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New Distributed Project Seeks Gravity Waves

Posted by timothy on from the jeff-spicolli-knows-where-they're-at dept.

fenimor writes "Much like the popular SETI@Home distributed computing project that searches radio telescope data for signs of extraterrestrial life, the new Einstein@Home will search for gravitational waves in data collected by U.S. and European gravitational wave detectors. Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity predicted the existence of gravitational waves in 1916, but only now has technology reached the point that scientists hope to detect them directly."

148 of 234 comments (clear)

  1. What do gravity waves tell us? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What do gravity waves tell us that EM radiation doesn't? Will these measurements allow us to image distant objects that are otherwise invisible?

    1. Re:What do gravity waves tell us? by turnstyle · · Score: 4, Informative
      "What do gravity waves tell us that EM radiation doesn't?"

      It would be another confirmation of Einstein's theory. Some more background here.

      And here's some about a recent satellite also hoping to establish the existence of gravity waves.

      --
      Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
    2. Re:What do gravity waves tell us? by cot · · Score: 5, Informative

      If you detect gravity waves from sources like supernovae, black hole collisions, etc. you're confirming that Einstein's GR works and that the properties of the waves (ie amplitude, duration) make sense for that particular source.

      If you can detect primordial gravity waves from the very early universe(harder!), you now have an indication that inflation (rapid expansion) of the universe is a reasonable cosmological model rather than its current somewhat ad hoc status. It nicely explains away some problems with simpler models, but no real direct test has been performed to show that it happened.

      --

    3. Re:What do gravity waves tell us? by StupendousMan · · Score: 5, Interesting

      First, the direct detection of gravitational waves would confirm certain aspects of the theory of general relativity, as other posters have noted.

      Second, gravitational wave detectors will provide us with a new window to the universe. Ordinary stars emit mostly visible light, so ordinary optical telescopes are well suited to their study. Cold clouds of interstellar gas emit mostly radio waves, so radio telescopes are the best choice to study them. We know of certain objects --- relatively uncommon ones -- which ought to produce a good deal of gravitational radiation: very massive objects moving very quickly, such as pairs of black holes or neutron stars orbiting around each other at small distances. Gravitational wave detectors will allow astronomers to study the properties of these objects more precisely than we can with ordinary telescopes (since they do not emit much electromagnetic radiation).

      Finally, it is possible (though I suspect unlikely) that the universe may contain a whole class (or classes) of objects which are currently unknown to us, but which will appear as strong sources of gravitational radiation. Almost every time astronomers have added a new type of telescope to their toolkit, they have stumbled across previously unknown phenomena. The first gamma-ray telescopes, for example, revealed gamma-ray bursts, which were completely undetected (and unexpected) by other means in the late sixties and early seventies.

      One last note: LIGO and other gravitational wave detectors provide very poor angular resolution, compared to ordinary optical telescopes. They will tell us something like "a source of gravitational waves is over there, about 10 degrees above the horizon at 5 degrees south of East." The "error circle" for a typical detection will be a few degrees in size. It may be quite a challenge for astronomers to identify the optical counterpart to a new source of gravitational waves, since there will usually be thousands to millions of optical sources within the error box of a gravitational wave detection.

      --
      Michael Richmond "This is the heart that broke my finger."
      mwrsps@rit.edu http://stupendous.rit.edu
    4. Re:What do gravity waves tell us? by LionMan · · Score: 4, Informative

      Sorry, gravity probe B (the recent satellite) is not trying to confirm the existence of gravity waves. GPB is looking for "frame dragging," another predicted effect of general relativity. Gyroscopes in GPB should precess, despite the fact that they are over the poles of the earth and (to first order, excluding motion about the sun and the motion of our solar system itself) not in a rotating frame. Even though the gyroscopes won't be in a rotating frame, their spacetime metric will be 'dragged' by the rotating massive earth, causing a precession of some parts of arcseconds (check the web page for more).

      --
      -Leo
    5. Re:What do gravity waves tell us? by erick99 · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Something about using Wikipedia as a definitive reference for anything leaves me underwhelmed.

      And, yes, go ahead and mark me Troll

      --
      http://www.busyweather.com/
    6. Re:What do gravity waves tell us? by LionMan · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Actually, the angular resolution is worse than that. The antenna pattern of the LIGO and VIRGO projects is close to 90 degrees of sky. However, work is under way at Caltech to use multiple detectors (like LIGO Hanford and Livingston) in a fashion similar to how radio astronomy uses multiple dishes to form a more sensitive, finer resolution antenna (this is based on interferometery).
      The stochastic gravity wave background, which is a prediction of inflation, is predicted to be at power levels which are currently below the noise level of the detectors. Advanced LIGO and LISA may have noise levels low enough to verify or disprove this prediction.

      --
      -Leo
    7. Re:What do gravity waves tell us? by turnstyle · · Score: 1

      Gack! My apologies -- aren't frame-dragging and gravity waves manifestations of the same phenomenon?

      --
      Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
    8. Re:What do gravity waves tell us? by ophecleide · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You also have to keep in mind that for something about which we know so little, learning more about it will probably lead to applications we haven't even thought of yet. When X-rays were discovered, do you think Roentgen immediately thought of using it for detecting weapons in bags or measuring atomic spacing in crystal latices? Probably not. It could very well be useless, but I expect we will find something useful to do with them if and when we detect them (assuming they exist).

    9. Re:What do gravity waves tell us? by nmpeglit · · Score: 3, Informative

      Gravitational Radiation being much weaker, thus harder to detect, does not interact with matter like the electromagnetic radiation does. As a result, gravitational waves produced by spiraling binary star systems, coalescing stars, supermassive black holes etc will be unaltered when detected giving us a completely new perspective in how we look to the universe. It will be like the transition from optical telescopes to x-ray ones.

      An excellent, popular book about the topic is Black Holes and Time Wraps by Kip S. Thorne, one of the participants in the LIGO project at Caltech and a well known theorist.

      In the case of imaging invisible celestial objects , consider that, for example, Black Holes are by definition invisible, they do not emit electromagnetic radiation ( short of, if we forget the Hawking Radiation ) so astronomers predict that a Black Hole exists by observing the effects ot its existence to the surrounding stars. With gravitational radiation detectors a more direct method will be available. Plus, there exists the dark matter issue ( and others ), an extra tool would be nice to have.

      PS. Gravitational waves from the inflationary phase of the universe ( if there is such ) will be too weak to detect.

      PS2. From a more theoretical point of view there are some alternative theories ( quite serious ) like the Brans - Dicke theory, they include also a scalar field that propagates in the form of a wave as well. If i recall correctly, in this case the polarisation is different so i think ( but i am not 100% sure ) that if such fields exist a detector like LIGO will able to tell.

    10. Re:What do gravity waves tell us? by LionMan · · Score: 1

      Sure, that phenomenon being general relativity.
      A gravitational wave would be a time varying ("AC" to an electrical engineer) curvature of spacetime. Frame dragging would be a constant ("DC") curvature due to being close to a massive rotating body.

      --
      -Leo
    11. Re:What do gravity waves tell us? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      No. Frame-dragging is more analogous to magnetostatics, while gravitational waves are more analogous to electromagnetodynamics.

    12. Re:What do gravity waves tell us? by rotenberry · · Score: 1

      The Wikipedia article is quite good. It even explains the difference between gravity waves and gravitational waves.

      However, I would like to point out that any theory of gravitation that requires the effect of gravity to move at a finite speed will predict gravitational waves. Only the details of the wave will provide a confirmation of Einstien's theory.

    13. Re:What do gravity waves tell us? by DerekLyons · · Score: 1
      The first gamma-ray telescopes, for example, revealed gamma-ray bursts, which were completely undetected (and unexpected) by other means in the late sixties and early seventies.
      Mostly true. Gamma ray bursts were first discovered by DoD satellites that monitored the Gamma spectrum in an attempt to ferret out clandestine nuclear tests and/or the usage of nuclear weapons (in combat). The first Gamma-ray telescopes were launched partly in connection with that discovery. (Though the DoD contribution was not acknowledged until after the Wall fell, and whose complete extent is largely classified.)
    14. Re:What do gravity waves tell us? by Ruie · · Score: 1
      To add to the postings above:

      One of the most load sources of gravitational waves are collapses of binary neutron stars or black holes.

