Selfsim:
Yeah, no. Nobody is in a position to refuse to let people debate scientific theories.
Boloney. You folks refuse to let people debate scientific theories routinely in fact. Just this weekend one of the moderators removed my post about this topic over at Physics Forums. Your "editors" of APJ Letters also act like demi-gods when comes to refusing to even allow for a rebuttal to their published paper. How does one even try to refute a paper they "peer reviewed" if they don't allow for rebuttals?
General relativity was widely debated. You just don't like the outcome of that debate: the widespread realization that general relativity is by far the most accurate theory for gravity that we have.
Maybe, but even GR wasn't an instant sell. It took you guys 60 years to admit that Birkeland was right about aurora.
That, plus its multiple successful tests.
What "successful tests" are there for LCDM even if there are tests that support GR? You struck out 100 percent of the time with dark matter, and the last "test" of your dark energy claims put the whole concept at roughly 3 sigma at best case, *assuming* that no inelastic scattering takes place *at all* in space. Your inflation deity has hemispheric variations that *defy* Pope Guth's claims about homogeneity at the largest scales. What "successful tests" are even left standing in LCMD?
Your objections are purely subjective. General relativity is 100% scientific. It makes quantifiable, testable predictions. And it passes all those tests. That is as much as we can ever ask of any scientific theory. Your own objections are pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo.
Even if GR theory itself is 100 percent scientific and "testable", LCDM theory is definitely not. LCDM "predictions" mean absolutely nothing *unless* they happen to work in your favor, and *only* if they happen to work in your favor. Every failed "test" is utterly ignored, most notably every failed "test" of "dark matter" over the past decade.
Granted, GR theory itself isn't the problem IMO, but the fact you try to ride the coattails of a "blunder" theory disguised as GR theory is a problem.
Arguably, of greater issue in the recent renewed activity on the LIGO GW discoveries, is the publication of this paper:
Was LIGO’s Gravitational Wave Detection a False Alarm? by authors: Policarpo Yōshin Ulianov, Xiaochun Mei, Ping Yu.
The paper makes the following claims, and then sets about 'proving' them. (How this process is in any way indicative of the Scientific Process, completely escapes me). Summarising:
Section2. Theoretical Evidence That LIGO Cannot Detect Gravitational Waves.
2.1 The Michelson Interferometer Cannot Be Used to Detect Gravitational Waves
2.2. The Results of LIGO’s Experiments Go against the Results of Michelson’s Experiments
2.3. The Formula of General Relativity Was Applied in a Wrong Context
2.4. Electromagnetic Interaction Makes LIGO’s Experiments Impossible
2.5. LIGO’s Experiments Do Not Verify the Theory of General Relativity
2.6. No Singularity Black Holes Were Found
2.7. Interferometer’s Arm Length Variation Is a 1000 Times Less than Nuclear Radius
2.8. The Method of Numerical Relativity Is Unreliable
So, after seeing such headings, the question arises:
"Who on Earth would have actually bothered to publish such an obviously flawed paper?"
Yet you really didn't show any flaws in any of the claims on that list, you just alleged flaws with the express intent on bashing on the publication that published them:
The answer turns out to be the subject of an entire Wikipedia entry on "Scientific Research Publishing":
Originally Posted by Wiki
The company has been accused of being a predatory open access publisher and of using email spam to solicit papers for submission. In 2014 there was a mass resignation of the editorial board of one of the company's journals, with the outgoing Editor-in-Chief saying of the publisher "For them it was only about making money. We were simply their 'front'."
Right, and mainstream publications make no money at alll on anything they publish. They publish stuff out of the goodness of their heart, and they have no financial interests at all. Sheeesh.
So much for the credibility of Mr Mozina's new found evidence in support of his accusations of the LIGO team's:
Quote:
.. *extreme* case of confirmation bias in its most blatant form.
The only argument that I found interesting and relevant in that paper was their proposed *source* of the signal. It's substantially *more* likely that they are correct about the real cause of that signal, and that the LIGO team screwed up. The LIGO team even went out of their way to *deny* that any data quality veto even took place! I love how you simply overlook their *huge* lack of ethics just to bash on some random publication.
You can pick on my "credibility' the moment you can actually point out an error in my paper. You can't, and you won't.
It seems this paper and its analysis turns out to be a near-perfect example of Mr Mozina's hollow accusations directed at the LIGO team's work.
You haven't even mentioned a single point that *I personally raised* in my paper. Your response is completely hollow and it's based on pure fear. You have no way to refute anything that I wrote, so you went after another paper, and actually a different *publisher*, you didn't even directly refute the content of the paper that I cited. You didn't show any error in their work either. You just attacked the publisher with innuendo and nonsense.
The paper's (evidently unconcealed) motivation, appears to be for the authors to gain profit, in some way, from their development of a type of data filter ("the Ulianov Whitening Filter with Noise Band-Pass"), which may, or may not be applicable to the LIGO data gathering/detection path:
Originally Posted by Ulianov etal
... the Ulianov Whitening Filter with Noise Band-Pass is a new tool that can be used by the LIGO team to better understand the noise sources in the detectors and can help avoid false detections
If that's not confirming their own confirmation bias, (and a vested interest in the discreditation of LIGO's work), then it would be very surprising.
What? How does anyone "gain" by discrediting LIGO? Exactly how were those authors going to "make money" by paying to get their work published? I don't see anything in their filtering process from that paper which cannot be reproduced by LIGO *without* paying anyone anything. You're just making up this nonsense as you go. It actually *costs money* to be a "skeptic" of mainstream claims because skeptics don't have instant access to the same publishing channels, and they often have to go to much greater lengths (and greater costs) to get their work published at all.
If there was a level playing field, LIGO would be toast by now. The only way you can keep up this pretense about discovering gravitational waves is by controlling the peer review process and limiting the publishing options of critics.
Until this LIGO paper I had *never* even personally read an astronomy paper that contained *false* information, nor have I ever seen such an outrageous example of pure confirmation bias.
In every other potential 'cause' of the signal, LIGO introduced *external* instrumentation to *eliminate* other possible causes if there was no observation to support it. When they got to their own claim however, they *blatantly* ignored the external instruments and telescopes and they utterly ignored their complete lack of evidence to support their claim of a celestial origin of this signal, and they claimed "discovery" anyway! What a bullshit way to do "science". When you folks can't provide evidence ethically and based on consistent methodology, your side just lies and cheats! Like hell there was no data quality veto within an hour of the signal. What a bunch of dishonest bullshit.