A dangerous precedent has been set by claiming both GW150914 data reanalyses (Nielsen et al. 2018 and Green-Moffat 2017/8) were conducted by independent groups having no affiliation with the LIGO collaboration, thus no conflict of interests. This is false: Nielsen et al. authors were LIGO contributors and team members whose recent departure is puzzling; the less heroically-sensationalized Nielsen et al. 2018 paper alone became available within the last few months; Green-Moffat 2017/8 required two revisions before it was published in PhysletB Sep 10, 2018, but the paper had been available since 2017 (v1: 5 Oct 2017, v3: 24 Aug 2018) on arXiv. It should be noted that in the same paper, Green-Moffat, who work with MOG (modified gravity), also assign much lower SNR to LIGO events in general; their v3 abstract actually was edited to downplay these claims – so much for “independence”:
V1: “While the extracted waveforms are clearly indicative of black hole coalescence, we find signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) much smaller than the published matched-filter detection SNRs.”
V3: ” Conceptual and numerical differences between our RMS signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) and the published matched-filter detection SNRs are discussed.”
Moffat seems to have miscommunicated or misconstrued an anecdote about the NBI collaboration use of a LIGO "illustration." NBI The NBI collab. found that LIGO graph in PhysRevLett.116.061102 used "illustrative" data; free smoothing/fitting of normalized/rescaled LIGO data were presented with fictional bounds and oversimplified templates. Such ambiguity persisted into this article. LIGO published plots "[...]not derived from actual analysis. The paper on the first detection[...]used a data plot that was more “illustrative” than precise, says [Neil] Cornish. Some of the results [...] were done 'by eye'." [quoted from Oct 31 2018 New Scientist article]. Neil Cornish works for LIGO, by the way, vouching for the credibility of the NBI collaboration. Not all LIGO members claim all arguments and evidence in Creswell et al. 2017 reanalysis are wrong.
It should be recognized that LIGO member Ian Harry could not discount residual phase correlations claimed by the NBI team by insisting that an apodization function, if applied to sample LIGO time series prior to use of Fourier transforms, would eliminate excess cross-correlations in assumed stationary lag value between station-specific template residuals. The NBI team found multiple errors in LIGO-sanctioned code developed by Ian Harry; when Harry corrected his errors, the claimed correlations persisted, prompting the two recent publications presented by this article. Ian Harry's gaffe on Sean Carroll's blog – cited extensively as evidence for the robustness of LIGO signals upon an effort of independent falsification - remains un-retracted.
Lightning around GW events:
fulguritics.blogspot.com/201… ... rtung.html
GW150914 lags from terrestrial source:
fulguritics.blogspot.com/201…
GW150914:
fulguritics.blogspot.com/201… ... -here.html
GW170817:
fulguritics.blogspot.com/201… ... n-bar.html
On Nielsen et al 2018, Green-Moffat 2017/8, and van Putten et al. 2018:
fulguritics.blogspot.com/201… ... -very.html
Terrestrial contamination as mentioned in LIGO papers and reports:
fulguritics.blogspot.com/201… ... e-for.html
Problems with the EM counterpart of GW170817:
fulguritics.blogspot.com/201… ... -4993.html
Pre-whitened strain data are used in the Creswell et al 2017 work, but not in Green-Moffat 2017/8 or Nielsen et al. 2018; both Nielsen et al. 2018 and Green-Moffat 2017/8 only report reduced significance of correlations after heavy filtering and decimation of LIGO strain. Lag correlations tested in Nielsen et al. 2018 and Green-Moffat 2017/8 are not strictly window-sensitive; lag-coherent noise begins ~10 minutes prior to GW150914 and continued for ~40 min, during the peak of magnetospheric sawtooth event with T-storm located at proper distance to produce ~0.007 s lag.
Partial correlations that preserve ~0.007s (strictly 0.0069s in my own work) interval appear in both reanalyses, and these must now be addressed, as should the use of de-correlated and synthetic noise in both Nielsen et al. 2018 and Green-Moffat 2017/8. Very large wavelet bins used by Green-Moffat mask auto-spectral density, which has low-Q modes in H1 data. Bin width can be chosen to essentially obscure transverse mode resolution. Wavelet transforms/whitening by Green-Moffat obscure nonstationary transverse modes; Nielsen et al. 2018 uses amplitude information from real strain to color Gaussian noise prior to subtraction of an ML template, but ML and NR templates themselves are inversely lag-correlated. Green-Moffat reject NR templates altogether and claim to model their phase information directly from strain surrounding prospect and known signals. This introduces foundational circularity into their analysis, as any coherence/transverse modes in noise can contribute phase information to signal!
