I find it odd that the responses from the LIGO team and supporters are so hostile, while it seems Jackson have a fairly constructive perspective:
Jackson says he hope that “our concerns will be taken constructively and lead both to improved methods for data analysis and to a better understanding of LIGO’s results and its exciting long-term potential.”
It seems to me that Jackson just wants to eliminate potential flaws in the result rather than overturn the result itself. Isn't that exactly what we expect from the scientific method?
I wonder if it is a media created image that the tone between the teams are so hostile instead of collaborative.
"While LIGO has gained a (not entirely undeserved) reputation for excessive secrecy, Shoemaker says the collaboration has spent a great deal of time interacting with Jackson and his group over the last two years to improve their understanding of LIGO's methods, including extended visits to the Niels Bohr Institute and inviting Jackson et al. to discuss the issue in depth in teleconferences with LIGO team members. So if LIGO's response whenever that drum begins banging anew sometimes comes off as a bit exasperated, there's a very good reason for it."
I think you are overlooking into this, there is no hostility whatsoever.
I have two coworkers like that. No matter how much communication we have seemingly nothing ever gets settled nor progress made. The one calls himself an anarchist. There’s a large difference between constructive “skepticism” and destruction of progress - but so much can hide under the false umbrella of “just trying to understand.”
It’s a difficult problem to solve. For example the phrase, “I want to have a serious conversation about immigration” can mean that you want to have an intellectually honest, detailed conversation about immigration. You want to talk about the pros and cons and how best to balance them for everyone involved, seek out more perspectives and information, and in general shine some light on an issue that often generates nothing, but heat.
Or it can be the prelude to a racist scree laden with FUD. We have to be careful not to let the the purveyors of the latter poison the well against the former group, but it can be hard to manage when people are smart enough to disguise their intentions.
> how do you (did?) resolve that kind of work-place conflict?
Figure out a domain they operate exceedingly well in, determine the minimum amount of information they need and firewall them from everything else. A side effect of such disagreeability is not being involved in the sort of open-ended discussions which delineate upper from middle management.
"LIGO spokesperson David Shoemaker of MIT thinks the controversy all boils down to a misunderstanding about LIGO's methods for analyzing its data. "[Jackson et al.] came to it skeptically, and I think skepticism in science is a really important thing. You have to question results," he says."
The statement of the Jackson's team can be read as constructive skepticism or it can be read as FUD. In both cases they can use the same polite tone. It's difficult to distinguish them without reading carefully the technical objections to understand if they have some specific criticism or just generic concern.
My guess is that the easiest way to solve the controversy is to build three or four more detectors, and try to build a second team to make an independent analysis of the data. (But this is not cheap.)
(This is similar to the Atlas/CMS teams at CERN. They share the accelerator but they have independent detectors and analysis.)
Three or four more detectors is definitely not easy. The current ones were built, tuned and retuned over 25 years, and with approximately $1B spending on the US side alone (ignoring efforts in Europe, Japan, Australia, Brazil, Malaysia, etc). There are early plans for new detectors but to surpass the sensitivity of the existing network they will need even larger, more expensive facilities and equipment - unfortunately pushing the boundaries of human understanding is expensive.
Anyone who's spent any amount of time in academia knows it's the other way around: extreme [1] internal viciousness, external kumbaya PR for the tax-paying public.
The detection of GW170817 is the nail in the coffin here. A gravitational wave corroborated by numerous other teams and instruments detecting the same event using completely different physical principles. There is almost zero likelihood of such a coincidence.
Yes, in this case the theoretical models predict a gravitational wave to coincide with the observations from other trusted instruments. There may be systematic issues with LIGO's analysis, but it would appear that LIGO also reliably detects astronomical events which suggests that it does actually detect the waves themselves and not just coincidental artifacts in the analysis.
"the controversy all boils down to a misunderstanding about LIGO's methods for analyzing its data." This plus the mentioned secrecy is the modus operandi in the physics community.
No open data, no open calculation how you reached a certain theoretical result and no open code with which the simulation/analysis is done.
