What the Background Noise LIGO Detects is Telling Us

On February 12, 2016, LIGO made the extraordinary announcement that they had detected gravitational waves for the first time. The day following the announcement, I posted an article predicting that the announcement was premature and that the signal was probably due to noise.

Then on June 13, 2017, just a few days ago, a group of researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen (see Forbes article here) published a new study. After analysing the data from LIGO, they found correlations in the noise detected by the two LIGO detectors. Thus casts some serious doubts on the LIGO discovery and supporting my prediction.

That QGD excludes the existence of gravitational waves does not demean the importance of the LIGO-VIRGO observatories. They may not detect gravitational waves, but they could detect variations in the gravitational interactions between the Earth and all massive structures in the Universe causing a gravitational tidal effect. In fact, if QGD is correct, the noise is the continuous fluctuations in the sum of the gravitational interactions between the Earth and the rest of the universe which the peak fluctuations due to the events involving the most distant massive structures. So what is discarded as noise (aside from the systematic and local sources) is more revealing than any individual gravitational signal.

A New Prediction

The VIRGO observatory will soon join the two LIGO detectors and it is expected that together they answer the question as to whether or not gravitational waves have been detected. I do believe they will, but the answer may not be the one expected by the researchers. If the signals are due to stellar gravitational tidal forces, then QGD predicts correlations between the noise of all three detectors similar to that found by the Copenhagen group.

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