Recent content by A/4

I've always felt black hole evaporation is better thought of as a quantum tunneling process than pair creation. In this case, there is no ambiguity as to why it's only the positive energy particle that escapes. The thermodynamic characteristics also follow naturally from this approach. Also...

But not if the graviton has mass, as the rest of my post says.

Although the GW that was detected is a classical object (i.e. a prediction of a classical theory), there is some connection to the quantum nature of gravity. That is, if the graviton is massless, we expect GWs to travel at the speed of light. A massive graviton will slow the wave down, and...

It's a tricky case. For the Higgs, there were tons of events that contained the resonance, and it was verified by two competing experiments. In this case, there was only one lab that could possibly have observed it, but the same signal was seen by two different detectors. The data was...

But there was consensus: the Hanford and Livingston labs independently observed the signal. Sure, they're both LIGO, but they are separate detectors. Replication of the result isn't quite the same here as with, say, observing the Higgs boson. By the way, there is another detection that has...

The deadline for nominations for the 2016 Nobel Prize was the end of January. Since the detection and peer-review of the paper was most certainly done beforehand, who do you think is in line for the 2016 Nobel? My bets are on the three gents who spoke/got mention this morning in Washington...

The press conference is scheduled for Feb 11th to coincide with the Feb 11th issue of Nature, which happens to have their paper in it (it was written and peer reviewed last year). Sure, another "rumor", but at some point the rumors become so intricately detailed that you can pretty much figure...

No, supermassive black holes are of the order ##10^6-10^{10}## solar masses, not 100-1000. There's a range of difference between the two mass scales, and thus associated detection probabilities. But anyway, my remark was somewhat in jest.

Two 100 or 1000 solar mass black holes merging? LIGO methodologies are certainly covert, and you probably won't find them by a simple google search on their documentation (jocular sarcasm...). LIGO does matched-filtering of incoming signals, by comparing them to a giant database of templates...

The presser has been advertised: 10:30am in Washington, DC: http://www.ligo.org/news/media-advisory.php

Kicking this thread. Rumours are flying, and apparently there may be a press conference looming on the horizon (pun intended). The story is there have been at least two signal detections, one being a binary merger of two ~10x solar mass black holes. Please share what you've heard!

This sounds somewhat like non-commutative geometry, on which there is a wealth of literature.

Can anyone comment on what he actually did? I am unable to locate any papers, etc.., that describe the solution. Only media reports. That suggests to me this story isn't as big as it's being made out to be.

The paper you cite is conjecture on possible signals. In reality, no missing energy has been found, nor evidence for extra dimensions. The lower-limit placed on any modified Planck scale is about 4 TeV, based on the fact that no mini-black holes (that is, their evaporation profiles) have been...

It's my understanding the LIGO itself is just on the cusp of possible detection, let alone aLIGO. The instrumentation has been tuned to within an order of magnitude of the predicted strain introduced by the polarization modes (about 10^-23 m or so). If you ask LIGO people what is the most...