      If a waveform of such a collapse is found it should first obey Einstein's equations and then quickly transition into the regime of quantum gravity which we know nothing about.

      Such information would be extremely valuable as (at the moment) there is no way we can experiment with quantum gravity in a laboratory - the energies involved are far beyound what current accelerators can achieve.

  2. No more interest? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting


    What ever happened to distributed.net?

    1. Re:No more interest? by MikeCapone · · Score: 1

      You call that working hard? With less than a percent done after all that time! ;P

      --
      Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
  3. Bah humbug. by dauthur · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Even though it's one of the most popular philisophical astronomy books ever, A Brief History Of Time (Stephen Hawking) really happened to open up my eyes, and I sought extra reading. After all this time, even beforeward, I knew about gravitational waves considering the 4th dimension. The thought of actual waves though seems hard to imagine, considering gravity comes from mass, not anything non-particle. The idea that a massive supernova could propel gravitational waves at us in such a way as it does micro gamma and cosmic waves sounds absolutely rediculous unless, of course, the actual mass encounters us too (That would take a while).

    1. Re:Bah humbug. by mindstrm · · Score: 1

      Don't forget einstein. Energy and mass are the same thing, remember? Gravity is proportional to energy density.

      A spinning thing has more mass than a non spinning thing (more energy in the system)

    2. Re:Bah humbug. by LionMan · · Score: 1

      Is it difficult to believe that we see distant objects? The light waves reach us after travelling through spacetime; we don't have to be touching a distant star to see it. Similarly, we feel the pull of gravity of every other object in the universe (and not only massive objects, such as matter. It is the curvature or energy density of spacetime which couples to the gravitational force. Weakly Interacting Massive Particles should contribute to the pull of gravity we feel, as should the energy density of a vacuum itself!)
      However, neither light nor gravity travel at infinite velocities. Both are predicted to propogate at the same velocity, c.
      Imagine a distant (or even close) system of two stars orbiting each other. In one orientation, when they are the same distance from you, you would feel a certain gravitational attraction to them. When they are in line with you, you will feel different attraction to them. It is this fluctuation in gravitational attraction (which in turn curves spacetime) which you would feel.

      --
      -Leo
    3. Re:Bah humbug. by novakyu · · Score: 1
      Doesn't mass itself even move under dual nature, just with a REALLY long wavelength?

      If by "mass" you mean macroscopic objects, then, if anything, it would be short wavelength---hence we cannot observe the wave-nature of the object.

      BTW, it wouldn't be right to say "mass moves under..." since mass (or lack of it) is an intrinsic property of a physical object (particle, etc.). It's particles with mass (like electrons) that have dual nature.

      PS. Well, I got confused while writing so I checked De Broigle wavelength: wavelength = h/mv. So, given a fixed velocity, more massive particles have shorter wavelength.

    4. Re:Bah humbug. by Quantum+Fizz · · Score: 1
      You could think of it in terms of interactions. Ie, you might be able to visualize sunlight traveling to Earth as a wave, but it might be harder to think of your cable TV signal traveling down the coaxial cable as being photons transmitted. But you're manipulating electrons, which of course are elementary particles, and these particles interact via the Electromagnetic Force. And quantum field theory tells us that individual quanta of the electromagnetic force are Photons (uncharged particles with spin of 1).

      So when you have to masses separated by some finite distance, they obviously interact, as noted by the gravitational force. So it's only natural to come up with a graviton which is the interacting carrier between these two masses.

      You can also learn some things about the dimensionality of the fields. For example, you can think of a scalar field as every point in space (or spacetime) having a distinct scalar value that describes something. An example is tempature, each point in space would have a unique temperature. How do two points in space transmit their temperature to each other (like an ice cube melting in a tumbler of Scotch)? Well, through the exchange of kinetic energy, which in the quantized sense would be individual quanta of lattice vibrations. These are called phonons and have a spin of Zero, as expected from a scalar field (a scalar is a tensor of rank zero).

      One step more complicated is a vector field, or really a rank-1 tensor field. Each point in space now has a vector (magnitude and direction) associated with it. One popular example is the electromagnetic field. This is a rank-1 tensor field, and thus carriers that mediate the field exchange between two points would be expected to have spin-1. Photons.

      Getting even more complicated, Einstein's Theory of General Relativity describes how mass affects the curvature of space-time, and Einstein's equations that describe such motion make use of rank-two tensors to describe the curvature (you can roughly think of rank-2 tensor like a vector of vectors). So the carriers of this interaction can be expected to be spin-2 particles, hence the proposed graviton.

      But gravity is actually more complicated, and there's the proposed Higgs mechanism which gives rise to mass, through a scalar Higgs Field. So the accompanying carrier of this mass information is the predicted Higgs Boson, which is expected to have zero spin.

    5. Re:Bah humbug. by mindstrm · · Score: 1

      That's not quite it I don't think.

      Think of how electric charges moving around create EM waves. You don't feel the electric field of the electron, for instance, but it does produce EM waves which carry energy away.

      Similarly, this isn't about feeling the direct gravity of some distant object, but about detecting a wave that was created by that object moving. Just like light, or x-rays.

      Similarly, gravitational waves aren't just fluctuations in gravity as if some large mass moved past you, but waves thrown off by that, similar to light, for instance.

    6. Re:Bah humbug. by hubie · · Score: 1
      You don't feel the electric field of the electron, for instance, but it does produce EM waves which carry energy away.
      But that is what EM waves are: oscillatory field lines. Take two point charges separated a certain distance; they feel a force between them. Now wiggle one charge up and down thus putting wiggles into the field lines. The other charge feels these changes and starts to wiggle up and down too. Increase the wiggle rate to a megacycle or so and you can talk to each other via radio. See cool applet here. Exercise for the student: pretend that charge in the applet is a mass...

    7. Re:Bah humbug. by Quantum+Fizz · · Score: 1
      It's not clear to me whether the OP was suggesting that phonons were quanta of a "temperature field".

      No, I wasn't. I was trying to give some general examples for non-physicists, and it's easiest to visualize a scalar field over higher-rank tensor fields. There's no reason why you cannot say temperature distribution is a field, you just cannot quantize such a system in the traditional sense. (as you have already noted).

      Obviously phonons are lattice vibration quanta and not quanta of a 'temperature field'. But my point was, in trying to give a hand-waving general explanation, that for some system not in thermal equilibrium, the heat energy that will be transmitted to reach equilibrium is carried by these spin-0 phonons.

    8. Re:Bah humbug. by 0x0000 · · Score: 1
      A spinning thing has more mass than a non spinning thing (more energy in the system)

      Is it really more mass, or is it more dense .... ?

      Hrm - what exactly is the relationship of mass to density? If mass is Energy, then, mass is dependant on any matter, so gravity is caused by energy density? Or energy density in a cyclic (spin) vector? That's the gravity wave?

      Has relativity been proved?

      --
      "The Internet is made of cats."
  4. Re:USB? by cot · · Score: 1

    If you've got the room in your house and the money for supercooled kiloton Aluminum bars, I'm quite sure they could find a way to hook the readout up to your USB port.

    --

  5. Relevant link by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/

    Posting as AC to avoid karma whoring.

    1. Re:Relevant link by s0me1tm · · Score: 1

      Posting as AC to avoid karma whoring.

      Spoken like true coward.

  6. Anti-Gravity Engine? by Space_Soldier · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Can this project lead to an anti-gravity engine? Obviously, the first engine will not be powerful enough for a spaceship to escape the gravity of earth, but maybe it will lead to maglev cars that don't require special tracks like the train.

    1. Re:Anti-Gravity Engine? by northcat · · Score: 2, Funny

      Dude! Star Trek! Not real!! Data!

    2. Re:Anti-Gravity Engine? by mOoZik · · Score: 1

      WHAT? RTFA, because you're way off track.

      --
      A blog like any other.
    3. Re:Anti-Gravity Engine? by StarfishOne · · Score: 1

      I think one would need to warp space-time for that.. and I don't think that's a wise thing to do anywhere near the Earth ;)

      This is next to the fact that it requires an enormous mass or _insane_ amounts of energy to do..

