NanoGrav Collaboration, Pulsar timing images of the Universe that is much larger than the “big bang region”

National Science Foundation News: ANNOUNCEMENT: New Discovery in Gravitational Waves at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydSZVt8iucA

National Science Foundation News, NanoGrav Collaboration:

A few links to the project, the individuals, the data algorithms and results would be more useful. It says 9:41:45 and only talking heads and waving hands. You need to publish the Pickle binary format so the data can be used by any team, not just the relatively few who use Python. Spend more time organizing your GitHub. It is a generic sharing site, and you have to provide the organization “glue”, unless you want to train every viewer on their methods. Same with the site(s) where you put data.

This is a useful result, but it is indirect. LIGO uses photon interferometry. But you can also use atom interferometer and electron interferometer or other detector that are much smaller and more cost effective in large N arrays. For the Internet, I prefer “correlation imaging” or “time of flight correlation imaging” because “interferometry” on the Internet has been so badly corrupted. NSF perhaps ought to spend more money on organizing the Internet fragments of its many projects. They are essentially all “doing their own thing”. Which is OK for creativity, but horrible for global collaboration and sharing. “Doing their own thing” is why things take decades, not days.

It is nice you have 70 groups. You should not say “institutions” because it is groups and individuals, not institutions who do the work. I recommend you get one of your exascale sites to host the data, but make it accessible to all the roughly 5 billion internet users. There are about 8 billion humans, and 2 billion “first time learners” from 4 to 24. But I find global projects with tens of millions of participants (groups and individuals) where they never move beyond their individual pair-wise methods.

Do NOT use binary formats, unless right where the data is available, you give clear text access to the same data. If you know the format, that is only a few hundred thousand people at most. There are hundreds of millions of humans now who can use science technology engineering mathematics computing (STEMC) and other quantitative methods. The “science” part is open accessible lossless permanent auditable verifiable. If you use your favorite tools those cluster on the Internet. Groups who use their favorite formats and tools do that because of excitement and first time interactions. But what you are doing with NanoGrav and what NSF is doing are just a tiny part of the global Internet and “all human knowledge”.

The GPT AIs and other methods are changing what is possible. I have reviewed that closely and generally recommend using it for anything you are not willing to properly train and constrain the interface. The data itself has value, but is mostly NOT usable or should not be used for long term planning and projects, if it is not verifiable austible accessible. Accessibility does mean “for individual needs”, but it also means “for individual backgrounds and skills”. When the AI has no data on itself or the human(s) it is working with, that is a recipe for failure on a big scale. On the Internet a single programmer saving themselves a few hours work can cost millions of hours of lost time for others.

You only have just over 5000 viewers so far. But you did not have the courtesy or professionalism to give links and background. Dumping things on the Internet is NOT sharing. It is wasteful. If you think you are just talking to “insiders”, “our people”, “people like us” you are wrong. Because groups tend to be lazy about communicating with “everyone” it usually does devolve to “a few insiders”.

With James Webb, the Universe just got thousands or more times larger. And we desperately need ways to measure the shape and dynamics. Your gravitational background imaging allows for mapping the shape and dynamics of the whole of the “big bang” region, and beyond. The “gravitationally visible” universe is much larger than the electromagnetic and neutrino imaging networks can see. But the radio telescopes can all be upgraded and probably miniaturized, put into Moon Mar Earth Other arrays. Particularly they need to record the nanoHertz to GigaHertz region carefully. On the Earth that means cross correlating with all the Earth based sensor arrays – seismometers, gravimeters, magnetometers, telluric, radiation field (so large a group I have to lump it into anyone using electromagnetic sensors for any reason. Most of the communication uses also can monitor “noise” and some of that noise is “Newtonian gravitational noise” from the changing gravitational potential on earth and its gradient and tensor derivatives.

The thing that ties all these networks together is that the speed of light and gravity are identical. Not just close, but identical. Some of the “gravitational” large scale slow variations are actually “electromagnetic” and some of the slow “electromagnetic” variations come from “gravitational sources”. The piezomagnetic and magnetospheric variations do use “electromagnetic” sensors. But the sources are earth scale or larger so need a combination of solar system ephemeris and galactic ephemeris methods. JPL is central to some of that. But they are not yet to the point where they share their data in forms accessible tot he whole 5 billion with some access to the Internet. And they are not as open as they ought, nor careful to serve “all humans” not just some in a few countries and “institututions’.

It is hard to write to new groups. 23 Jul 2023 is the 25th Anniversary of the Internet Foundation. The largest gains for the human species will be made not in the individual jewels found like pulsar timing, but in the comprehensive organization and sharing of “all human knowledge” with all humans. I wrote recently that “grand unification” is NOT a physics footnote, but global collaboration. I recommend “global open collaborative worksites” and that ideal is far beyond GitHub, Google, YouTube, social media, and “just dumping things on the Internet with less effort than anyone would be allowed if they were writing for a peer reviewed journal”. I cannot be the editor for the whole Internet, but I can try to tell a few NSFs, NISTs, LIGOs, CERNs and other “groups who ought to be leading, not part of the problem” to step up their game.

Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation


JayBoston9620, The vacuum has a LONG list of useful properties. Nothing is ever empty or useless. Time changes constantly everywhere with velocity, acceleration, gravitational potential, magnetic potential, and other fields. The changes are small, you have to work hard to measure and verify, but the tools are there for that now. If you can help people work together globally and soon heliospherically. Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation

Richard K Collins

About: Richard K Collins

Director, The Internet Foundation Studying formation and optimized collaboration of global communities. Applying the Internet to solve global problems and build sustainable communities. Internet policies, standards and best practices.


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