Wait, I’m confused. How does this practice resistance to false positives? If the false signal is designed to mimic what a true detection would look like, then it seems like the team would be correct to identify it as a true detection. I feel like I’m missing something here.
I don’t know the details, but the detection process is essentially statistical and very very noisy. It’s not a “we’ll know it when we see it” case, it’s more like “out of the huge number of wiggles and wobbles that we have recorded, what can’t we explain and therefore might be a grav wave”.
I would guess one of the points is that a single observation is unreliable in a high-noise environment.
Wait, I’m confused. How does this practice resistance to false positives? If the false signal is designed to mimic what a true detection would look like, then it seems like the team would be correct to identify it as a true detection. I feel like I’m missing something here.
I don’t know the details, but the detection process is essentially statistical and very very noisy. It’s not a “we’ll know it when we see it” case, it’s more like “out of the huge number of wiggles and wobbles that we have recorded, what can’t we explain and therefore might be a grav wave”.
I would guess one of the points is that a single observation is unreliable in a high-noise environment.