      How much?

      You need about 10 billion times all the energy in the entire Universe to warp a section of space-time that is much smaller than an atom.

      Not something you can do with/in a car I fear.. :-/

    4. Re:Anti-Gravity Engine? by techno-vampire · · Score: 2, Insightful
      How the heck is parent a troll? Gee, get your mods right...

      There's a lot of moderators out there that don't understand just what a Troll is. They think that if they don't agree with somebody's opinions, that makes the poster a Troll, no matter how polite and well-reasoned teh post is. Either that, or they think it's a good way to punish somebody they don't like. All I know is, at least half the Troll mods I get to meta-mod are unfair, and that's how I mark them.

      --
      Good, inexpensive web hosting
    5. Re:Anti-Gravity Engine? by DeepHurtn! · · Score: 1

      I'd bet that the reason the GP was marked as troll was because of the free ipod offer in his sig. Some people really, really, *really* hate that.

    6. Re:Anti-Gravity Engine? by techno-vampire · · Score: 1

      Modding a post troll because if the .sig is just as abusive as modding it troll because you don't like the poster's politics. It will probably get meta-modded Unfair, and if the modder keeps it up, his/her mod privs will go bye-bye.

      --
      Good, inexpensive web hosting
    7. Re:Anti-Gravity Engine? by the_greywolf · · Score: 1

      this is interesting because Bob Lazar makes the rather astonishing claim that UFOs are propelled by directed gravity waves.

      he also made the claims that gravity waves are instantaneous (i.e., have no discernable speed), and that such waves are generated by the decay of element 115.

      maybe it doesn't take insane amounts of energy to do. maybe there are things physics theories simply can't describe just yet.

      i, for one, am keeping an open mind.

      --
      grey wolf
      LET FORTRAN DIE!
    8. Re:Anti-Gravity Engine? by bmgoau · · Score: 1

      IF an anti-hravity machine, as absurd as it may be, would require these amounts of energry why can black hole collisions and massive explosions also warp gravity with far less energy? One would say the fact that the blackholes already warp gravity is a factor but then again mass is energy. The only forseeable way i think to get "real" flying cars would be anti-gravity though this is far beyond our reach yet. Research is being done at places like cern in the serach for gravitons (the fundamental particles of gravity)

    9. Re:Anti-Gravity Engine? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      No. There is no antigravity in Einstein's gravity. And even if there were with negative mass or exotic matter to produce local antigravity effects, detecting gravitational waves still would not help acheive that goal.

    10. Re:Anti-Gravity Engine? by OneOver137 · · Score: 1

      I remember we watched one of his videos in my high school physics class. Whatever happened to him?

    11. Re:Anti-Gravity Engine? by DeepHurtn! · · Score: 1

      I agree; but if you keep your eyes peeled, there is definitely a pattern of people with free ipod links getting randomly modded as trolls.

    12. Re:Anti-Gravity Engine? by vadim_t · · Score: 1

      Hehe, is this a reference to X-Com?

      Very nice old game. The UFOs indeed were propelled by gravity waves, using an element called "Elerium 115"

  7. Not to push this down... by Koiu+Lpoi · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Not to push this down, but isn't Folding@Home a little more important for humanity overall?

    1. Re:Not to push this down... by RWerp · · Score: 1

      Why? What's the point of living if we can't poke our nose into space and ask fundamental questions?

      --
      "Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
    2. Re:Not to push this down... by Koiu+Lpoi · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Because Gravity Waves are going to be a proof of Einstein's theories - which, correct me if I'm wrong, have been mostly proven anyways. Personally, I think the way the human body works, with all it's quirks and complexities, is much more interesting than gravity waves and such. And more important, seeing how Folding@Home has the theoretical possibility of curing things like ALS, etc. You're allowed to ask all the questions you want, I'm just saying Folding is a much better way to spend your extra cpu cycles.

    3. Re:Not to push this down... by coolcold · · Score: 1

      I didn't RTFA but if Folding@Home is doing research on curing diseases then at some point proving GR is more important (they can be done parallel anyway).

      Imagine there is a meteroite crashing into earth in 30 years time. Researching in human isn't going to help but GR might possibly do.

      This situation is very unlikely but one can always hope :p

      --
      I am harvesting funny/good quotes. Please help by putting them in your sigs :)
    4. Re:Not to push this down... by Dachannien · · Score: 4, Insightful

      By that logic, a significant portion of pure science wouldn't be considered worthwhile (most of astronomy, large portions of mathematics and physics, small portions of biology). And why should we even bother expending human resources on the arts, when there are lives to save?

    5. Re:Not to push this down... by slavemowgli · · Score: 1

      In a word: no.

      --
      quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
    6. Re:Not to push this down... by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 1

      Stop wasting your time posting on slashdot! Please, everybody, get back to your protien studies. Children are dying even as we type!

    7. Re:Not to push this down... by TheGavster · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Some people want to live forever, some people just want to understand the universe. Its really a matter of personal preference.

      --
      "Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
    8. Re:Not to push this down... by Koiu+Lpoi · · Score: 1

      Bing bing bing! Logic flaw detected! Folding@Home works in the background, so I can save the children AND post on slashdot!

    9. Re:Not to push this down... by thrillseeker · · Score: 1
      Some people want to live forever, some people just want to understand the universe.

      Well, if we achieve the first, then the second is simply a matter of enough time...

    10. Re:Not to push this down... by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 1

      All that computation is useless if there's nobody to interpret it. We need to get each and every person on this planet 110% dedicated to protien research 24x7 until every last child has been saved.

    11. Re:Not to push this down... by Lord_Dweomer · · Score: 1
      Why does everything people do have to be for the overall benefit of humanity? What's wrong with doing something BECAUSE THEY WANT TO?

      --
      Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
    12. Re:Not to push this down... by dsanfte · · Score: 1

      To further expand on the parent, maybe saving lives is a fruitless exercise as long as there's poor people crapping out kids they have no hope of feeding.

      --
      occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
    13. Re:Not to push this down... by Koiu+Lpoi · · Score: 1

      Why are you taking it so personally? Sheesh.

    14. Re:Not to push this down... by hubie · · Score: 1

      Good God! We now have Politically Correct distributed computation projects?

    15. Re:Not to push this down... by Lord_Dweomer · · Score: 1
      Because it annoys me when people try to tell me what to do with my money or my time, or my resources.

      --
      Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
    16. Re:Not to push this down... by Jamu · · Score: 1

      No one will know unless we try both.

      --
      Who ordered that?
    17. Re:Not to push this down... by Mycroft_VIII · · Score: 1

      Your making the assumption only one can be done, his is false.
      If fact it'd probably be foolish we just insisted on all reasearch of type x be about problem y. Shure we'd solve say herpes much faster, but in the meantime we get invaded by zergonians pissed off because we never answered thier galactic email.

      Mycroft

      --
      https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
    18. Re:Not to push this down... by RWerp · · Score: 1

      Oh, but gravity waves may tell us many interesting things about large astronomical objects.

      --
      "Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
    19. Re:Not to push this down... by wakdjunkaga · · Score: 1
      Collaborative efforts on protein folding and other biotech may produce more obviously 'human' results in the short term. On the other hand, where would we now be if theoretical and experimental physicists from Zeeman in 1897 through to 1960 had not sewn the scientific undergarments Theodore Maiman used to create the first working laser in 1960 while researching improved long distance communication for AT&T?

      Very few would have foreseen 45 years later lasers becoming nearly ubiquitous in everyday life, and with multitudes of both direct (laser surgery tools, etc.) and indirect (bar code readers, mass storage) medical applications.

      Similarly, Max Von Laue was interested in learning what happens when light (or, more generally, EM radiation) was transmitted through crystals. X-ray crystallography wasn't developed specifically for decoding DNA's basic structure, but it certainly was key to DNA's elucidation.

      Now, I'm not predicting that improving our basic understanding of gravitation will lead to significant medical tools. Point is, that we don't know what such knowledge will bring, and the history of science shows the chances are good there will be a bucketful of by-products important to humanity.

      Also, this isn't an either-or proposition. If one wants to devote all their spare comp cycles to folding@home, great. Want to support multiple projects? Select other projects to support, set what percentage of spare computer time to throw at each of them, and away you go.