There is also the case to be made for a reproducibility crisis in the hard sciences.
All three points you mentioned are true for large parts of physics research. The point is: Not so for LIGO.
The data is open, the code is open.
They even had Jupiter notebooks doing the later parts of the analysis when they published the first detection.
And, one cannot overstate that while the black hole mergers might have been bogus for some reason, the neutron star merger as been observed by over 80 different experiments in all wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum.
> “But Reitze counters that the complete data from that first run is already available online. According to Shoemaker, this includes the relevant time series data and the programs used, but "it's not a trivial matter to use them." Caltech even held a training workshop on how to deal with gravitational-wave data. That's a pretty far cry from asking the physics community to take its analysis on faith...”
Are you refuting this statement? To me, it looks like the data/analysis are open, but not yet independently verified due to difficult nature of problem space.
I used to work in particle/astrophysics. By and large people weren't opposed to sharing their data and software. The degree of specific expertise it took to get results was staggerng though. It takes significant technical infrastructure and expertise to even just rerun an analysis on a big corpus of data. At that stage, you haven't even validated squat, just pushed some buttons to run other people's logic. Doing this properly takes person years of effort with little to no reward.
In practice, there's usually at least two big experiments (not necessarily quite of the same generation) that were built by different groups which corroborate results. This is currently the best defense against big mistakes.
I did not read the article till the very last paragraph. My bad. Of course, I do not refute it. So in this particular case they went open source.
However, from my experience in years of publishing to and reviewing for several APS journals, I stand by my statement. Because of 'publish or perish' nobody wants to give up any 'competitive edge' of their particular research. So there is no incentive system in place to foster an open source everything attitude.
This is changing. Slowly, as it seems to be mostly a generational issue.
The younger scientists, current PhD generation and a little up are all fed up with closed source/private data as there are no enough bright examples how good open source/data can work out.
Ummm... where are you getting this idea from? Nearly every field I've worked in, and any NSF funded facility has the requirement to publish and open source the data collected.
I will admit that most telescopes operate on a rolling window of privacy (usually 12-18 months) so that an observer with an original idea can't have their research snatched out from under them, but most will gladly share their data for someone who has doubts or wants to open up communications on reproducibility.
I worked very closely with this field, participating with a similar experiment to use frequent observations of accurately modeled millisecond pulsars to study and detect gravitational wave, and while we did have that rolling window, nearly all of our data was shared far and wide often well before that window was up.
Perhaps LIGO's behavior seems secretive, but they have a multi-national group with hundreds of researchers working on it, so if you're even remotely within the field, I don't see how you can come to that conclusion at all. Their analysis techniques have been public for at least the last 5 years (some of their repos go back at least 7 years: https://github.com/gwastro). Their data is completely available (https://www.gw-openscience.org/data/), and even have an entire series of materials on how they perform their techniques (https://www.gw-openscience.org/static/workshop1/course.html).
I've found Astrophysics to be one of the most reproducible and open fields in science, since it rarely has the same kind of financial motivations that bio-med, minerals and materials science, and even environmental science can have.
Agreed. The "secrecy" thing is just hyperbole from New Scientist. What LIGO are doing with their data is completely standard practice in the community.
I don't want to pile on, but I worked in numrel on binary blackholes and I have my gripes about the general gw community, but this is definitely not one of them. In fact, the GW community is probably one of the most open ones in physics. It's just such a hard subject that no one would survive acting like you describe.
Well the equipment to reproduce the findings includes multimillion dollar lasers that are required to have precision under a nanometre. If I understand correctly, gravational waves require data to line up between multiple telescopes around the world, right? So all these labs have to be sharing their data through some organized means, right?
Thousands of people worked on gravitational waves, but somehow only LIGO is the one taking credit. I'd like to know what other physicists think of the LIGO results and methods.
I work in gammay-ray astronomy. We work closely together with LIGO, they alert us in case something interesting happens so we can observe the same position.
This is e.g. what happened with the Neutron star merger.
