Robittybob1

When they say "generic feature" doesn't that imply you have to go back and look at the basic physics of the situation. I wasn't guessing, I was looking at how those waves were being generated, OK it involved logic but are you sure logic is not part of a generic feature? Definition of generic "characteristic of or relating to a class or group of things; not specific." Well I'm pleased. I picture it as 2 wavefronts per orbit, due to those two (3D) spirals of gravitational energy traveling through space. To picture them as 3D spirals is not easy, but it was a necessary part of that tweet. The strength is greatest above and below the orbital plane, so are we getting summation of the waves above and below? http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/93472-gravitational-lens-and-gravitational-waves-question/page-2#entry909493 It seems like they would lose their distinctiveness perpendicular to the orbital plane even if they were stronger as according to @AstroKatie. I'm putting this down to them orbiting different distances (in most cases) from their CoM. In one paper it likened GE to the water coming out of an "S" shaped rotating garden sprinkler. So I'd say there are two streams of water coming out continuously but when a person is standing closeby there are two showers of water per revolution of the sprinkler head. In the garden sprinkler the water is piped in but where does the "supply" of gravitational energy come from?

In one paper it likened Gravitational Waves to the water coming out of an "S" shaped rotating garden sprinkler. So I'd say there are two streams of water coming out continuously but when a person is standing closeby there are two showers of water per revolution of the sprinkler head. In the garden sprinkler the water is piped in but where does the "endless supply" of gravitational energy come from? Is it just the potential energy between the masses? No for some of that potential energy is converted to kinetic energy. So I have a feeling it will be 1/2 its PE. So was that "3 solar masses of energy released" equivalent to half the potential energy of 2 BHs (of the masses specified)? They say this energy was released "mostly in the final moments". That would be true of PE as well wouldn't it?

That is a start I suppose. Something is moving and you add some more energy it moves faster why can't this go on forever? Are you having to push the additional energy as well as the rest mass energy as you go faster? Is that why "the total energy of a massive object tends towards infinity as you approach c" is any reason to be a restriction? Do we say that kinetic energy has no mass, the kinetic energy of an object does not add to its gravitational mass, but it appears to affect its inertia. But wasn't it impossible to separate inertial mass from gravitational mass?

Try to explain why nothing can go faster than speed of light without using the term relativistic mass. Can it be done?

Eise - you seem to have answered the issue: "I have no idea what "Ockham's Razor" being wrong could possibly mean" yourself. "Ockham's Razor" is not (used) as an absolute sieve of wrong or correct theories.

How are you defining the photon sphere? That from memory was 3/2 times the radius of the EH. You say "the mass is lost from the EH photon sphere outward", is that the region between the EH and the photon sphere? Or still further out? "binary black hole mergers.pdf " http://w.astro.berkeley.edu/~gmarcy/astro160/papers/binary_black_hole_mergers.pdf covers quite a lot of interesting detail.

Spins - as in rotation rate of the black hole? What type of spins are you talking about? Distances - do you mean orbital radius, the orbital radius went from extremely large right down to a total merge. So what difference would distance have? Exactly what distance are you meaning? Would the masses make any difference to the number of wavefronts per orbit? How would that have an effect? Do you think you could vary the number of wavefronts per orbit by varying the balance of the BH masses? They know the frequency of the "chirp" So if there is only 1 wavefront per orbit the binary is orbiting at twice the rate of the system that had 2 wavefronts per orbit. There have been estimates of the final tangential speeds of the BHs, and we should be able to calculate the size of their event horizons so we should be able to tell from those estimates if there were two or one wave per orbit.

Well I could be wrong too. That wiggly line at the bottom is the GW passing through the LIGO. This tells me that GE is being radiated long before the last -0.75 secs. I have not worked out how it happens but BHs still have gravity so "gravitons" seem to be able to go out of the BH even if other types of radiation can't. So if it was gravitons being lost as GWs or GE and this allows the BHs to fall and speed up (the orbital period collapses) both orbiting at a smaller radius, I can just about see how a BH can lose mass long before the merger. I would prefer to see it described by the researchers themselves but that is how I'm thinking about it ATM. (There are 2 waves per orbit - comparing the wiggly line to the orbits of the BHs) if I understand your analogy correctly could there be two drivers sharing the same antenna 180 degrees out of phase, and then only producing rectified positive waves? (Gravity can only attract) The sinusoidal look of the GW is really only positive wave crests falling down to zero, rather than a true positive and negative phases of the sinusoidal curve. Now that might seem really hard to take but could it be the case?

Thanks. Those simulations would need certain conditions put on the programs at the beginning. Someone would have had to decide whether there were 1,2, 3, 4 .... waves per orbit. That is one of the first steps and that is all we are deciding here. I chose 2 because each body of the binary is emitting the gravitational energy separately. They are both falling toward each other leading to the merger.

Do the edits I made on #35 help? If as you say it is related to the orbital period, is it just the decision as to whether it is 2 pulses or just 1 per orbit that you are considering or are there other ratios that are possible?