    20. Re:Not to push this down... by wakdjunkaga · · Score: 1
      Errata - after re-reading this after posting, it didn't sound quite right, and (after doing a bit of research) found I'd screwed the pooch.

      Maiman did develop the first operational laser, but not for AT&T ... they (Bell Labs, that is) come into the story because their researchers Arthur Schawlow and Charles Townes wrote the seminal papers. Good background info sources

      http://www.bell-labs.com/about/history/laser/index .html

      http://www.spie.org/web/oer/august/aug00/maiman.ht ml

  8. This. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    There is an almost unknown theory that is an alternative to general relativity and quantum mechanics. The only directly measurable difference (as predictable so far) is that for the little-known theory, gravity waves should be dipole. For general relativity, they are quatrapole.

    1. Re:This. by LionMan · · Score: 2, Informative

      1) Any theory in contention with either of these would probably only be an alternative to one or the other, considering that GR and QM make predictions on completely different scales and are generally not unified.
      2) GR does not make any prediction such as "in the far field, gravity waves should look like the result of dipole excitations" or quadrupole. In the far field, in a linearized patch of spacetime (a small patch of it, in which special relativity can be applied) gravity waves should obey a linear wave equation. Therefore, both binary inspiral sources such as coalescing black holes or other massive objects and any other gravity wave source are superimposable and can therefore be predicted by GR.
      3) Be careful with the usage of the words dipole and quadrupole: a binary inspiral system is not actually a dipole, since both bodies have the same "sign" - the gravitational force only cares about energy density. Two massive bodies both have positive energy density.

      --
      -Leo
    2. Re:This. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Maybe I can explain somewhat how this works. I found most of this in a book by somebody who must have really hated Quantum Mechanics (I really wish I could find that book again. When I went back to the same place in the library, it wasn't there). There is a very unexpected effect of applying a very slightly modified form of special relativity to really small effects.

      The additional assumption is made that light rotates in transit. Using the tenets of special relativity, attempting to solve for the angular momentum has a surprise for those who do not not know quantum mechainics: there is a new fundamental constant that is the angular momentum of light per cycle. This conservation of angular momentum provides for the stabality of the hydrogen atom exactly the same way quantum mechanics does, but with no other assumptions like large equations.

      For the theory to be coherent however, the curved time must be extracted out. This is not as difficult as it seems: if gravity waves behave like electromagnetic waves, than the process that procuces magnetic forces also produces another force. This force simply has not been seen the effects it cause look exactly like time dialation.
      Only unexpected result: gravity waves have a strong dipole.

    3. Re:This. by drsquare · · Score: 1

      Sorry, didn't get a word of that.

  9. Re:ARGH by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    I used to run seti@home 24/7 until i realized that half of my electricity bill was from keeping my computers on all the time. I still run it when i'm using my computer (like right now) but turn off the comp when i go to bed and when i'm at work.

  10. Kind of worries me. by SushiFugu · · Score: 3, Funny

    The $randomwisdom at the bottom of slashdot currently reads "When things go well, expect something to explode, erode, collapse or just disappear." I sort of deep down hope they don't find them now.

  11. observed first in 70s experiment? by geo.georgi · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I read in some books, that gravitational waves were observed in the 70s years in one of the first built detectors. The source of the waves was the centre of our galaxy.
    Unfortunately the experiment was not confirmed in a latter one, and it is believed, that something else was observed in this moment.
    Did someone knows something else about this first experiment?

    1. Re:observed first in 70s experiment? by Tim+the+Gecko · · Score: 3, Interesting
      That would be the experiments of Weber described in the sci.astro FAQ

      The "something else" that was observed was most likely to be big ordinary vibrations which the experiments were trying to subtract to leave a small signal.

  12. Man! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    That guy really gets around. It seems like everyweek he's got another theory named after him. And in so many fields too!

  13. Re:USB? by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 1

    If you've got the room in your house and the money for supercooled kiloton Aluminum bars,

    No need for that, just invite CowboyNeal and show him the USB device.

    --
    "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
  14. Re:Cool, but... by coolcold · · Score: 1

    yep, and without physics, we will still be able to do research in biology with our bare hand.

    I just want to let you know that Folding@home might be important but not to a point that it is a must. Human can still survive without it. However, other research field do sometimes indirectly benefit, say Folding@Home, because of more tools available for research.

    --
    I am harvesting funny/good quotes. Please help by putting them in your sigs :)
  15. Re:String Theory = Gravitron by brian0918 · · Score: 1

    Is a gravitron where virtual gravitons live?

  16. LIGO project by karvind · · Score: 4, Informative

    Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory from Caltech is working on same subject. LIGO will search for gravitational waves created in supernova collapses of stellar cores (which form neutron stars and black holes), collisions and coalescences of neutron stars or black holes, rotations of neutron stars with deformed crusts and the remnants of gravitational radiation created by the birth of the universe. LIGO is a joint project between scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

    1. Re:LIGO project by ArcCoyote · · Score: 3, Informative

      Einstein@Home is analyzing data from LIGO.

  17. Folding@home? by Eunuch · · Score: 1

    Well, transhumanism trumps everything. Once we engineer ourself correctly, we can just jump up and be in space! Are there any transhuman angles to folding? I suspect it's just the usual "let's make the disabled normal" rather than interesting transhuman goals.

    --
    Transcend Humanity. Please.
  18. The coolest thing about this project is: by ArcCoyote · · Score: 3, Informative

    The kickass OpenGL screensaver it gives you!

    The BOINC versions of Seti@Home and Climateprediction are similar.
    You can attach to all of them and have the client devide your CPU time any way you want.
    BOINC also has a folding client (predictor@home), but there's no eye candy.

  19. Re:Serious question. by antispam_ben · · Score: 1

    There's some online info somewhere on the LIGO project about the things they're looking for. One hoped-for event is two black holes in close orbit (generating a gravitational wave with frequency determined by their orbital times) which get closer and fall into each other, generating a higher and higher frequency as they close in on each other.

    Also, read yesterday's story "Science: Huge Star Quake Rocks Milky Way" http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/1 9/013255&tid=160 - I imagine that event generated a detectable gravity-wave pulse.

    --
    Tag lost or not installed.
  20. Re:Cool, but... by ArcCoyote · · Score: 1

    If you want to fold run the predictor@home module as well as E@H.

    That's the beauty of BOINC, you can plug in to different projects with the same platform.

  21. To: BOINC Admins by ArcCoyote · · Score: 1

    From: webmaster@berkeley.edu
    Subject: using BOINC to handle web requests.

    Help! Someone put us on Slashdot!

  22. Re:Serious question. by jpflip · · Score: 3, Informative

    Detecting gravitational waves isn't the same as detecting the pull of gravity (that we've been doing for a long time). There is an analogy to electromagnetism - the attractive or repulsive force between electric charges is like gravity's pull, but light (electromagnetic waves) are analogous to gravity waves. General relativity predicts that accelerating mass can generate ripples in spacetime (gravity waves) that can carry away energy. There's a good bit of evidence that says the ripples are there (for instance, binary pulsars seem to spiral toward one another at just the rate that would be explained by the loss of energy to gravity waves), but the waves themselves have never been detected. Detecting gravity waves would be an excellent test of general relativity, for one. It could also give us new ways of looking at events in the cosmos, similar to the way in which radio astronomy revolutionized the study of the universe.

  23. Re:So? by ZackSchil · · Score: 1

    Is this a script? If so, you guys need to work on grammar more than relevance. An irrelevant comment usually gets more replies than a grammatically incorrect one.

  24. Wow by cot · · Score: 1

    make fun of one (very heavily overused) sentence in a fairly innocuous way and get modded down? What a world!

    --

  25. Re:Cool, but... by antispam_ben · · Score: 1

    This is cool and all, but I think Folding@home is more relevant and important. It's an amazing perversity that we know less about how the components of our bodies work than about how stars and black holes work.

    There are probably some simple reasons for that. Stars and black holes are simpler and easier to learn about than protiens.

    I do agree that biological research is important, OTOH I don't feel badly that more people don't choose to donate their extra CPU cycles to such research. I paid for my computers, and I get to choose how they are used, and I likewise respect others' choices.

