The LIGO Announcement Event or How Fast Can a Wave of Embarrassment Move through the Media?

First, I would like to acknowledge the amazing engineering feat that is the LIGO. Its completion is an achievement of historical proportion. I have nothing but admiration for the work that has been done. But without taking away any of the well deserved credit, I think we need to look closely at the observation of what is assumed to be a gravitational wave made in September 2015 and which motivated the claim that gravitational waves have been discover at long last and, by some incredible serendipity, a century after their existence has been predicted.

I’m not going to go into the detail as to why I believe gravitational waves do not exist since that I have explained this at length. And I will reserve for later a discussion of the fact that there is no matter energy mechanism that allows for conversion of matter into gravitational energy as is required for the general relativity prediction to hold. In fact, I will not in any way criticize general relativity and its predictions, many of which coincide with QGD’s prediction (see An Axiomatic Approach to Physics). My criticism here is not due to a theoretical bias, but about how scientists, as they have recently done with the BICEP 2 result, have again jumped the gun and make what can only be qualified as the most extraordinary claim in the history of science.

When we ignore all the biases due to the assumed certainty of the existence of gravitational waves, all the theoretical biases regarding the properties of the source of the signal (distances, masses, etc,. all of which have been calculated using the very equations that made the prediction we’re trying to prove and not based on actual measurements) and take an objective look at what was observed, what are we left with?

We are left with is a single low resolution, noisy, signal of origin, source and location unknown, that has yet to be independently corroborated, and of a type that has never been observed before, thus without any reference signals to compare it to. However one looks at the data, a singular event such as the observed signal is far from sufficient to claim discovery.

That said, I can understand that after hundred years, scientists were eager to settle the question, but it makes all the more paradoxical to claim discovery prematurely.

I fear and predict that further observations will show that the signal is not what physicists hoped for and that they’ll have to live down a larger embarrassment than even the BICEP 2 claim caused.