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
To: everything-list
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
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