    --
    Tag lost or not installed.
  26. Re:ARGH by MillionthMonkey · · Score: 1

    I used to run it on my laptop until I realized it was slowly putting red burn marks on my lap.

  27. Is this really useful? by thijsa · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Why are so many people participating in seti@home when both the goal and the expected result are kind of weak? It seems that an ideologic goal seems to attractive power of an ideologic goal is higher than the repelling power of a low chance of success. I would rate this as a goal irrelevant to most people and an undefined chance of success, so why join? In my opinion, biology projects with protein folding to find cancer/AIDS cures seem to have the best chance of success/utility product.

    1. Re:Is this really useful? by thrillseeker · · Score: 1
      Why are so many people participating in seti@home ... I would rate this as a goal irrelevant to most people

      Apparantly all those people participating in seti@home don't lend much credence to your ratings, but have made their own choices of where to spend their resources, on goals they do find relevant.

  28. Tune Your Gravio (Gravity Radio) to 93.1GHz by Wingsy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    And that's where you'll fiind what SETI is looking for. Radio is a thing of the distant past for civilizations who have lived long enough to learn how to not kill each other off. Gravity waves are not blocked or obscured by anything, and the only source of emissions at GHz frequencies are alien-made.

    --
    If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
  29. SETI@Home vs. other distributed computing tasks by antispam_ben · · Score: 1

    There are a *lot* of people crunching work for SETI@Home...

    Gimps (http://www.mersenne.org/prime.htm, large prime number search) is also a popular distributed computing task, and I think there are a few other 'minor players' in the game of soliciting free CPU cycles from the public. Does anyone know offhand how many computers are running each task?

    --
    Tag lost or not installed.
  30. Re:A short list... by CaptainPinko · · Score: 1

    Most of these things were pretty esoteric at one time or another.

    The grandparent's point is that Einstein's theory is already accepted and it isn't "esoteric" as you. The grandparent's point of view is that this is going to tell us nothing that we don't already know... kind of like yet another proof of Pythagoras' theorem.

    Not say that I agree, just that I think you missed the point.

    --
    Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
  31. They Claim To "Own" The Data by John+Hasler · · Score: 4, Insightful

    No thanks. I don't donate to people who claim to own data.

    They also make no mention of license terms or client source availability.

    --
    Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
    1. Re:They Claim To "Own" The Data by Xantharus · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The only reason the claim to ownership is there is so that if your machine is the one that analyzes the parcel of data that reveals Gravity Waves, you can't take credit away from the Project by claiming that you discovered it. Also, that would probably make it illegal to alter the data, which would render the @home process illegal. The same goes for client source code, if the programs were modify so that the data was analyzed differently than everyone else's, it would be useless to compare to the others.

    2. Re:They Claim To "Own" The Data by HiThere · · Score: 1

      I understand that explanation. But I don't totally accept it. Certainly, e.g., the cancer@home people have a signigicant financial interest in owning the result, and being able to control who can benefit from the cure. Similarly the folding@home people stand to accrue significant financial benefit.

      I'm really considering donating this time, because I *DON'T* see that there is a large financial benefit to owning the data. If I did, then I'd want significant comitment that they wouldn't restrict the rights of the public to use the data that the public had processed. (And for those reasons I didn't contribute to either folding@home or cancer@home [name may be wrong].)

      These projects are similar to BSD. If you approve of the BSD license, then they shouldn't give you any problems. If you prefer the GPL...then you might wonder what strings they will put on access to the results.

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
    3. Re:They Claim To "Own" The Data by mr_z_beeblebrox · · Score: 1

      No thanks. I don't donate to people who claim to own data.

      Definitely not, Data has shown time and again that his 'quest' for humanity as much as makes him human. Data wants to be free

    4. Re:They Claim To "Own" The Data by John+Hasler · · Score: 1

      > The only reason the claim to ownership is there
      > is so that if your machine is the one that
      > analyzes the parcel of data that reveals Gravity
      > Waves, you can't take credit away from the
      > Project by claiming that you discovered it.

      Nonsense. Even if a single parcel was able to "reveal gravity waves" they would be the first to know. The results must be sent back to them for comparison with other results before anything can be "revealed".

      > Also, that would probably make it illegal to
      > alter the data, which would render the @home
      > process illegal.

      If they are relying on toothless threats of breach of contract litigation to assure data integrity their project is worthless.

      > The same goes for client source code, if the
      > programs were modify so that the data was
      > analyzed differently than everyone else's, it
      > would be useless to compare to the others.

      If they are relying on secrecy of source to assure the integrity of their client binaries they are in for a rude surprise. People patch binaries all the time. It would be quite straightforward to release the client source under the GPL but accept uploads only from signed binaries downloaded from their site.

      --
      Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
    5. Re:They Claim To "Own" The Data by Breakfast+Pants · · Score: 1

      And how exactly do you verify that it is coming from signed binaries from the site? They could just compile their own version and have it use the other binary any time it asked it to prove it was the real client. The real way, and this is the way that SETI at el do it, is to assign duplicate data occasionally and randomly and pick out any results that aren't the same.

      --

      --

      WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
    6. Re:They Claim To "Own" The Data by Rich0 · · Score: 1

      Couldn't agree more. I've stayed away from folding/cancer for the same reasons.

      My logic is this:

      If you're doing something for the general benefit of mankind with the results being free for all to use/extend, then I'll follow your lead and let you use some spare cycles on my PC (which do cost me money since my PC would otherwise throttle the CPU/fan/etc).

      If on the other hand you plan on selling your results to the highest bidder then this is a commercial enterprise and you had better be prepared to make me a financial offer for my CPU-time. If said offer turns out to be lower than the cost-per-kWh, then I won't participate. Buy your own cluster for umpteen-million dollars like all the big pharma companies do...

    7. Re:They Claim To "Own" The Data by http · · Score: 1
      You shoud try digging before making unsubstantiated claims.
      They also make no mention of license terms or client source availability.
      They say quite explicitly on the download page (did you read the page beyond the list of the most common binaries?) that the source code is available, and if you bothered to download and inspect the source code, main.C (I can't say why they used an uppercase c) clearly indicates distribution under GPL.
      +4. Mods must be just choking back the Marleys
      --
      If opportunity came disguised as temptation, one knock would be enough.
      3^2 * 67^1 * 977^1
    8. Re:They Claim To "Own" The Data by HiThere · · Score: 1

      Appearantly the people at folding@home have promissed to not take financial advantage of the data (in their faq). This *may* be legally binding.

      OTOH, it wasn't there the first time that I looked, and who knows if the promise may disappear again? IANAL, so I have no idea how binding such a comitment is.

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
    9. Re:They Claim To "Own" The Data by John+Hasler · · Score: 1

      > And how exactly do you verify that it is coming
      > from signed binaries from the site?

      Ok, I'll bite. How exactly do they verify that it is coming from signed binaries from the site? They must be able to or there would be no point in keeping the client source secret, right?

      > The real way, and this is the way that SETI at
      > el do it, is to assign duplicate data
      > occasionally and randomly and pick out any
      > results that aren't the same.

      What is the excuse for keeping the client source secret if they cannot authenticate the clients anyway? Why is it bad for people to compile clients from source downloaded from the site but ok for them to use patched binaries or totally fake clients?

      --
      Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
    10. Re:They Claim To "Own" The Data by John+Hasler · · Score: 1

      > You shoud try digging before making
      > unsubstantiated claims.

      You should try paying attention.

      > They say quite explicitly on the download page
      > (did you read the page beyond the list of the
      > most common binaries?) that the source code is
      > available...

      That's BOINC. I was referring to the LIGO client. Two different pieces of software.

      > ...clearly indicates distribution under GPL.

      No. It clearly indicates that BOINC is distributed under the LGPL. That's why LIGO (among others) can link closed-source clients to it.

