since you insist on dispensing with this PERFECTLY civil and considerate discussion on the topic of science fraud:
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That's a total misrepresentation of the obvious facts of the trolling that jcc has been doing. If you cannot see that, than you are the fraud!
Nothing to do with any comment by Thorne, and neither should it. Scientific speculation on something that is allowed for by GR, is certainly open for scientific debate.
danshawen said:
Is this going to be a science discussion board or not?
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I suggest your view is totally askew. This forum has many sub sections and of late we have had alternative proposals put as science in the science threads.
Even you should be able to see that despite your obvious agenda for the alternative underdog.
In case I havn't told you before, if any alternative underdog, had anything of substance, they would not be here.
 
paddoboy said:
Totally agree. Difference of course and as you should know, is that jcc is a total troll and wants us to believe that "sun light is gravitational waves produced by vibrating hot atoms on the sun"...Your answer also smells of pseudoscience, LIGO of course employs light beams or laser beams and mirrors to detect gravitational radiation which has nothing to do with atoms vibrating in the Sun nor light or photons as such.

That's a total misrepresentation of the obvious facts of the trolling that jcc has been doing. If you cannot see that, than you are the fraud!
Nothing to do with any comment by Thorne, and neither should it. Scientific speculation on something that is allowed for by GR, is certainly open for scientific debate.

I suggest your view is totally askew. This forum has many sub sections and of late we have had alternative proposals put as science in the science threads.
Even you should be able to see that despite your obvious agenda for the alternative underdog.
In case I havn't told you before, if any alternative underdog, had anything of substance, they would not be here.
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I'm still not certain that jcc is a troll, paddoboy. At least, I have noticed, his posts in answer to my own usually address the gist of what I am trying to get across, whereas yours (and this response is a good example of this) almost never provide direct answers to anything I ask.

If, as you say "MY VIEWS ON THORNE IS TOTALLY ASKEW", then WHY is it that of about TEN OTHER SCIENCE DISCUSSION FORUMS I SAMPLED, ABOUT FIVE OF THOSE ARE NEGATIVE ABOUT THORNE'S INFLUENCE ON THE MOVIE "Interstellar"? One such review was written by a close colleague of Thorne's. I don't care if you respond to this directly or not.

But on the bright side, I managed to brush up on Thorne's published work since the incident almost 20 years ago, and I stand by my original assertion that most of it is on the level published by the Bogdanovich brothers, which is to say, too obfuscated by sheer speculation to qualify as science.

The next post by brucep will now claim that I am an illiterate crank. My plan is to ignore that as well. If all he ever reads are stuff like Thorne writes, no wonder he is incredulous that everyone else has chosen not to read it. I have actual literacy awards to my credit, brucep. Do you? I can point you to one that is still available in an online newspaper, if you wish. Our team beat a former Jeopardy champ's team for one of three years running, Literacy Volunteers Brain Games trivia competition.

Only an online discussion group partially funded or associated with Thorne should be so sensitive about such criticism. Is it?
 
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On the other thread (before my posts were summarily deleted), I was relating how Joe Weber was the gravity wave guru at the University of Maryland while I attended there as an undergraduate PHYSICS major in the 1970s. For a while, his Weber bars (multi-ton bars of aluminum acoustically suspended from the ceiling with piano wires, with rings of piezoelectric detectors) were the state of the art in gravity wave detection. The few instances of believed gravity waves detected by Joe's detectors were never able to be confirmed by detection using other Weber bars distant from College Park. He may not have detected a gravity wave successfully, but he was no crank.

Later, during my career as a satellite telecom engineer, Joe was asked by the senior management at COMSAT Labs to host a talk before an audience of satellite engineers, including yours truly in the late 1990s. Joe died in 2000. His talk was about a new method of neutrino detection which involved placing a single large crystal of silicon with an appropriate cross section inside of an MRI device. The idea was that if a neutrino should interact with any atom in the crystal of silicon, the whole crystalline lattice would resonate, and this would be easy to detect in the MRI machine. A similar technique of neutrino detection is in heavy use today in facilities like AMANDA. Joe told us that our days as satellite telecom engineers were numbered if a modulated neutrino beam could be sent through the Earth instead of relaying our signal from Arthur Clarke's ring of Intelsat geostationary satellites. Although the idea wasn't really original with Joe, my respect for his physics ability was increased that day.

Which brings us back to the topic of this thread and Mr. Thorne. In a lecture given by him available online in 2006, the LIGO interferometer was all ready to detect gravitational waves. He spoke as though it would only take a few more years to detect gravity waves that were from a source far more distant and also less intense THAN THE ONES DETECTED RIGHT HERE, IN OUR OWN SOLAR SYSTEM. Mr. Thorne's basic ignorance of the inverse square law for gravity waves is appalling, but that's just the tip of the iceberg, which I have already discussed in this thread and one other that got more bogged down with responses from individuals on this site who did not experience the close up and personal history of gravity wave detection THE WAY THAT I DID.

Read this post carefully and research the facts it presents, if you are illiterate about gravity waves. There are ample accounts of Joe's gravity detectors on the Internet available for free reading.

Thorne is a fraud. LIGO, on which he is a long time consultant, will never detect a gravity wave. Joe Weber was closer to success detecting gravity waves, as he did not try and duplicate the null result of the Michaelson-Morely experiment. Joe's model was the Earth's own tides. Thorne should have at least told the producers of Interstellar that any gravity wave strong enough to clear the books off of the shelves of one home would do likewise over most of the planet at which it was directed. I'm sure that would not have been the dramatic effect the producer was looking for, BUT IT WOULD HAVE BEEN MORE SCIENTIFICALLY ACCURATE.

The LHC is a better gravity wave detector than LIGO. The LHC ability to focus the beam only over a 10 hour period is related in part to gravitational interaction with the tidal gravity exerted by the moon. The whole ring moves, and the Earth's magnetic field thereby fluctuates and degrades the fields that confine the beams of the collider.

If anyone here responds to this post, please confine youself to issues about science, not my disposition, illiteracy, or my attitude.
 
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danshawen said:
If anyone here responds to this post, please confine youself to issues about science, not my disposition, illiteracy, or my attitude.
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If you don't want people to discuss your illiteracy, your over the top disposition, and your rather less than reasonable attitude, why post [twice] two rants dripping with such illiterate unreasonable, self gratutitious diatribe.

And on the issue of jcc, if you do not believe he is a crank, then you are Robinson Crusoe.
That is weird to say the least, based on his posts and does not say too much for the rest of your claims.
 
paddoboy said:
If you don't want people to discuss your illiteracy, your over the top disposition, and your rather less than reasonable attitude, why post [twice] two rants dripping with such illiterate unreasonable, self gratutitious diatribe.

And on the issue of jcc, if you do not believe he is a crank, then you are Robinson Crusoe.
That is weird to say the least, based on his posts and does not say too much for the rest of your claims.
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Your post is not about science, paddoboy (again). Why is that? Don't you know any? Just because this is in pseudoscience now is no excuse. Show us your stuff, if you really have any, that is.

What does the inverse square law mean to you? Look it up, if you need to.

I don't believe you are a crank yet, but if you keep coming back with issues like the quality of jcc's posts just a few more dozen times, I may change my opinion. I get it; you don't like jcc. And I don't care. I don't like Kip Thorne, and evidently, you do. So, what?
 
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