In 2014 Harvard infamously claimed to have discovered gravitational waves. It was false. Recently LIGO famously claimed to have discovered gravitational waves. Should we be skeptical this time around?

I would love to Believe with a Hundred percent certainty that the Ligo Discovery is legitimate however there are some items that just can't be ignored.

1 The LIGO team has always had the ability to inject fake results called "Blind Injections" They use this in sort of the same way placebos are used in medication trials.

2 LIGO was on the verge of being unfunded and shutdown due to government budget cutbacks. Then like a last minute superman miracle they have a discovery which ensures them funding for a quite a while... And the majority of the ligo team is quite old, this very well may be there last chance to work on something of this magnitude.

3 The detection mechanism is fundamentally flawed, mainly due to the fact that it receives interference from just about any source including a rabbit kicking the outer casing of the tube. They may not have even detected gravity waves but some other unknown form of interference that they can't filter out due to no knowing about what it is.

4 The time of detection between the Two separate detectors was 7ms, which is not consistent with what a Theoretical Gravity wave would produce. It is instead more consistent with the lag on a blind injection of false data. Because 7ms is 16 times slower than the speed of light, suggesting human intervention.

5 Reproduction of results, quite simply this is the first and as the first it is suspect until the results are repeatable. Not only repeatable by one labratory but by all of them. This discovery will most likely encourage more of the same type to be built and if eventually new discoveries are made it will be confirmed and happy day. But if no new discoveries are ever made it will start to become obvious as the years pass that the ligo discovery was a hoax.

/r/askscience Thread