There has also be a test of the recent Verlinde paper, and it returned with a non-standard prediction of Einstein's original model. As Freeman Dyson said long ago, the better our equipment is, the more new things we will discover.
-----Original Message----- From: John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> To: everything-list <everything-list@googlegroups.com> Sent: Sun, Dec 18, 2016 1:18 pm Subject: Has LIGO found new physics? On December 9 a paper was published hinting that maybe just maybe the LIGO Gravitational Wave detector has found evidence for new physics, the first ever departure from General Relativity: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1612.00266.pdf String theory says, well...,some string theories say, a Black Hole really has 2 event horizons just a few Planck lengths apart, the inner one is like the one Einstein predicted where anything crossing it can never escape, and the outer event horizon where anything crossing will *probably* be trapped to o but might still escape if the particle enters at just the right angle. Some non-string theories also predict similar event horizons , with a few subtle differences from the String Theory version , in an effort to avoid the Black Hole information paradox and explain Black Hole firewalls. To Gravitational Waves these 2 event horizons would act like mirrors, most waves would pass through both but some would start bouncing back and forth between the two . Eventually the waves would all get out but there would be a delay. The above paper calculates that the echo s should appear at 0.1 seconds, 0.2 seconds and 0.3 seconds a fter the primary wave. When they looked at the LIGO data for the 3 Black Hole mergers (2 certain and 1 probable) they seemed to find echos after just those delays (the delay only changes with the log of of the mass, and the mass of all 3 events were roughly the same so the delays would be too). The evidence so far for any of this is weak, the sigma is only 2.9 which means if you repeated the experiment 270 times you'd only expect to see the observed results once if it was all due to random noise . Y ou need 5 sigma to claim a discover and that's one chance in 3.5 million it's just a fluke. A few month ago everybody got excited when the LHC said they may have found a new unexpected particle, and the evidence for it was almost as good as LIGO's , the sigma was 2.1, but as more data came in the entire thing just disappeared, so caution is warranted. As LIGO collects more data we should be able to confirm or rule out new physics within the next 2 years, less if we're lucky; although the data will probably not be good enough to figure out if a string theory o r a non-string theory fits the results better, but at least we'll know if there is something new under the sun or not. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.