What’s Up with LIGO?
I did my PhD working on LIGO, but haven&#x27;t been involved in the project for about five years. To me this article sounds like a crackpot hit-piece akin to the 9-11 deniers claiming that jet fuel can&#x27;t melt steel.<p>Most of the claims in this article have been refuted elsewhere, and I am sure current LIGO scientists will jump in here to further refute its claims.<p>The matter of &quot;retractions&quot; is, for example, not a fair criticism. LIGO generates automatic low-latency notifications of potential detections in order to allow optical telescopes and other detectors to aim at the location of the potential event. Upon further analysis -- which takes time and can&#x27;t be done at low latency -- many of these event notifications are downgraded. These retractions should not diminish your confidence in LIGO.  Indeed, the team fine tunes the &quot;false alarm rate&quot; to avoid sending out too many false positives while not missing real events.<p>The gravitational wave community is _extremely conservative_ in its scientific statements, and you can be assured that every scrutiny has gone into the analysis of detected events and the associated papers. The LIGO detections should not be considered controversial. There is 30+ years of science behind them, and the effort of thousands of professional scientists.