      --
      Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
    11. Re:They Claim To "Own" The Data by http · · Score: 1
      You said,
      I was referring to the LIGO client
      but earlier, all you had said was
      No thanks. I don't donate to people who claim to own data.
      They also make no mention of license terms or client source availability.
      ...so I hope you can forgive my misunderstanding. But then you said,
      Two different pieces of software.
      Now, re-reading the physorg article, I note that "Einstein@Home searches data from the US Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory (LIGO)... ". From the Einsten@home page, I follwed the link 'Getting started' and the instructions said,
      * Create an account. ...
      * Download and install BOINC. ...
      That's it.
      So I'm not sure how you got the idea that there are two separate pieces of software. What did I miss?
      --
      If opportunity came disguised as temptation, one knock would be enough.
      3^2 * 67^1 * 977^1
  32. in search for smaller things by Daveznet · · Score: 2, Interesting

    even bigger breakthrough would be finding a gravatron to verify string theory. Fermilab has the technology and is currently searching another machine is being built and when it is complete it will blow Fermilab's technology out of the water. Ed Whitton is the man!!! combining 5 theories into one (M theory) was a regular saterday night event for him! Yes! -Ro

    --
    GL HF!
  33. Don't know -- climateprediction.net by MikeCapone · · Score: 1

    But my CPU cycles go to climateprediction.net now.

    --
    Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
  34. why do we care by liquidpast · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I have been lucky enough to be working on a similar project for the past few years. We also use distributed computing but only via our local clusters. We don't actually analyze data from the interferometers, rather we try to figure out what waveforms we would get from a particular set of objects (mostly pulsars). As far as I understand (I'm but a lowly undergrad), the main reasons why we study gravitational waves are
    1. because unlike EM waves which get deflected by just about everything they pass by, gravitational waves pass through pretty much anything unaffected, and so retain a lot of information about the object(s) that created them
    2. they give us information about some objects we otherwise know very little about
    3. they tell us more about how and why gravity works, and we know REALLY very little about that
    4. lastly, if found, they would be yet another proof of general relativity
    And to all those saying that Folding@Home is a much worthier cause, I would say that improving the life of individual humans is super, but to improve the state of humanity as a whole, we need more research into basic physics rather than basic biochem. I mean I'd love to live forever, but I would sacrifice the possibility instantly if I could actually go and see the universe out there before I died.
    1. Re:why do we care by TeknoHog · · Score: 1
      I mean I'd love to live forever, but I would sacrifice the possibility instantly if I could actually go and see the universe out there before I died.

      I agree. Humans are not the center of the universe, and there are more important matters in the universe than humankind. Therefore I think there are more important distributed projects than Folding@Home. And that's just my humble absolutely true opinion ;)

      --
      Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
  35. We have a team. by X0563511 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If anyone cares, we have a team Slashdot.

    http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/team_display.php?team id=584

    If you run einstein@home, get yer arse on it.

    --
    For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
    1. Re:We have a team. by X0563511 · · Score: 1

      Except for I'm not the You.

      It only shows people who have credit greater than zero. There could be thousands of users on it, and they would not show up unless they did something yet.

      --
      For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
  36. Wild speculation to follow: by Mac+Degger · · Score: 1

    Heh..I replied to the dupe thread on the galactic flash before I even realised this thread was up. I swear the association must have been accidental or subconsious :) Anyway, I thought I'd post it here as the other thread is likely to be dupe-flamed into oblivion:

    "Even though it's a dupe, this is the first time I saw this story. Now I know I'm thinking of correlations in the wild, but 10,000 trillion trillion trillion watts is a large amount of energy.

    Two days earlier, there was a massive earthquake. I wonder what part of the planet was facing the direction of the flash at that time? Who knows, we might have detected our first gravity wave...space-time might deform about 2 days in 50.000 years faster than light :)"

    --
    -- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
  37. Gravity waves != Gravitational waves by TMB · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The blurb correctly says that they are looking for gravitational waves. The title incorrectly calls these gravity waves.

    Gravity waves are waves where displacement from equilibrium in a medium is counteracted by the force of gravity. For example, the waves on the surface of a pond are due to regions that are higher getting pulled down by gravity.

    Gravitational waves are a phenomenon in general relativity where accelerating dense masses cause waves in the space-time metric that propogate at the speed of light.

    [TMB]

    1. Re:Gravity waves != Gravitational waves by TMB · · Score: 1

      Not really. A gravity wave is one where gravity is the restoring force. There is no restoring force in a gravitational wave... it's a wave of the entire gravitational field.

      And yes, I know it's annoying that two very different things have similar names. ;-) Gravity waves got named long before the concept of a gravitational wave was dreamed of.

      [TMB]

  38. Re:Cool, but... by wamatt · · Score: 1

    I couldn't care less how my body extracts ogygen from my blood supply. In fact I hate thinking about myself as a living entity, a lump sum of organic parts.

    That being said, I do not consider the our medical researchers "amazingly perverse".

    This is about the bigger picture, our place in the universe is important to me.

  39. project MiniGrail by rjdegraaf · · Score: 3, Informative

    At Leiden University in The Netherlands a project called MiniGrail tries to detect gravitational wave produced by neutron stars.

  40. Its a big question... by boeserjavamann · · Score: 1

    ...which distributed project to support. i think this einstein-project is IMHO a little bit more worth to support than SETI, but those cancer-project is the one everybody should support (sorry, got no url right now)

    1. Re:Its a big question... by Almost-Retired · · Score: 4, Insightful

      this einstein-project is IMHO a little bit more worth to support than SETI, but those cancer-project is the one everybody should support (sorry, got no url right now)

      I have been doing seti for nearly since it started, currently standing at 99.339% in overall rankings.

      I do this mainly because my sci-fi reading goes all the way back to E.E. (Doc) Smith, which some of you might consider as the McGuffies Readers of the day and which is circa 60+ years back up the log now. One always hopes that his machine might be the one to raise its hand and holler, Hey Teach, I hear something.

      But realisticly, after 5+ years, and the results of nearly 6 million people, coupled with the limited sky view of Aricebo, does tend to tell you after a while that the chances are someplace between point double ought zip and absolutely nothing. The data, I think, has been analysed several times by now, with no really outstanding candidate signals haveing been detected. Going over that same limited band of the sky, at the same limited band of frequencies, is beginning to grow old.

      This gravity wave project is intrigueing, but I don't seem to be able to dl the BOINC client, mime type error I think at the BOINC site.

      As far as the parent posters suggestion that we should be working on the cancer project, sorry but I'm enough of an open source advocate that my cycles will not be used for such a project wherein the output data is owned by some commercial entity, who if they get lucky will profit immensely from any discoveries so made. Likewise for the folding@home project. If the results are not to be public knowledge, able to benefit all manner of life, then screw 'em just like they'll screw me at the prescription counter for the product that may result.

      There is, I would hope, a new way of doing such research that will meet these ideas, doing it openly, with the results being unencumbered by patents, and the products so developed then sold on the open market (but regulated by the FDA of course) by the time honored tradition of he who can do it the best, or cheapest, being the marketplace winner, with open competition between the makers for our dollars. The FDA's job then is like the agriculture dept folks, to make sure the process is being done by the proper methods, that being by way of testing the efficiency, and safety of the product at doing what it is being sold for.

      But to bring that about, you are all I trust, aware that we will have to declare a Bill Shakespear day as an annual holiday.

      The chances of that actually happening are also somewhere between point double ought zip and nothing in our present society.

      Then, and only then, would I personally be interested in doing what amounts to free data processing for a commercially profitable entity.

      Now, if they want to buy my cpu time at a rate that helps me pay the energy bill to run these machines, and a piece of the action (no RIAA bookkeeping to be allowed here folks, its a piece of the gross sales only, the internal expenses for that Lamborgini and the sexytary who wants a quarter of a mill just to have your baby are yours to control) then I might consider learning a different tune.

      But I sure wouldn't sleep any better.

      Now, if they would fix the mime type on the linux binary of BOINC, I'd dl it and take a look.

      Cheers, Gene

  41. Re:Cool, but... by HiThere · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Unfortunately, BECAUSE it's more relevant and important, I find myself less willing to be taken advantage of. These people end up in control of resources created in conjunction with public effort, and they end up in total control.

    It wouldn't bother me if what they ended up with was publication priority, but they stand to end up with patents that mean they can deny benefits to the very people who helped them. I find this undesireable.

    OTOH, Einsein@home and Seti@Home don't appear to have the commercial motivation, so I don't mind contributing to them. I don't feel like they're trying to take advantage of me, because it's not obvious that there's any unfair advantage available.

