[ExI] LIGO: RE: Hey, look on the bright side

[spike]

From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of John Clark



 

 

>…it was supposed to happen in September but remember ​

Hofstadter's L​aw, it always takes longer than you think even when you take Hofstadter's ​Law into account.

 

​John K Clark​

 

PS: thanks, for a few seconds I was thinking of something besides the catastrophe. 

 

 

 

Me too!  Thanks to you John.  We took a pounding, 538 to zip, but as you posted, there is a bright side and it is bright indeed.  Having you post under the title look on the bright side is a good thing.  I am an inherently optimistic sort, like Tigger only without the springy tail (always wanted one of those, but evolution didn’t go there) so we kinda expect that from me.  Having you look on the bright side is a good thing.  Even after this 538 to nada, LIGO is still coming.

 

To help us look on the bright side, consider:  what if…

 

What if… the LIGO upgrade had gone better and they had turned the thing on about Monday and had seen about a dozen signals that day.  Imagine how that would have been: we would go around looking dazed, bewildered, puzzled.  Someone would make some kind of comment about an election, we would have no idea who won or what the heck had gone on because we would be looking over our equations and realizing everything we thought we knew was wrong.

 

That would be cool in itself I suppose, because then we would be trying to figure out how some other phenomenon could make gravity waves, or what the heck could have happened, sort of like an order of magnitude greater reaction than I had when that first signal was announced right after they turned on the devices.  

 

I am still trying to get my head around that: how could we have seen two crazy-unlikely events in just a few weeks?  My view of the cosmos must be serious flawed.  COOL!

 

spike

 

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