[ExI] Gravitational Waves Detected By LIGO!

[John Clark]

On Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 2:29 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

> back in the early 90s, when Kip Thorne and Drever and those guys were
> setting up LIGO, there were good arguments at the time, some with pretty
> convincing-looking equations in refereed papers, that GWs would never be
> detected with that technology.  As I recall, the argument was that the
> interferometry techniques couldn’t get sufficient resolution to see GWs,
> which those same papers agreed are there.
>

​And the critics were correct, the old ​
​LIGO wasn't sensitive enough to detect gravitational waves unless you were
unrealistically lucky and 2 black holes happened to merge very near to
Earth , but after LEGO big upgrade  it could detect when the distance
between 2 mirrors 2 and a half miles ​away changed by only 10^-18 meters
(less than one thousandth the width of a proton) and that was good enough
to get the job done.

  John K Clark
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