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LIGO Announcement - Live Now!!!


hypervelocity

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1 hour ago, Majorjim said:

And any number of the the other nationals who worked hard to make this happen.

my reference to gaby gonzalez's nationality was just a good-intentioned miscellaneous piece of information, there are no boundaries or countries in science! :):):)

Edited by hypervelocity
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Just now, hypervelocity said:

my reference to gaby gonzalez's nationality was just a good-intentioned miscellaneous piece of information, there are no boundaries or countries in science! :):):)

Agreed. I meant no animosity. I detest national pride, pride built on the pain and subjugation of others. I am a humanist. :)

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Apparently the signal quality was excellent too - in other words, that black hole merger made a shockwave so powerful that the interferometers got a result well beyond their noise floor. There is not the shadow of a doubt that this is indeed the real deal :) Kind of a weird turnaround after a whole century of "we cannot detect something that faint", straight to "boom, now there's a spike!".

And due to the high clarity of the signal, all sorts of secondary and tertiary science can now be done on it by anyone who wants. There'll be a flurry of papers over the next two years for sure!

Edited by Streetwind
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1 hour ago, Scotius said:

Is this enough to elevate Einstein's Theory to Einstein's Law? :)

I think scientific "laws" are a different category of thing. Laws are apparently very general and can be expressed in a single sentence or a single equation. Einsteins entire theory might not become law, but something like "E=Mc2" could more easily become something like "Einsteins Law of Equivalence" or something. But the whole of general relativity is quite a lot to be summarised into a single, or groups of, laws. I guess?

Although further reading indicates that what constitues the difference between "law" or "theory" is almost entirely arbitrary, the criteria for both appear to be very similar, and there certainly is not, as far as I can see, any fixed progression of "ranks" for scientific concepts, other than the most broad generalisations.

Postulate is another term which is analogous to "law". It could even be argued that Einsteins theories *already* qualify as laws - laws are still falsifiable and replaceable by new knowledge and share a similar burden of evidence. There are even laws which are also theories, eg: Abel's Theorem, Bell's Theorem etc.

Seems to me that if your theory is to be called law is almost entirely a matter of popular consensus.

 

PS: In several places it is stated that Einsteins theory of General Relativity includes the Einstein Field Equation as a fundamental law - G=8*pi*T

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8 minutes ago, p1t1o said:

Seems to me that if your theory is to be called law is almost entirely a matter of popular consensus.

 

PS: In several places it is stated that Einsteins theory of General Relativity includes the Einstein Field Equation as a fundamental law - G=8*pi*T

Theory does not become law or vice versa, as I understand the difference between the two is that a law tells you what happens (laws of motion for an example) and a theory explains why or how it does.

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