Maggie's Farm

Discovery of gravitational waves named science 'Breakthrough of the year'

Old news and not exactly accurate. "Gravitational waves" are as sound a theory as dark matter and dark energy, which is to say not very. It's better to think of them as placeholders - not unlike gravity and this mysterious "spacetime" we plop into phrases - and not material constructs. They're labels for the unknown, not phenomena.

One of the persistent myths you'll see all over the comments to that piece is the belief that the propagation of gravity is limited to the speed of light. This is simply untrue, as a body orbits the instantaneous center of its primary, in our case the Sun. Or close enough to not matter. If they didn't all chaos would ensue.

They say give the right 20 years and it'll be the left. So true. The right has gone from rejecting evolution to conforming Genesis to the Big Bang, and with it, climbing aboard the modern day Cult of Einstein. Albert himself would have rejected his relativity becoming so religious.

Except for the part that's opinion and the part that regards orbits, I agree. Naturally if you want an "accurate summary" be prepared to do a whole lot of wading.

The point holds: We have place-held lots of things without knowing how they work, what causes them, or even if we have a unified view of their manifestations. I won't be surprised when LIGO goes the way of BICEP2.

^ The Z-robot wishes to argue. To do this the Z-robot stakes a claim - conflation, as it's programed see it - and then draws a conclusion about a human. (The robot must receive a lot of neatly filed data in order for it to be the unique sum of knowledge, no? Discernment not so much.)

What the robot seems to fail to grasp is that the problem with gravity as a wave and gravity as a force is precisely the "conflation" problem left out of these cursory pieces like the one Moran links to in his gloss of, as Will notes, a vastly bigger and so-far unanswered question.

Which is how Newton holds at the same time that relativity does: A gravity wave occurs as phase change and phase must include time - the lightspeed problem - while the instantaneous center problem the Newtonian model hews to requires a fixed and timeless state, so to put it. A virtual aether. (Unless I misread its output, that the robot seems to contradict itself with a problem of conflation: Gravity is instantaneous force in a field except when one of two bodies disappears at which time [no pun] in the case of the Sun it reverts to an 8.3 minute wave. It is a mystery.)

Regardless, the robot's program sees this as a conflict in my comment but it's actually the difference in theory. There are two phenomena yet to be joined in a single unified whole. I'm just observing a human mindset that favors a trend in human sentiment where a kind of cultism arises where it'd never had gotten off the ground twenty or thirty before, culturally speaking. Given the failures of similar experiments, I tend to see this one with more skepticism than its breathless fans do.

Gravity behaves as a wave with finite phase velocity* and virtually infinite group velocity (or zero group delay.) That's what's hard to reconcile.

(The robot has, of course, conditionally relaxed at least one of these conditions but that's not an uncommon mistake for the sum of all knowledge to make.)

*based on observations, conditions, and calculations even this is in some question.

As is its way, the Z-robot has put words in my mouth. Funny, you say "phenomena" about some stuff they're still working on and the darn thing conflates that with Maxwell. But that's the Sum of Knowledge descended from on high to MF for you.