The community has great respect for the awesome work our colleagues at LIGO do.
Especially since they made data and code public, which sadly is something that just starts gaining track in gammaray astronomy.
Since VIRGO wasn't running at high enough signal to noise ratio before 2017, yes. But then again "LIGO" is not just one person but hundreds if not more. The same could be said for CERN which had initial papers with around 1000 coauthors.
The idea that Nobel prizes are inherently unfair actually has wide credence[0][1][2]: basically everyone agrees that singling out individuals or even single organizations ignores the real degree of collaboration between scientists of all fields and levels. However, they're a tradition, and a good show, they're fantastic as a tool for publicity, the money is usually appreciated by the recipients. However, the real point of the Nobel Prize is that it's a great honor, and the effect of that honor is diminished in proportion to the number of recipients--ditto for the prize money.
At least a few other detections have been reported by LIGO, and I assume that they, like the first one, are correlated in the data from Hanford WA and Livingston LA.
Doesn't anyone looking to debunk the LIGO results need to first explain what is producing correlated signals at interferometers thousands of miles apart?
Also, are the incidents we're receiving in the US producing similar data at VIRGO in Italy?
If so, then wow, Jackson has a tough case to make.
> Doesn't anyone looking to debunk the LIGO results need to first explain what is producing correlated signals at interferometers thousands of miles apart?
> Also, are the incidents we're receiving in the US producing similar data at VIRGO in Italy?
Yes and yes (also there was the optical/GRB confirmation for one of the events)
That's why I'm siding on the LIGO side of this
The whole article sounds like some "skeptics gone wild" trying to start a car with a banana then saying cars are fake because of it (and that's my behaved way of phrasing it)
I'm on LIGO's side on this one, but I disagree that one must be able to offer an alternative explanation in order to claim a result is bogus. That is, I don't need an alternate theory in order to falsify yours.
Again, to be clear: I think the LIGO results are probably correct. There's a bunch of corroborating evidence, and from the outside it appears they've been acting is very much good faith. I'm just making an epistemology quibble.
That is, I don't need an alternate theory in order to falsify yours.
I phrased that poorly: what the critics need to explain is the apparent agreement between the prior model and the observations. It wasn't just a case where someone looked at an oscilloscope screen and said, "Whoa. Look at that. Aliens!" As I understand it, the LIGO results showed good conformance to their predictions.
Does that make their position completely bulletproof? No, nothing in science ever is, but it does place Jackson's dispute into the category of "extraordinary claims."
Agreed: the scientific community is supposed to havea consensus on [Popperian] falsificationism but seem to act like they don't really believe it quite often.
Ultra high vacuum isn't vacuum. Achieving an actual vacuum is practically impossible in my understanding. Even in deep space you will probably have a few stray hydrogen atoms floating around.
Yes, this is problem, but two 200W lasers[0] separated by thousands of kilometres are able to filter out noise created by atoms or electrons easily. Moreover, 200W of energy applied to single atom will put away it from path of laser very quickly. At such powers and precision we may need to take into account flow of neutrino. It's possible that distant event created blast of neutrinos, which affected speed of light in vacuum.
Nobody of downvoters asked for anything nor contested my arguments. English is not a my native language and I'm busy right now, so I prefer to be concise.
Basically, LIGO is oversized and much more precise version of Michelson-Moorley experiment. What else I need to show you or tell you to convince? Everybody already know role of Michelson-Moorley experiment in development of GR/SR theories. Michelson-Moorley experiment was performed with precision of up to 1E-17 and found nothing, so it was reasonable to post theories assuming that c=const. LIGO performed with precision of 1E-18 and found deviations, so it no longer true unless LIGO is wrong (distance to Alpha Centaur is just 4E16 meters, so it's possible), so it's why I asked "are you sure?".