Low-power/short-time complex phase correlations with fractional/transverse Fourier power are not suitable for Fourier wavelet analysis. Laplacian methods would be useful in this capacity, in fact: to test the introduction of complex template-clipped artifacts into residuals. Both reanalyses assume Gaussian-dominated noise. This seems deliberate and simplistic; noisy data are filtered arbitrarily to increase spectral power in 35-350 Hz range. Noncommutative properties of coherent complex noise symmetry, when band-passed, can create false SNR from non-Gaussian broadband noise modes, as can phase mixing (which can also add artifacts and interrupt complex coherence). Phase mixing occurs upon conversion between finite, arbitrary sample lengths and sampling rates after band-passing and notching from non-periodic data, which can obscure nonstationary correlations with poorly-weighted rescaling is applied under assumption of prior stationarity/dispersionless propagation of signal content. Inverted-retrograde cross-correlations are not "insignificant," as partial cross-correlations are preserved ( [τ] anticorrelations shifted, inverted to -[τ] correlations at same absolute ~0.007 s lag).
Creswell et al. 2017 reports similar lag-preserving null output (template-subtracted) cross-correlations for GW151226 and GW170104 signals (the only three datasets available at the time of publication). It is important to note that windowing artifacts don't yield exactly lag-preserving output cross-correlations ≤20% from R=-1, as for GW150914 template-subtracted residual output for 0.2s event.
Discrete cosine transforms (DCTs), which are not window sensitive, of noise CCFs show same lags being dismissed so naively by Nielsen et al. 2018 and Green-Moffat 2017/8. Another forbidden spectral trait I have found in notched/band-passed (pre-whitened) LIGO event signal data is low-Q enhancement of auto-spectral density modes by continental waveguide, which includes Schumann mode power not removed by LIGO through notching, and additional enhancement in lag/inversion-corrected cross-spectral density within 138-145 Hz. The DST and DCT-based Fourier analysis of the cross-correlations and partial auto-correlations of band-passed/pre-whitened GW150914 data are utilized to investigate strongest non-Gaussian noise modes, which are related to topographic spatial cavity-bound coherence length and boundary/partition/centroid coordinates of thunderstorms within LIGO line-of-sight.
Even calibration lines around the 0.2s event are optimized for ~0.007s lag! This suggests that calibration locking should be performed critically when ramping sawtooth (quasiperodic) noise dominates strain and magnetic/charging signals, as calibration lines are (uncomfortably) harmonically-related to each other. Systematic error is expected, but the many correlations and coincidences with known periods of dynamic magnetospheric-geomagnetic instability should be expected to draw more attention than it has to error. Sawtooth signals similar to those found in the CCFs of coherent noise modes and their quantization error terms are injected during active LIGO calibration and testing, which may also indicate cross-talk between detectors during GPS signal acquisition, which was reported to have been intermittently interrupted ~15 minutes prior to GW150914 arrival by A. Effler. Interview with Anamaria Effler, Caltech (stationed at LIGO Livingston during O1)
nsf.gov/news/special_report ... ls_v02.pdf:
“Robert Schofield and I were testing the L1 detector’s sensitivity to environmental noise at LIGO Livingston on the night of September 13. Our tests were part of LIGO’s preparations for the O1 run. We were still working at 2am on Monday, September 14. Pausing until about 4am to evaluate our data, we debated whether or not to do “car injections” in which one of us would drive a large car near the main detector building and apply the brakes violently every five seconds to see if the seismic noise from the car would appear in the interferometer data. But the GPS wristwatch that we needed for the test had become disconnected from the satellite signal. This was the last straw. We said, “Fine, we can live without this test.” I distinctly remember (because I was asked many times during the next few days) looking at my car clock as I was driving away from the site and seeing that the time was 4:35am. I knew that my clock was three minutes in error, which annoyed me.
The next day or the following, I saw some email traffic on GW150914 and my heart stopped because of the possibility that it occurred during our tests (although this couldn’t have happened because we keep the detector out of observation mode while we’re testing)."
Incidentally, there was a magnetospheric sawtooth injection event underway.