    --

    I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
  42. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 1

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  43. mime type miss-match for the linux binary? by Almost-Retired · · Score: 1

    All I can do with firefox is to get it to output the binary data to firefox's screen, so the ability to do a preper download seems to be broken.

    I've not had any problems of a .gz file doing that previously.

    This gravity wave search rather intrigues me, but if I cannot dl the boinc manager, what good is it to do a linux version if the webmaster putting it up for dl hasn't the foggiest what a .gz file really is?

    --
    Cheers, Gene

    1. Re:mime type miss-match for the linux binary? by Mage+Powers · · Score: 1

      most people interested in this stuff already have boinc

      also right click -> save as (I know thats from IE but I cant be arsed to figure out EXACTLY what it says)

      oh, I know why its like this. gz doesn't mean binary, it means compressed. Firefox probably downloaded it and gunzipped it and threw it up as text.

      Not really their fault, but yes it should be changed, maybe by a .htaccess in thier download directory (hint to einstein guys as I'm sure one person will be looking through slashdot for important things)

  44. Re:Cool, but... by bradkittenbrink · · Score: 1

    your opinion of Folding@Home appears to be directly contradicted by their faq. They claim to be completely non-profit and make all their results publicly availible. I can't vouch on their actually making good on these promises though. Do you have sources to back up your claims about their nefarious intentions?

  45. Useful information is karma whoring? by KingPrad · · Score: 1

    I don't understand why it would be karma whoring to supply a relevant link. Others post blithering nonsense and outrageously stupid opinions and regularly get modded Insightful. Do you really feel so guilty about contributing useful information that you post it anonymously?

    Next time just post the link, a short description of what it is about, and glory in being able to provide useful info.

    --
    Stop the Slashdot Effect! Don't read the articles!
  46. They already updated their "in the news" page by jm4498 · · Score: 1

    http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/news.php

    Jm4498

  47. "Grassroots project" my ass by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This pisses me off. I saw Kip Thorne lecture on LIGO project. They are spending lots of $, a few billion, on detectors, but they presumptuously PRESUME they will be able to use the free cycles of a distributed project to wade through their "data". (The gravity wave detectors are supremely sensitive motion detectors, and the gravity waves they hope to detect are expected to cause motion fluctuations MANY TIMES SMALLER THAN A SINGLE NEUCLEUS. On top of this "signal" with be noise of all vibrations around, cars on the street, slamming doors. etc. From the data they hope to extract signal by analysing and canceling noise; this is what the distributed project is supposed to do.) What pisses me off is they aren't budgeting for their own computer resources, they are leeching off the donation-net. Which takes away from other projects that really have no budget , and/or really are more important, and/or more likely to have a positive outcome. Example: SETI at home is low budget, they are piggybacking data acquisition from device built for other purpose (Aricebo), so the donations make sense; they allow something to happen that otherwise not. Folding@home, actually could help health. Mersenne primes, brute-forcing ciphers, a nice hobby, kinda boring and pointless to me, but no budget; each to his/her own. BUT LIGO is BIG SCIENCE, ($billions) yet they don't budget their own computational needs. In a way it's fraudulent to set up experiment on that basis; without the computations, you don't have an experiment, yet you ASSUME people will give you computer time, BUT that computer time is being drawn from a finite pool of well-wishing volunteers, and thus causing a loss to those other projects who really have to budget.

    Thanks for giving me this opportunity to vent.

    Slashdot, please make your text entry box a little wider.

  48. Wave in GR and E&M by internic · · Score: 1

    Electric charges and their motion are the sources of electric and magnetic fields. However, you can also have electromagnetic waves (radio waves, light, gamma rays, etc.), which are self-purpetuating in the absense of charges. These wave are produced when an electric charge accelerates and keep going far away from the charge that produced them.

    Mass and energy* are the sources of gravitational fields, and, in fact, Newton's law (which is an approximate description of gravity in certain situations) looks mathematically a lot like Coulomb's law (which describes the electric field of a charge). As with E&M, when mass and energy move in certain ways# they emit gravitational waves. These waves travel far away from the mass that produced them and are self-sustaining, much like the EM waves. Graviational waves are not exactly analogous, though, because General Relativity is non-linear, meaning gravity can interact with itself, unlike classical electromagnetism. However, for weak waves traveling in a nearly flat background spacetime, the behavior is similar to E&M in many ways.

    • * Technically the source is the stress energy field, which includes mass and rest energy, but also momentum (and pressure in fluids).
    • # The "certain ways" are different for GR than for EM. In EM, at least the dipole moment must change to emit wave, while in GR the quadrapole moment of an object must change, meaning some sorts of motions that would produce EM waves produce no gravitational waves.
    --
    "You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
  49. Definitive? by Gonoff · · Score: 1

    I wouldn't consider it definitive. I would consider it a starting point. It is easy to look something up there and if it is interesting, you can then dig further at least knowing what some of the concepts are about. My 10 year old son uses Encarta the same way.

    --
    I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
  50. Oh Damn by nate+nice · · Score: 1

    Wow, that would be my professor Bruce Allen. I'm taking Physics 210 at UWM this semester and he's the one who lectures to me every Tuesday and Thursday. Good professor who studied under Stephen Hawking.

    --
    "If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer ..."
    1. Re:Oh Damn by kpfeif · · Score: 1

      Yes, it is. Which reminds me, I still have all of Bruce's "Stereo Builder" issues. Hey Brunce - give me a call. I got a tour of the Beowulf cluster Bruce put together around 1998 using Alpha machines...if I recall he donated one to Red Hat at the time...it's good to see him back at UWM...

  51. Re:Serious question. by mr_z_beeblebrox · · Score: 1

    I don't know what detecting gravity in space will tell us that we don't know.

    Detecting gravitational waves is one of the easiest ways to detect cloked startships. "Einstein @ home" is a clever cover for "the US Department of Homeland Security: Romulan Invasion Alert System"

  52. Re:SETI@Home by mr_z_beeblebrox · · Score: 2, Funny

    That is very negative. Remember your superior attitude at the end, when the last thing you hear is: "Your' planet has been scheduled for demolition to make way for a galactic..." etc....

  53. Re:SETI@Home by TeknoHog · · Score: 1
    Slashdotters of all people should not be victims to stupid beliefs like finding aliens.

    The probability of finding life on a random planet in this universe is greater than zero. Think about it for a moment.

    Reading your comment, though, I'm not sure about intelligent life.

    --
    Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
  54. Re:First line of quote by Almost-Retired · · Score: 1

    There are a *lot* of people crunching work for SETI@Home (and several tens of thousands on SETI@Home II).

    TBE, as of right now, 5,357,872 total users according to the stats page I'm looking at with another browser right now...

    Your 'tens of thousands' is a wee bit of an understatement.

    --
    Cheers, Gene

  55. Mac OS X client not ready for prime time by steve_bryan · · Score: 2, Informative

    They should have written an actual Mac OS X application before advertising their project to the public. Even within the constraints of users who don't mind using the Terminal for manipulating and launching processes it is inadequate. In the terminal the first thing it did after using chmod +x to make it executable was come back and request the URL for the project. Say what? There is nothing in the documentation that I could find indicating something like this would be asked. Then after proceeding a bit further it indicated it could not find the choices I had made to the parameters it uses to govern how it will run so it set them to defaults!

    I'm supposed to trust these amateurs with my Mac? If they don't have the needed programming knowledge they need to get it and do so before inflicting unnecessary havoc on unsuspecting voluteers. Take a look at Folding@Home or SETI to get an idea of what you need to have done before you ask the public to trust your work.

    1. Re:Mac OS X client not ready for prime time by bill_911 · · Score: 1

      GreenKeeper Software has an OS X donationware spplication to run/manage Boinc.

      The Deep Thought home page saya:

      "Deep Thought is a front end for Boinc, a software platform developed at Berkeley which allows volunteers such as yourself to contribute unused processor cycles to help solve problems in physics, medicine, climatology, astronomy, and more. Combining tens of thousands of computers, Boinc users form what is effectively the most powerful supercomputer on the planet.