LIGO is what is called a "Michelson Interferometer" because the same interfereometer was used in the Michelson-Morely experiment. However where Michelson and Morley were rotating their interferometer with fixed-length arms and monitoring the interference pattern to detect the orientation of the luminiferous ether, LIGO is using shifts in the relative distance of the arms to detect changes in the "size" of space due to gravitational waves. The speed of light doesn't vary, but rather my understanding is that the entire distance metric perpendicular to the wavefront compresses and expands. So light moves at the same rate through this compressed and then expanded space, but if you assume that the distance metric is constant then light will appear to speed up or slow down.
We have waves, which (in theory) are generated by merging of massive black holes. These waves cannot reach us without of help of a medium, because, unlike photons, they are normal waves and definitely propagate trough medium.
Yes, distance extends and contracts, but it can be interpreted in different ways:
If we accept existence of Ether, then speed of light in Ether doesn't vary (in same conditions, as speed of sound in water doesn't change when water is waving), but "ether" contracts and expands instead.
If we will not accept existence of Ether, then "physical vacuum"/"quantum field"/"quantum atmosphere"/"* field"/etc contracts and expands or "space-time" bends. However, if we translate all that back to plain English, then we will get:
* Ether - hypothetical medium for light and EM waves made of subatomic particles in solid/superliquid/gaseous/plasma/etc form (we don't know yet), which is attracted to macro objects like atmosphere is attracted to bodies, but much lighter and much more extended;
* physical void - "void" means empty space (nothing), but "physical void" is not an empty space, but space filed with quantum fluctuations, where "quantum" literally means "integer" but refers to subatomic particles, and "fluctuations" means that these particles are moving or appearing and disappearing to fast for us to measure, so "physical vacuum" means "space filed with subatomic particles in superliquid/gaseous/plasma/etc form (we don't know yet)";
* "quantum field" literally means "3D array of integers" and refers to subatomic particles of unknown origin;
* "quantum atmosphere" literally means "3D array of integers attached to nearest atomic object" and refers to subatomic particles attracted by bodies.
* "space-time" literally means "mathematical technique when time is added to vector of coordintas: [x,y,z,t], and "bending" means applying of transformations to space-time vectors or fields.
And so on.
Literally, we can talk about this_thing using various names. (BTW: I prefer to use "QA" instead of "Ether", because "Ether" is strongly associated with pseudo-science.)
So problem is not in accepting of fact of existing of subatomics particles in vacuum, but in believing in "bottom", unbreakable "elementary" particle. Many scientists thinks that there is bottom, but I disagree, because Pi is irrational number, so 3D space cannot be filled with round objects without leaving of a bit of empty space, no matter how small or large objects are. Thus there always will be a bit of empty space between particles filled with even smaller particles.
So, if we will accept that we can zoom in indefinitely and we still see particles at each level of zoom, then Ether is natural outcome of that:
You're asserting your conclusion, and relying heavily on irrelevant statements, and semantic arguments.
Your definition of "quantum field" is wrong. It's not necessarily correct to think of particles in general as having a "real" existence, or rather, it's at least as correct to consider them as being localized excitations of a field. That field exists everywhere: there is no "in-between" for things to be in, just places where you have a low probability of observing a "particle".
Also, arguing quantum-level behavior by analogy with macro-scale objects is superlatively misguided.
> Also, arguing quantum-level behavior by analogy with macro-scale objects is superlatively misguided.
Indeed this is how we came up with the Saturnian model, for which there are a ton of expected results that have been trivially proven wrong by experiment.
"Quantum field" is literally "3d array" ("field") of "integers" (quantum). It's mathematical abstraction, not a real thing. Yes, in mathematical abstraction, when we have something in a point of space, we can name that "excitation". We don't know what it is, so this is fair. But whole idea of quantization is that we have whole things, i.e. particles.
Yes, abstract thing can exists everywhere, mathematics have no limits, but real physical thing cannot.
You can look at reimplementation of double-slit experiment at macro scale using walking droplet[0][1]. As you, dual particle-wave behaviour can be implemented at macro scale too, so quantum world is not special in this regard.
