Marcia Bartusiak's book "Einstein's Unfinished Symphony" details a good bit of the controversy surrounding Weber's "discovery"...he wasn't exactly working in a vacuum. There were other detectors up at the time and none recorded anything to correlate his findings. It is doubtful that his bars were special. He got tagged for everything from being outright dishonest to having poorly written computer applications in use to sort through his data.
As it stands, even with the advanced interferometers up today, it would take one of the stars within 10 light years of us to suddenly collapse into a neutron star for any of them to register something....and that is unlikely. I'm not holding out hope that a terrestrial based pair will ever work as anticipated. It may take a much larger set built in space before the sensitivity is sufficient to detect a gravity event beyond something truly massive and/or very close by....
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Marcia Bartusiak's book "Einstein's Unfinished Symphony" details a good bit of the controversy surrounding Weber's "discovery"...he wasn't exactly working in a vacuum. There were other detectors up at the time and none recorded anything to correlate his findings. It is doubtful that his bars were special. He got tagged for everything from being outright dishonest to having poorly written computer applications in use to sort through his data. As it stands, even with the advanced interferometers up today, it would take one of the stars within 10 light years of us to suddenly collapse into a neutron star for any of them to register something....and that is unlikely. I'm not holding out hope that a terrestrial based pair will ever work as anticipated. It may take a much larger set built in space before the sensitivity is sufficient to detect a gravity event beyond something truly massive and/or very close by....