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Physicists Gear Up To Catch a Gravitational Wave
sciencehabit writes: A patch of woodland just north of Livingston, Louisiana, population 1893, isn't the first place you'd go looking for a breakthrough in physics. Yet it is here that physicists may fulfill perhaps the most spectacular prediction of Albert Einstein's theory of gravity, or general relativity. Structures here house the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), an ultrasensitive instrument that may soon detect ripples in space and time set off when neutron stars or black holes merge. Einstein himself predicted the existence of such gravitational waves nearly a century ago. But only now is the quest to detect them coming to a culmination. Physicists are finishing a $205 million rebuild of the detectors, known as Advanced LIGO, which should make them 10 times more sensitive and, they say, virtually ensure a detection.
That being said I fully expect gravitational waves to be discovered.
I am not so sure. There have been other experiments that should have detected them, but didn't. If this experiment also comes up empty, then physics may be facing another Michelson–Morley moment.
Yes, they are amazingly sensitive seismometers. However, I don't think they'll ever detect gravitational waves. Physcists are divided over whether the waves can be detected by the devices so far created. They rely on special and general relativity to not cancel each other out when it comes to compressing the wavelenghts of light over a long distince. The small signal strenght combined with noise combined with nearly complete cancellation probably dooms the experiment from the start.