1) I'm not sure that I understand your argument correctly, it's very short, but let me quote Wikipedia: Quantization is the process of constraining an input from a continuous or otherwise large set of values (such as the real numbers) to a discrete set (such as the integers).
2) Lets me quote very beginning of book about Quantum(Integer) Mechanics again:
Chapter 2
The Formulation of Quantum Mechanics
2.1
Basic Theoretical Concepts
Every physical theory involves some basic physical concepts, a mathematical formalism, and set of correspondence rules which map the physical concepts onto the mathematical objects that represent them. The correspondence rules are first used to express a physical problem in mathematical terms. Once the mathematical version of the problem is formulated, it may be solved by purely mathematical techniques that need not have any physical interpretation. The formal solution is then translated back into the physical world by means of the correspondence rules.
3) Of course, you are right. Walking droplet is 2D system while quantum world is 3D system. We cannot compare 2D system with 3D system, like we cannot compare 1D system with 2D system. They are very different worlds.
But, can we reproduce this strange behavior of this 2D macro-system, when oil droplet behaves like mater and wave at same time, at quantum scale?
It's demonstrated that walking droplets are working on white noise, so we need a noise generator. Casemir effect demonstrates that quantum world is full of strong white noise.
We also need to have waves around a particle. IMHO, electron is good candidate for that: it has strong EM field and very lightweight. White noise will cause vibrations. Accelerated charged particle will generate EM waves, fueled by energy of PV/QF/QA/E/YNI, not by energy of electron itself(!).
However, these EM waves must be converted but into thermal energy of PV/QF/QA/E/YNI, otherwise all energy of PV will be converted into EM waves, and vibrations will stop. As we see in interstellar red shift effect, light ages with distance, and more frequent light ages more quickly (confirmed using multiple wavelengths with high confidence). IMHO, it because EM waves are interacting with non-zero fluctuations of QF: they have charge, so they can draw energy from EM waves. Electron has high frequency of vibration and his EM waves are very weak, so his EM waves will die in 4E4-4E10km range (very rough calculations).
Also, we need two slits. Not a problem. Then we will shot electron trough one slit, while his companion EM waves will go trough both slits, cause interference and change course of electron, so it will show interference pattern. Looks doable.
What you think? Can we reproduce this weird dual wave-droplet behavior at quantum level?
Quantization means that energy is observed to come in discrete packets, not that those packets are particles. That the EM field is omnipresent is not a mathematical artifact, but corresponds to a real-world phenomenon. Macro-scale analogies continue to not be valid for predicting quantum behavior.
And discrete packets, in turn, are generated by discrete things.
At some zoom level, EM field will break and stop to be continuous. For example, Voyager found "magnetic bubbles" at the edge of Solar system, which may be caused by discrete nature of EM field.
I'm asked is we can reproduce macro-scale experiment at quantum level. So your answer is "no, we cannot reproduce this weird particle-wave duality demonstrated by oil droplet at quantum scale", right?
An oil droplet is a physical analogy for a quantum phenomenon. You cannot prove anything about the subatomic world by such analogies. Your insistence that it's "particles all the way down" also continues to be entirely incorrect. I think that you are more interested in believing that you have a special understanding of the universe than knowing the truth. Either way, I am uninterested in repeating myself further.
Again, I'm not asking what is analogy to what. I'm asking is we can reproduce this insane wave-droplet duality of oil-droplet at quantum scale or not. You are refuse to say. You contribution to discussion is "you are wrong, your claims are false, I know the truth, but I will not tell you."
Okay, you made claim that I made claim (instead of asking me) that I made claim that everything is made out of particles all the way down. It's not true.
What we call particle/atom/object/planet/galactic/galianea is just system, which keeps energy inside and can transfer that energy to an other thing, when it in small radius to that system.
For example, galaxy is a supper massive black hole or set of massive black holes. Rest of galaxy is mostly empty space, but this black hole can alter courses of stars and other black holes, by transferring energy to them via gravitational field. Same true for star system, planet, atom, particle.
