Physics gossip vs. physics news
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8159
Nature cited an “improbable rumor” in its subhead for Davide Castelvecchi’s September news report “Has giant LIGO experiment seen gravitational waves?” By 12 January, things had escalated concerning the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Nature headlined another such Castelvecchi report “Gravitational-wave rumours in overdrive: Physicists say they’ve heard that the LIGO observatory may have spotted the signature of merging black holes.”
It’s another episode in the old science-and-the-media story of public fascination with fundamental physics news that may not actually be news—and that in any case is premature. An article at Scientific American began this way:
In physics circles a sense of déjà vu is setting in—breathless headlines have recently championed a possible discovery of gravitational waves, or ripples in the fabric of spacetime. Less than a year ago the same thing happened, although that time the team behind the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization 2 (BICEP2) experiment claimed a discovery that turned out to be a mistake. Time will tell if the new potential detection, about which rumors have swirled in lieu of any official announcement ... will turn out to be real. If it is, though, we are talking about a different kind of gravitational wave with very different implications for our understanding of the universe.
Castelvecchi’s 12 January piece similarly began by pointing to excitedly speculative headlines: “Physicists have for months been buzzing about the possible detection of gravitational waves—a finding that would confirm one of the key predictions of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. On 11 January, that speculation exploded in a frenzy of media headlines, after excited physicists spilled some of the gossip online.” At Science magazine, Adrian Cho’s 12 January report “Rumor of gravitational wave discovery is just that, source says” referred to a “press storm.”
Breathless headlines, media frenzy, press storm? It’s true that there’s been physics-cheering media excitement. And whatever is to be said about the rumor’s circulation via social media, much of its treatment by journalists has—or should that be “at least has”?—deliberately involved clarity about the crucial distinction between speculation and confirmation.
It’s true that it’s not hard to find headlines like this one: “Scientists may have just discovered Einstein’s gravitational waves .” The Guardian ran this enthusiastic headline with its subhead claiming confirmation, sort of: “Scientists struggle to stay grounded after possible gravitational wave signal: Cosmologist’s tweet appears to confirm rumours of discovery that could ‘open a new window on the universe.’” But it’s even easier to find headlines that explicitly telegraph that the news is only speculation. At the Washington Post, it was “Why is this famous physicist tweeting rumors about gravitational waves? ” At the Guardian, another article carried the cautious headline “Gravitational wave detection could be a false alarm.” The subhead observed, “Caution is needed over claims that gravitational waves have been found.”
Under the subheading “What is the gossip?” Castelvecchi’s 12 January article summarized:
The rumours suggest that [LIGO], a US laboratory with detectors in Washington and Louisiana, has spotted a signal of gravitational waves. These are ripples in the fabric of space-time that, according to Einstein’s theory, are produced by cataclysmic events such as the merging of two black holes or two neutron stars.
Whispers of a possible detection were first tweeted in September by cosmologist Lawrence Krauss, at Arizona State University in Tempe. The most specific rumour now comes in a blog post by theoretical physicist Luboš Motl: it’s speculated that the two detectors, which began to collect data again last September after a $200-million upgrade, have picked up waves produced by two black holes in the act of merging.
If this is true, it would be “as close to directly observing a black hole as possible”, says Frans Pretorius, a specialist in general-relativity simulations at Princeton University in New Jersey.
Castelvecchi reported that LIGO itself is making no announcement, that it’s possible the detection has indeed taken place, and that it’s also possible not only that it could have been a false alarm, but that it could have been a “deliberate drill.” He wrote, “Three members of the LIGO team have access to systems that can secretly nudge the mirrors and simulate all the hallmarks of an astrophysical phenomenon—a procedure called a ‘blind injection.’”
Under another subheading—"Are LIGO physicists concerned about the rumours?"—he reported that Louisiana State University physicist Gabriela González, “spokesperson for the 900-strong collaboration,” is “a little miffed.”
At Science, Cho’s 12 January article explored that kind of reaction. First he summarized the rumor’s origins:
From 2010 to 2015, LIGO researchers completely rebuilt their instruments, aiming to make them up to 10 times more sensitive. They resumed their hunt for a fleeting source of gravitational waves on 18 September 2015. Then the rumor mill revved up.
On 25 September 2015, Krauss tweeted: “Rumor of a gravitational wave detection at LIGO detector. Amazing if true. Will post details if it survives.” That tweet elicited a flurry of news stories.
Then, yesterday, Krauss tweeted: “My earlier rumor about LIGO has been confirmed by independent sources. Stay tuned! Gravitational waves may have been discovered!! Exciting.” Again, a press storm ensued.
From the beginning, there have been reasons to doubt that the rumor will hold up.
Later Cho summarized the miffed view:
Krauss has taken some blowback for his rumor-mongering. "[I]f true, you are trying to steal their glory; if false, you are damaging scientific credibility,” tweeted Michael Merrifield, an astronomer at the University of Nottingham, in the United Kingdom. Erik Mamajek, an astronomer at the University of Rochester in New York tweeted, “Does [the LIGO] project sanction your rumor-mongering? ‘Confirmed’ followed by ‘may have been’ = BS. Hurts science.”
Krauss, the author of nine popular science books including The Physics of Star Trek and A Universe from Nothing, counters that he was merely trying key in the public to the discussions physicists are already having among themselves. “All I was trying to do was prepare people for the potential excitement,” he says. “If something really excites me, should I never talk about it?”
LIGO leaders seem somewhat dismayed by whole affair. “I’ve seen Krauss’s new tweet,” wrote Gabriela Gonzalez, a physicist at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, and spokesperson for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration in an email. “I’m disappointed (again) that he didn’t ask me or anybody in LIGO leadership.”
Krauss says that he purposefully avoided trying to confirm the rumors because doing so would have been unethical. “If I contacted them, that would imply that I was trying to get information I shouldn’t have,” he says. “That would have been inappropriate.” Krauss adds that, had he been told something by LIGO researchers in confidence, he would have kept it to himself.
In any case, not everyone is focused on the reasons to be miffed. Castelvecchi ended by quoting Laura Cadonati, the Georgia Tech physicist who heads LIGO’s data-analysis team, and David Blair, a physicist at the University of Western Australia in Perth and a member of the LIGO consortium:
Cadonati says that the buzz around the experiment has been “energizing”. “The fact that leaks started early on meant that they were something we had to learn to live with,” she says. “It means that there is excitement around what we are doing.”
If gravitational waves were detected, it would be a momentous event. “How I see gravitational waves is that humanity has been deaf to the Universe,” says David Blair...."Now, suddenly we have the possibility of creating bionic ears for the human race to allow us to listen to the sounds of the Universe.”
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.