Elder, Jamee (2023) On the “Direct Detection” of Gravitational Waves. [Preprint]
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Abstract
In this paper I provide an account of the sense in which the LIGO-Virgo Collaboration's 2015 observation, "GW150914" constituted the first "direct detection" of gravitational waves. Roughly, my account leverages the conceptual resources from recent work in the philosophy of measurement (especially Parker (2017)’s distinction between direct and derived measurements) to distinguish between these detections at the level of the modeling of the measurement processes. This distinction also has epistemic importance, because the choices scientists make about how to model measurement processes are related to the kinds of interventions they can perform to test the adequacy of their models. The direct/indirect distinction concerns the nature of the justification for confidence in the measurement outcome—in the direct case, this is based primarily on models of the measuring system, while in in the indirect case it also relies on models of a separate target system. Since astrophysical systems are not amenable to interventions, observations of the Hulse-Taylor system, and indeed the source of GW150914, cannot be “direct” in the same way that detections of gravitational waves are.
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| Item Type: | Preprint | ||||||
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| Keywords: | gravitational waves, black holes, measurement, detection, experiment, observation | ||||||
| Subjects: | General Issues > Data Specific Sciences > Physics > Astrophysics General Issues > Experimentation Specific Sciences > Physics > Relativity Theory General Issues > Theory/Observation |
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| Depositing User: | Jamee Elder | ||||||
| Date Deposited: | 28 Mar 2023 17:11 | ||||||
| Last Modified: | 28 Mar 2023 17:11 | ||||||
| Item ID: | 21944 | ||||||
| Subjects: | General Issues > Data Specific Sciences > Physics > Astrophysics General Issues > Experimentation Specific Sciences > Physics > Relativity Theory General Issues > Theory/Observation |
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| Date: | 2023 | ||||||
| URI: | https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/21944 |
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