We can put emphasis on centre (black hole, star, planet, atom, nucleus, etc.), or at field, or at energy, or at radius of interaction, so we can say "everything is made of field/energy/particles", but truth is that every component of that is equally important.
I found, that in most cases is easier to convince a scientist by going up instead of going down, because everybody agrees that we can zoom up indefinitely. Try to imagine that we zoomed up to 1E40 or so, so our visible universe is of size of elementary particle. How this worlds looks to you? As infinite uniform field of universes like our, like fog? Or we will still saw something like we already see in night sky?
It's not the "ether" that's changing the phase, it's the relative length of the interferometer legs. That depends on the direction the waves come from.
Let's say you see foot prints outside your house. And they look like deer footprints, and so you say they are. Somebody then shows that a small moose could have left similar tracks. You don't need to state what definitively left those tracks to say that it's premature to declare them deer footprints.
In the signal world this is even more true, because with signals this faint everything is going to come down to probabilistic analysis. And so the real question is not binary (gravitational waves or not gravitational waves), but rather the chance that what was detected was caused by gravitational waves. And so anything that could confound those probabilities is as good as a refutation, even without any explanation for what did cause the observed phenomena.
I have no opinion on the issue one way or the other, but I do have to say that the large numbers of appeals to authority and ad hominem from the LIGO researchers do not inspire confidence. People tend to resort to these sorts of responses for the lack of a rational refutation. I found a much more informative article on the issue here [1], surprisingly from Forbes. There too, the responses from the LIGO team feel off. For instance they were criticizing the Danish team for using the tutorials LIGO provided on their site alongside the data! I mean...??? Did LIGO ever publish the exact method used to obtain their results?
How is your analogy fit with the fact that there was a case where LIGO had a detection then many telescopes were pointing into that region of sky and "seen" the cause.
I think Hossenfelder did a pretty bad jounalistic job in that column, which she defended by pointing out that she is not a journalist. Even reading that it was clear Jackson was probably wrong and had she not been an angry german she would have written that as her conclusion.
Also the article you are commenting on directly cites that column by Hossenfelder.
The question is as follows:. How frequent are all blips that might be classified as X overall, and from that, what is the expected rate of spurious correlation? To arrive at this one must have access to quite a bit of comprehensive data collected in an unbiased fashion.
In the general case no, you don't need to present an alternative theory to proove that a given existing theory is flawed or not self consistent or not consistent with observed data.
True enough in the general case as you say, but in this specific case, the data in question was (reportedly) a good fit for a pre-existing model. They made a prediction, ran an experiment, observed the predicted effect, drew a conclusion, and got a Nobel for their trouble.
So the burden of proof is decisively on the accuser here, I'd think.
They claim it’s noise and pure coincidence. Some trains may have shaken the earth at the exact time the cosmic event happened. At least that’s what I take from the article.
Presumably if LIGO fell victim to a statistical fluke of noise in the data because they underestimated the likelihood of such a fluke then those flukes should have happened during the decades when they were running multiple detectors at lower sensitivity. Is it possible that the probability of these flukes occurring sits just within the window of "likely enough to happen and still be mistaken for a true signal" and "not so likely that it would have happened more than once in the last 10 years". My question is, are the Danish considering the fact that this kind of noise will occur regardless of the sensitivity of the detectors?
How does this interpretation error result in the actual finding of an optical counterpart to the gravitational wave in the region it was supposed to be in? (see GW170817)
Or are they only trying to weigh in on the first detection?
It was the first time we recogniced these transients as ns-ns mergers, but there is very likely other events hidden in archival data. Simply put, gw170817 looked fairly boring in the waveband that has good skycoverage, so without the ligo trigger most observatories wouldn’t have bothered looking.
The article states that jackson had some objection to the signal processing done for gw170817, but nothing really about what he has to say regarding the transient found in the ligo-virgo error contours.
"And contrary to Jackson's assertion in the article, a technical paper really is in the works at the LIGO collaboration detailing how it has handled the noise in its data—noise just hasn't been a top priority."
where in which article is Jackson claiming that "LIGO does not have a noise-handling technical paper in the pipeline" so to speak?
this is a really weird comment in the conclusion...
