On the subject of glitches: There is an entire branch of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration dedicated to "Detector Characterization". The article implicitly, and incorrectly in my opinion, casts doubt upon the excellent work of a great many smart and dedicated people.
At sufficient precision, every experiment will face unknown non-gaussian stochastic fluctuations. It is the single most-important job of an experimentalist to discern how to accurately assess the uncertainty in a measurement. LIGO's false-alarm-rate approach to significance estimation is data-driven and, to me, compelling.
The false-alarm-rate approach uses a simple fact: any detector signals at different observatories separated by more than an Earth-light-crossing-time cannot be a gravitational wave. By placing time-shifted signals from the two (or three) detectors into the gravitational-wave analysis pipeline, one can determine the accidental-detection rate, no matter what kinds of glitches might occur. Detections and candidates are reported with such a data-driven false-alarm rate.
Gravitational-wave searches, in the context of the post, are searches for transient disturbances in the detectors. Glitches are initially-unexplained transients. It is, in general, folly to believe that any instrument capable of sensing, in one second, an object's displacement by 1/20,000th of a proton diameter won't see the occasional unexplained transient. It is, as mentioned above, essential that a scientist using such an instrument credibly assesses measurement uncertainties.
If you are a gravitational-wave skeptic, keep your ears open for binary-neutron-star mergers. A simultaneous bang-and-a-flash are nigh-impossible to fake. I'm a skeptical experimentalist (experimentalists are skeptical, as a species), and I've found GW170817 sufficiently-compelling so as to remove any remaining doubt that LIGO/LVC has seen gravitational waves (They almost certainly discovered the site of the R-process at the same time! What more do you want?). As neutron star observations accumulate, the case will only get more compelling. All of us are waiting for the next bang-and-a-flash, as the potential for discovery and wonder is enormous.
At sufficient precision, every experiment will face unknown non-gaussian stochastic fluctuations. It is the single most-important job of an experimentalist to discern how to accurately assess the uncertainty in a measurement. LIGO's false-alarm-rate approach to significance estimation is data-driven and, to me, compelling.
The false-alarm-rate approach uses a simple fact: any detector signals at different observatories separated by more than an Earth-light-crossing-time cannot be a gravitational wave. By placing time-shifted signals from the two (or three) detectors into the gravitational-wave analysis pipeline, one can determine the accidental-detection rate, no matter what kinds of glitches might occur. Detections and candidates are reported with such a data-driven false-alarm rate.
Gravitational-wave searches, in the context of the post, are searches for transient disturbances in the detectors. Glitches are initially-unexplained transients. It is, in general, folly to believe that any instrument capable of sensing, in one second, an object's displacement by 1/20,000th of a proton diameter won't see the occasional unexplained transient. It is, as mentioned above, essential that a scientist using such an instrument credibly assesses measurement uncertainties.
If you are a gravitational-wave skeptic, keep your ears open for binary-neutron-star mergers. A simultaneous bang-and-a-flash are nigh-impossible to fake. I'm a skeptical experimentalist (experimentalists are skeptical, as a species), and I've found GW170817 sufficiently-compelling so as to remove any remaining doubt that LIGO/LVC has seen gravitational waves (They almost certainly discovered the site of the R-process at the same time! What more do you want?). As neutron star observations accumulate, the case will only get more compelling. All of us are waiting for the next bang-and-a-flash, as the potential for discovery and wonder is enormous.