      Until now, Boinc was only available as a command line application which required users to have a basic working knowledge of UNIX. Deep Thought, on the other hand, provides a very simple user interface for Boinc allowing anybody who wishes to contribute a chance to do so."

      This application workes well for me (OS X 10.3.8).

      In my view Deep Thought makes Einstein@home ready for prime time.

    2. Re:Mac OS X client not ready for prime time by Rura+Penthe · · Score: 1

      Grab Deep Thought. boinc CLI is definitely not for the vast majority of OS X users, but Deep Thought makes things simple and mac-like. (Although they do have an obsession with metal windows, bleh).

  56. Here here by SuperBanana · · Score: 1
    No thanks. I don't donate to people who claim to own data.

    Glad someone else noticed this bit:

    "Use of LIGO and GEO data - Data supplied for analysis with Einstein@Home are not to be used for any other purpose without the consent of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC)."

    I love it when projects paid for with public money think they can control how their stuff is used.

    --
    Please help metamoderate.
  57. Re:Cool, but... by HiThere · · Score: 1

    OK. It sounds like folding@home has promised not to do as I fear.

    Unlike other distributed computing projects, Folding@home is run by an academic institution (specifically the Pande Group, at Stanford University's Chemistry Department), which is a nonprofit institution dedicated to science research and education. We will not sell the data or make any money off of it.

    But the license terms allow that, so they had to make that as a separate promise. (And this wasn't on the web site when I investigated participating.)

    --

    I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
  58. Re:Useful information is karma whoring? - OT by cgenman · · Score: 2, Informative

    It's a holdover. People used to post relevant but obvious information in an attempt to get their karma number as high as possible.

    Stuff like how Einstein@ home is running on BOINC, which also runs SETI@home
    http://boinc.berkeley.edu/
    so it should be pretty stable. Anyone who read the articles or attempted to sign up would know that, but most of the mods didn't do either.

    They were playing the Karma game, back when karma was permanently accrued and displayed. People got their Karma numbers up into the tens of thousands at the height of the out-of-controllness. The pinnacle of Karma Whoring was re-posting the article text from the linked article. It was useful if one person did it, but the text would be reposted hundreds of times for every story, with everyone trying to be the first to repost.

    Playing this game eventually became socially unacceptable. It became good mojo to post certain things annonymously, like direct download links or article texts, to reassure everyone around you that you weren't just being a jerk, that you really did post the information because you wanted to help.

    Then they instituted a Karma cap at 50, which helped a lot. Still, people complained that a single post with +4 informative, -1 overrated could cause your Karma to go from 50 to 49. And other people were still playing the Karma game, just with multiple accounts. So they expunged even that amount of resolution, to the current good / great / bad system. And now many people don't even know what Karma Whoring is, or why one would do it.

    I respect the grandparent poster for posting annonymously. He's clinging to antiquated morals, which is kind of heartening.

    --
    The ______ Agenda
  59. Slightly OT by The+Tyrant · · Score: 1

    Ah the joy of the distributed power of geeks... while reading the wikipedia article linked in the story, I noticed a malformed link, but by the time I went to edit it, someone else had already corrected it. Gotta love the world we're collectively making.

  60. Folding@home nonprofit according to the FAQ by randalx · · Score: 2, Informative
    From the Folding@home FAQ
    http://folding.stanford.edu/faq.html#project.own
    Who "owns" the results? What will happen to them?
    Unlike other distributed computing projects, Folding@home is run by an academic institution (specifically the Pande Group, at Stanford University's Chemistry Department), which is a nonprofit institution dedicated to science research and education. We will not sell the data or make any money off of it. Moreover, we will make the data available for others to use. In particular, the results from Folding@home will be made available on several levels. Most importantly, analysis of the simulations will be submitted to scientific journals for publication, and these journal articles will be posted on the web page after publication. Next, after publication of these scientific articles which analyze the data, the raw data of the folding runs will be available for everyone, including other researchers, here on this web site.
    1. Re:Folding@home nonprofit according to the FAQ by Almost-Retired · · Score: 1

      Well, I did run folding@home, for about 4 hours one day, on what is now my firewall box, a 500mhz K6-III. That was the best box I had at the time, and its still running seti. Why? Because seti stays at a nice of 19, and other than the cpu staying at 100%, the machine is 100% usable for other stuff, just as if seti wasn't running.

      Normally, I had it setup to dial up and check the email at 1 hour intervals, but folding brought that machine to its knees begging for enough cycles to get the mail before the modem gave up as ppp was not negotiating a connection in anything like a timely manner. I tried for about half an hour to nice it up, but everytime it started a new loop the nice was back to 0 and nothing else that needed to be done was being done. So I shut it down & never restarted it. I don't know if the working dir even survives today. Drives in that machine have been shuffled around, and I cannot find the remains today.

      I do recall sending an email asking if your folks could adjust the nice so I could have my machine back, but it went unanswered, probably into a black hole designed to suck up squawking emails. So I figured they really weren't that interested in the output of one old (I'm 70 now) mans machine. To me, at this time, its a shrug I guess.

      Since then I've built 3 more machines, this one twice, putting the old cpu/memory out of here in a shop box to run a cnc app eventually when a video card died and took the mobo with it in this box, so this one now has a xp2800 in it. Supposedly 2x faster than the xp1400 that got reused in the shop box, but in reality, maybe, just maybe 30% faster. The xp1400 can actually run at 1400mhz, but the speed limit for this one is 2100mhz. It does 7 to 9 seti units a day, the 1400 did 5 to 7. Go figure, IMO the marketroids math is busted IMO, but thats off topic to here. The only diff is that this one runs on half the wattage that 1400 burns, gawd its hungry and hot.

      --
      Cheers, Gene

  61. Re:SETI@Home by Almost-Retired · · Score: 1

    Unforch, considering the total number of bodies that might be called planets orbiting the stars of this universe, and the fact that we only know of one life supporting planet for sure, you would have to admit that the one we know about, while very important to us (but not enough to stop the global warming causes) is most assuredly lost in the noise surrounding the digit 0, probably a decimal point followed by several thousand zero's before the first non-zero digit is found. And that, in the grand scheme of things is close enough to zero for all practical purposes. As an ex bro-in-law was fond of saying, its close enough for the girls I go with.

    --
    Cheers, Gene

  62. Why bother, it's already been done. by CleverMonkey · · Score: 1

    There has already been a nobel prize awarded for experimental confirmation of gravitational waves.

    Why are we doing this again?

  63. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 1

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  64. ....all that and... by 0x0000 · · Score: 1

    Hey, what's all this about using gravity waves to see things and detect stuff? I thought gravity waves were supposed to be a propulsion system. All we need is an emitter and a lattice to get them into a laminar, coherent, directed pattern, right?

    --
    "The Internet is made of cats."
  65. Re:Serious question. by jpflip · · Score: 1

    I'm not sure what you mean by "quanta of alpha helix". The term "alpha helix" comes up in biomolecular applications, but I don't see any connection with that...

  66. BOINC setup problems by Almost-Retired · · Score: 1

    First, let me lambast them (Einstein@Home, BOINC) for not having an email address for straightening out obvious fubars.

    I downloaded the agent version 4.19 and ran it. It asked for an account key, which I haven't the foggiest where it might be, so I went back to the web page and tried to create a new account.

    It throws me out because the account already exists. If thats the case, I can have it email me my forgotten account key, so I did that. Half an hour later, no key, so I repeated it a couple of times, 15 minutes later, still no key. So I went back and went around the mail me my key loop about 10 times, and finally received 8 copies, all identical of what is apparently my seti@home key!

    However, since seti-3.0.8 needs boinc, I haven't upgraded seti so I'm still running seti-3.0.3.

    So I'm between a rock and a hard place as that key will not allow me to log into the einstein project, but if I try to create a new account, theres already an existing account that the key they send me isn't valid for.

    Like I said, where the rubber meets the road here, somebody has spilled a ton of ball point pen balls. Either merge these projects totally, or split them totally. In the meantime, I'm still running seti and happy as a clam. The only skin off anybodies nose here is BOINC's (& Einstein@Home), so until they manage to get it all in one sock, it will sit there taking up drive space until I decide I need to play space patrol.

    --
    No Cheers, Gene