If you're going to downvote, at least have the courage to voice your objection. I thought that was supposed to be a privilege here, not an opportunity to skulk behind a rock.
I'll reply with a similar but lengthier remark from another contributor. Possibly it won't go over your head.
-------------
I've thought for some time that the slow down in "fundamental invention" that some have observed since roughly the late 1960s to early 1970s is the result of "scientific fundamentalism" and Skepticism. Look into the backgrounds and thoughts of people like Einstein, Tesla, Engelbart, Turing, Edison, or Schrodinger, and you generally will not find them to be fundamentalist-positivist Skeptics.
It seems like the general intellectual trend from roughly 1970 until maybe 2010 or so was the rise of fundamentalism of every kind, both religious and secular... - (api; 2015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10288033)
The article keeps talking about "Danish" this and that.
The only one of the so called Danish physicists quoted in the article is Andrew Jackson who is American. I believe this is the paper it all relates to: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.04191 None of the authors are Danish, but most are related to the Niels Bohr Institute.
Andrew Jackson probably has a lot of Danish colleagues at the Niels Bohr Institute, which of course is in Copenhagen, and many of them might agree with him and some might have been involved in the study. He probably also lived in Denmark for many years and he might even have gotten Danish citizenship, family and he might even speak Danish. The same might apply to some of the other authors.
But you wouldn't call Einstein a Swiss, Austro-Hungarian or American physicist although he did most of his important work in those countries (and actually obtained both Austrian and American citizenship), would you?
I am aware of the Copenhagen school quantum physics/ the Copenhagen interpretation, and that the article might try to play on that old thing in the hopes that we might see a new Danish school in physics. But why?
I have no idea with what nationality Andrew Jackson identifies with, but as an immigrant myself, your comment puts my back up a bit. How much of one's life must be spent in a country before being considered "from" that country in your philosophy? If you are born in one country does it indelibly mark you for life? Do you have to be raised in a country in order to identify with it? If you move somewhere, live many years there, have a family there, speak the language, follow the customs, have citizenship there and have no intention of every living anywhere else are you still cursed with your original nationality? Do you feel that such people who have not spent the entirety of their life in a single location need some sort of asterisk next to their nationality? Not a "real" Danish person. Can never become one.
I can understand your question: are they really Danish physicists, or simply physicists working in Denmark. Personally, I don't care but I suppose if you are thinking that Denmark is claiming something they don't deserve, then I suppose it's not a crazy question. However, I hope you can see that the way you put it could be pretty insulting to someone who literally is Danish, but just happens not to be born there.
I think you misread my comment. I have nothing against immigrants. I am an immigrant as well, and I have lived in 4 different countries.
I also think it's a bit hard to say that he is "cursed" with his original nationality or "marked" for life. I don't know him but from his own page on the Niels Bohr Institute, he sure doesn't seem embarrassed or sad with his American background: http://nbia.nbi.ku.dk/members/jackson/ And why should he be.
I was simply asking why they call it the "Danish" 5 times in the article. I believe the answer is that they really want to stir up the idea of another Danish/Copenhagen school as opposed to the mainstream views in physics. That's it. And I doubt this little debacle will ever evolve into anything as important as the original Copenhagen school.
Now, I don't think it necessarily matters what nationality we identify with. To many people, nationality is a legal concept, not a matter of feelings. That view on nationality has the advantage of being clear. It's hard to know what people identify with. I am not even sure what I identify with anymore. A bit of different countries, I guess. Maybe none. As a legal concept, however, nationality becomes something that is objectively right or wrong.
As to who deserves the credit or blame (Denmark or the US), I have no idea. A huge part of what makes a great scientist is his upbringing, primary and secondary education. In this case, they guy got his entire formal education in the US, and spent several decades there before going to Denmark. Maybe it's not nation states that deserve credit. Did Argentina make Messi or did Spain? Or was is just genes and the fact that his family of football players? I don't know...