A network quality duty cycle for LIGO-Virgo is ~0.6; data rejection criteria have been relaxed, however, and data formerly vetoed are now being mined for “events”. 13 mo.of total aLIGO-Virgo scientific operation, with long joint quality coverage interval gaps for both 01(duty cycle <0.5) and 02 (L1,H1|Virgo >0.7) yielded a prediction of 11 annual events from L1|H1 duty cycle, considering only prior N=7 LIGO events hitherto and the density of triggers relative to operational intervals. December, 2018 LIGO catalogue added four new events, which in fact matched my own prior estimation as I’ve briefly introduced. Magnetospheric sawtooth events also occur at an average rate of 11/yr. (Cai-Clauer 2013], and all 11 LIGO events coincided with quasiperiodic phase behavior in proton flux and magnetic field data, coherently-peaking and/or rapidly oscillating during LIGO triggers. Time/day of arrival is cyclically-correlated to error in all N=11 LIGO events, and strongly-bound to cyclical substorm/lightning/secular-orbital correlations.
The LIGO O2 catalogue [
arxiv.org/abs/1811.12907] promotes lower SNR GW candidate triggers to 'bonafide discoveries" than those rejected in Nitz et al. 2018 for O1 [
arxiv.org/abs/1811.01921]. The Nielsen et al. 2018 [
arxiv.org/abs/1811.04071] and Nitz et al 2018 LIGO authors abruptly left the collaboration as a response to this crisis, but are also referred to by LIGO and in new articles in Ars Technica and Quanta as "independent," although they wrote these papers while members of the LIGO collaboration. This is not the first sign of trouble in paradise.
LIGO decided to release four new triggers that have "network SNR" below their own seemingly-rigorous false discovery threshold. LIGO dredged their old data, and only one of these new four triggers even registers at more than one LIGO station with proper lag and SNR above colored non-Gaussian noise (noise exceeds signals in all LIGO events by at least three orders of magnitude). This particular more reliable signal, GW170729, was too dissimilar from numerical relativity templates that it could not be fit by the very modeling that provides confirmation of parametric consistency with GR.
Six so-called GW signals out of a total of eleven (N=11) arrived during the most lightning-active month for North America, directly-preceding the most active and energetic solar flare cycle in 12 years - all in under 30 days (conforming to a major Solar rotation cycle and its correlated driving of lightning cycle), and all during vigorous pulse-coupled CG from mesoscale quasi-stationary T-storms in LIGO line-of-sight (continuing the trend for previous N=7 LIGO events that had been established).The events were synchronized with magnetospheric sawtooth oscillations and steady magnetospheric convection (SMC), with major changes or persistence of significant sunspot number (e.g. 0, 11). All 11 GW events arrived during remarkable substorm days. Multiscale foreground signal correlations persist with O2 N=4, with times of day and day of arrival preserving cyclicity synchronized with substorm phase, having very much identical autocorrelations. Magnetospheric sawtooth events only occur an average of 11/yr, and each of the 11 LIGO events coincided with a sawtooth event.
LIGO-Virgo interferometers are sensitive to many kinds of seismic and electromagnetic noise.
Conditions suitable for the proliferation of spurious transients that generically match waveforms used by LIGO are expected exactly on days and times reported for N=11 LIGO GW signals. These undesirable terrestrial transients affect both detectors as expected for a gravitational wave
dcc.ligo.org/LIGO-P1400210/p…. Suspiciously, magnetometers have never been reported to have been fully functional and collecting quality data, but their failures, disconnections, and channel saturation issue.
The Earth's magnetic field can become richly-structured; quasiperiodic boundary intersections dominate magnetic field data during strong Solar wind-magnetospheric coupling intervals accompanied by propagating magnetic reconnection. Some of these intermittent states, collectively known as 'magnetospheric mode,' contain scale-invariant quasinormal superpositions of bifurcations/separatrices/transverse-ramping solitons. Quasi-stationary coherent Delta potential switching may emerge from oscillation between ground state and triplet degeneracy. Such crossover behavior stimulated in these non-equilibrium systems can be fit to a sufficient-degree of confidence by models capturing numerical relativity two-body inspiral and merger. Nonexceptional geomagnetic feedback from Solar wind driving to magnetosphere contains discontinuities that also resemble chirp transients in amplitude locked phase information, reciprocally-similar to ELF ‘whistler' energy density encoded into MM interferometer displacement variance.