[awhitty]

Huh, I wonder if anyone's tried to validate this approach again now that we have LIGO (and presumably more precise equipment?). I know very little about the physics involved here, but the articles I found about Weber bars don't cite disagreement about the theory underpinning the experiment, so I'm curious if we expect a detectable effect with our current understanding?

I also know very little about manufacturing Weber bars, but I could imagine it's cheaper to build 100s or 1000s of these and perform signal processing on them than building another LIGO. Or Weber bars in space?

Just spitballing here

[sigmoid10]

If you look at the lengths LIGO had to go to in order to eliminate background noise to even be able to theoretically detect gravitational waves, it seems very unlikely that a comparatively crude technology from the 80s could have achieved the same things. Like modern lasers or squeezed light states, which were mostly theoretical back then. If I remember correctly, Weber's device was claimed to show a huge amount of events per year, which would indicate tons of GW sources in our neighbourhood. LIGO and the rest of modern astronomy have since disproved that.

[adolph]

Sometimes noise turns out to be signal (see developments leading to Cosmic Microwave Background [0]). At this stage in gravitational wave detection is it well founded to consider noise as noise instead of information we cannot yet understand?

0. https://discovery.princeton.edu/2015/11/19/cosmic-background...

[mr_mitm]

Noise always has different sources, and when you eliminate noise you should always be conscious of the source. There should be a gravitational wave background analogous to the CMVB. Detecting it would be a sensation.