Agree this usage is odd. My guess is that they are used to describing people by their institutions: writing things like "Caltech scientists showed..." etc. is very common in such articles, to save readers from having to keep the names straight. And of course this identifier is uncontroversial the day after they got hired.
But who counts as Danish is obviously a thornier question. I don't know that "nationality we identify with" captures it, as it's mostly about what others think of the person. It doesn't line up perfectly with having been issued a passport either. And being Danish is also different to being American...
This applies to sub-national identities too: Wasn't the old-time saying (something like) that you could become a New Yorker in 6 months, but to come from Boston took generations?
I find the parent's Einstein example odd, as I would have called him exactly what you suggested no one would call him. He was German born, but I wouldn't hesitate to say he was American, Swiss or Austrian
You could call Einstein one of those labels and it wouldn't be much odder than calling him German. He was actually born in The Kingdom of Würtemburg, at the beginning of the "German Empire" (a federation of kingdoms whose borders were very different from today's Germany). And even then, what we now call "Germany" is something that only came into existence in the 1990s. A lot of people try to project nation-states backwards through history, but they're a relatively recent notion, and their current configuration even more so.
Specifically, he lived in the German speaking part of two of those countries, and it doesn't make sense to refer to German-speaking regions of the late 1800s and early 1900s by 21st century labels.
Age minus 12 years, perhaps? To my mind, someone who spent the first 16 years of their life in Ruritania, say, will remain a Ruritanian forever, though obviously there are contexts in which "Elbonian" would be taken to mean a "person travelling with an Elbonian passport" rather than someone who was brought up in Elbonia.
I think from the moment you become a citizen you may call yourself citizen of X, or American for example. All other forumals are racist bullshit...but hell, we are living in racist times.
It doesn’t make sense to me that something which emanates outward can in any way cause things to move inward. It just seems to violate logic itself. I find it more likely that there’s some fundamental aspect of space itself we are missing which is a purely inward phenomenon. I suppose that force itself too could be described as a wave but more in the way that you can describe pulling on an elastic rope that’s tied to something can be described as a wave. Also if we did live in a holographic universe, there could exist forces which are simply there and are completely unexplainable from within the hologram.
Is this logic also violated by seeing a magnet pick up a piece of metal? Something is clearly emanating outwards from the magnet, yet the piece of metal is attracted inwards. It doesn't have to make sense to you, but the experimental evidence seems pretty solid.
some fundamental aspect of space itself we are missing which is a purely inward phenomenon
A fundamental aspect of space... purely inward phenomenon... That sounds like gravity, as described by general relativity.
> It doesn’t make sense to me that something which emanates outward can in any way cause things to move inward.
If it doesn't make sense to you, that's normal. It doesn't make sense to a lot of people. It's very unintuitive. You should probably make the effort to actually learn the math and physics behind it before just dismissing it, though.
Doesn't a field emanate outwards from a point, but may draw things inwards? Both the gravitational and electric fields can attract. Of course the fields don't work as waves but they is emanation restricted to waves?
Changes in an electric field propagate outward at the speed of light, otherwise you could instantaneously transmit data over a distance by changing the strength of the field. I'd say that counts as emanating.
A simple example i'm thinking would be to imagine a flat road with a ball on it at x_ball. (x_ball > 0).
Starting at x=0 a machine begins raising the road, adding gradually as it moves in the x-direction (creating a sloped road). Once the bulldozer raises the road under the ball it would roll towards x = 0.
This machine moving in the positive x-direction is kind of "emanating outward" but it results in the ball rolling towards the origin.
Jackson says he hope that “our concerns will be taken constructively and lead both to improved methods for data analysis and to a better understanding of LIGO’s results and its exciting long-term potential.”
It seems to me that Jackson just wants to eliminate potential flaws in the result rather than overturn the result itself. Isn't that exactly what we expect from the scientific method?
I wonder if it is a media created image that the tone between the teams are so hostile instead of collaborative.