I am trying to answer you. When they got that "chirp" do you think the frequency they got had nothing to do with the orbital period? I did, so maybe I'm mistaken. The way I imagined it was happening was that the frequency increased as the orbital period decreased as the binary BH orbits decayed rapidly in the last half second. (I am not basing my concept on the animation, but MIT must have chosen that animation therefore we can presume it tries to explain the situation.) Yet looking into a bit further the animation that was shown along with the announcement there was not always 2 waves per rotation. It was harder to see the relationship. It starts at 4:50 into the clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5Ycv2yYNG8 which was "a computer simulation using Einstein's equations. Looking closer at it there was a period where there were two waves per revolution for a while from about 5:05 - 5:10.

Well what happens in reality then? How would you answer Swansont's question in #30?

Would you agree with this statement "Inertial mass increases with speed, while gravitational mass does not."? I'm struggling with this one when I relate it back to the RB law. Weren't we saying that the rest mass increases as an object uses it kinetic energy to climb out of a gravity well? To measure gravitational mass wouldn't you need to pass it by another mass and see where it will orbit?

At least in most of the animations it does. Look at the image at 1:38 on the MIT video. Logically it would, for do you think it wouldn't? I'm trying to think of how. If both orbiting BHs or stars had the same mass, why wouldn't they both have the same contribution? I must admit it is harder to see when the masses are out of balance like the Sun-Earth for you don't get the effect of the Sun sweeping past you. It still must be there though. So were you thinking in terms of just the one wave per orbit for the system as a whole? How does that logic go?

That was the first time I've seen a twitter post used in that way on a science forum. I looked up her credentials. I came around after a while. #26

Funny thing just about every site today has been saying KE is part of the mass, but not rest mass. I'll have to go through them again. What is the clue to understanding "KE never contributes to the mass...."? what do you think of this exercise?

But with GE each pass of the half of the binary produces another positive wave so I think the frequency of the GE wave will be twice the orbital frequency. So if it was liken to bow waves it would be two speed boats chasing each other in a circle and each time they come close to you a bow wave would travel toward you. But we are dealing with 3 dimensional space rather than a water surface so it is possible the waves are all around rather than just like ripples on a pond. http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/93472-gravitational-lens-and-gravitational-waves-question/page-2#entry909493 could well be right.

Was the quote from her twitter feed? I would be surprised if that was right. Why do you think it was sensible? I would love to know the right answer. GE production slows the body allowing the orbit to decay, so if it is removing force that was directed tangentially to the orbit I thought the energy given off would be an expression of this lost energy i.e at all times it is generating a wave front to the fore and these waves spread out from there. Like a bow wave of a boat maybe.

Was that a joke?

THe MM experiment was done on Earth in a GF and that was one of the proofs in a way of the statement light always travels at c. So as long as the experiments to prove the laws of physics are done in the horizontal plane the GF has minimal effect. For where abouts in the Universe is this place of no GF that was used in Einstein's thought experiments? It is hard to imagine if you could access the same place or similar places in the Universe and have different rest masses at the end if you started off with identical masses to begin with (i.e. they were side by side at sometime in the past). Einstein's thought experiments were not complicated by the thoughts of Dark Energy (DE) and Dark Matter (DM). So in reality (for practical purposes) we are always going to be dealing with IFoR in different strength GFs and all we can do are experiments in the horizontal plane i.e. orthogonal to the GF.

What I was trying to say was that the two sites have no gravitational field (GF) but in the process of taking the IFoR "physics laboratory" from one site to the other it passes through a GF. If that can't happen I can't look at the problem from a SR POV. E.g. Can we do this "The lab is raised in the GF by 1 meter" or even more dramatic "the lab is transported from Earth to Mars". If it never moved through a net changing force field the mass would be invariant.

The two postulates of Special Relativity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postulates_of_special_relativity#Postulates_of_special_relativity Laws of physics same in all reference frames. This does not stop mass changing when moving from one inertial frame to the next, especially if there was a gravitational field being crossed in the process of taking the frame of Reference (FoR) from one site to another. So if we take F= ma as the law in question the same amount of force will result in less acceleration if the mass has increased. "If there was a gravitational field being crossed in the process of taking the frame of Reference (FoR) from one site to another."The words "gravitational field" could be replaced by a "magnetic field", or an "electrical field", a strong force or weak force. I'm thinking wherever there is a force that has an absolute change. For instance the electron's trip to the top of the mountain does not have to be remembered if then later it is brought back to the bottom of the mountain. . In the RB law SR cannot operate with the assumption of memorylessness. Intermediary steps result in memory e.g. "if there was a gravitational field being crossed in the process of taking the frame of Reference (FoR) from one site to another". You can't forget how you got there. The electron in an inertial FoR (IFoR) at the bottom of the mountain does not have the same mass as in an IFoR at the top of the mountain. But the laws of physics will be the same in each IFoR.

The YT is really educational and shows the effort a good scientist goes through into attempts to prove the fossil is a missing link in the evolution of bats.

Well you (JC) have definitely helped me. Swansont still causes me to be fearful, but on this issue Swansont and I have been in line with each other even though we had stepped over the edge of classical physics. It has been a strange experience. Thanking all those who have contributed so far to a very personal thread. OK but can we discuss all these topics together under the heading of RB law? I'm not strong in GR or SR but I'll have to get strong to continue the discussion. It is going to be difficult but that is my problem. Next two steps: 1. How do I define my system? 2. Learn how SR divides total energy.

Should we pay to read it or should we be paid to read it, that is the question. $50 is the difference.