What if LIGO Actually Proved Einstein Wrong – and Found Signs of Quantum Gravity?

"The only thing that I'm worried about is that we humans are the only intelligence in the universe; if so, we are doomed to eternal stupidity and suffering and I'm very skeptical about the human race to ever become capable of fixing its problems. We need an alien perspective to help us.                                           -Maven

Three physicists have predicted that finding ‘echoes’ of gravitational waves coming from blackhole mergers might be signs of a theory that finally unifies quantum mechanics and general relativity.

A computer simulation shows two neutron stars, the extremely dense cores of now-dead stars, smashing into each other to form a blackhole. Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

Your high-school physics teacher would’ve likely taught you to think about the smallest constituents of nature by asking you to start with a large object – like a chair – and then keep breaking it down into smaller bits. For the purposes of making sense of your syllabus, you probably stopped at protons, electrons and neutrons. That’s a pity because, if you’d kept going, you’d have stumbled upon some of the biggest mysteries of the universe. At some point, you’d have hit the Planck scale: the smallest region of space, the shortest span of time. This is the smallest scale that quantum mechanics can make sense of, and this is where many physicists expect to find the fundamental particles that make up space itself.

If this region – or some phenomena that are thought to belong exclusively to this region – are found, then physicists will have made a stunning discovery. Apart from finding the ‘atoms’ of space itself, they’d have opened the doors to marrying the two biggest theories of physics: quantum mechanics and the theory of general relativity (GR). The former’s demesne is the small and smaller particles you passed along the way to the Planck scale. The latter’s is the largest distances and spans of time in the universe. And the discovery would be stunning because GR, created by Albert Einstein 101 years ago, doesn’t allow space to have any constituent ‘atoms’. For GR, space is smooth. And it is this fundamental conflict that has prevented the theories from being reconciled into a single ‘quantum gravity’ theory.

But the first signs of change might be here.

In 2015, the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatories (LIGO) in the US had made the first direct detection of gravitational waves. These are ripples of energy sent strumming through space at the speed of light when a massive object accelerates. LIGO had in fact detected gravitational waves created by two blackholes that were spinning rapidly around each other before colliding and merging to form a larger blackhole. The discovery was unequivocal proof that Einstein’s GR was valid and realistic. But curiously enough, three physicists recently announced that the discovery may have in fact achieved the opposite: invalidate GR and instead signal proof that the first signs of quantum gravity may have been found.

A blackhole is a particularly interesting thing. One is formed when the core of a dying star of a certain kind becomes so massive that, after the initial supernova explosion, it collapses inwards, tightly curving space around itself such that even light can’t escape its prodigious gravity. A blackhole is a consequence of GR – though Einstein didn’t himself predict its existence first. At the same time, because of its freaky nature, a blackhole also often exhibits quantum mechanical properties that physicists have been interested in for their potential to reveal something about quantum gravity. And many of these properties have to do with the blackhole’s outer shell: the event horizon, behind which nothing can escape the blackhole’s heart no matter how fast it is moving away.

GR can’t perfectly predict what the insides of a blackhole are like – and the theory simply breaks down when it comes to the blackhole’s heart itself. But using LIGO’s data when it tuned in to the mergers of two blackhole-pairs in 2015, three physicists are now saying there’s some reason to believe GR may be breaking down at the event horizon itself. They say they are motivated by having spotted signs (in the data) of a quantum-gravity effect known simply as an echo.

According to GR, the event horizon is a smooth and infinitely thin surface: at any given moment, you’re either behind it, falling into the blackhole, or in front of it, looking into the abyss that is the blackhole. But according to quantum mechanics, the event horizon is actually a ‘firewall’ of particles popping in and out of existence. You step into it and you’re immediately incinerated. But apart from making for an interesting gedanken experiment about suicidal astronauts, the existence of such a firewall can have very real consequences.

When two blackholes collide to form a larger blackhole, there is a very large amount of energy released. In LIGO’s first detection of a merger, made on September 14, 2015, two blackholes weighing 29 and 36 solar masses merged to form a blackhole weighing 62 solar masses. The remaining three solar masses – equivalent to 178.7 billion trillion trillion trillion joules of energy – were expelled as gravitational waves. If GR has its way, with an infinitely thin event horizon, then the waves are immediately expelled into space. However, if quantum mechanics has its way, then some of the waves are first trapped inside the firewall of particles, where they bounce around like echoes depending on the angle at which they were ensnared, and escape in instalments. Corresponding to the delay in setting off into space, LIGO would have detected them similarly: not arriving all at once but with delays.

LIGO original template for GW150914, along with Abedi-Dykaar-Afshordi’s best fit template for the echoes. Caption and credit: arXiv:1612.00266

The three physicists – Jahed Abedi, Hannah Dykaar and Niayesh Afshordi – simulated firewall-esque conditions using mirrors placed close to a computer-simulated blackhole to determine the intervals at which gravitational echoes from each of the three events LIGO has detected so far would arrive at. When they had their results, they went looking for similar signals in the LIGO data. In a pre-print paper uploaded to the arXiv server on December 1, the trio writes that it did find them, with a statistical significance of 2.9 sigma. This is a mathematical measure of confidence that’s not good enough to technically be considered evidence (3 sigma), let alone proof of any kind (5 sigma). And when tested for each event, the odds are lower: they max out at 2 sigma in the case of the merger known as GW150914, the first one that LIGO detected. Finally, even if the signal persists, it might not ultimately be due to quantum gravity at all but some other sources.

Nonetheless, the significance isn’t zero – and the LIGO team has confirmed that it is looking for more signs of echoes in its data. Luckily for everyone, the detectors also recently restarted with upgrades to make it more sensitive, to more accurately study the gravitational wave signals arising from blackholes of diverse masses. If future experiments can’t detect stronger echoes (or eliminate existing sources of noise that could be clouding observations), then that’s that for this line of verifying quantum gravity. But until then, it wouldn’t be amiss to speculate on its veracity – or on variations of it that might yield better results, results closer to LIGO’s capabilities – if only because the data LIGO collects for each merger is so complex.

Ultimately, the most heartening takeaway from the Abedi-Dykaar-Afshordi thesis is that there is an experimental way to confirm the predictions of quantum gravity at all. Physicists have long held it to be out of human reach. This is obvious when you realise the Planck length is 100-billion-billion-times smaller than the diameter of a proton and the Planck second is 10-billion-billion-billion-times smaller than the smallest unit of time that some of the most powerful atomic clocks can measure. If quantum gravity is a true theory, then it will be to nature’s unending credit that it spawned blackholes that can magnify the effects of such infinitesimal provenance – and to humankind’s for building machines that can eavesdrop on them.

An Indian LIGO detector is currently under development and is expected to join the twin American ones to study gravitational waves by 2023.

Suspected Russian cyberattacks waged on Clinton campaign just days before vote

             
                                                           In the closing days of the 2016 election campaign, hackers believed to be working for Russian intelligence launched a new wave of attacks on Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee — a previously unreported cyberoffensive that heightened concerns, now endorsed by the CIA, that the Russian government was seeking to influence the outcome of the election in favor of Donald Trump, according to sources familiar with the investigations into the attempted intrusions. The attacks came in the form of so-called “phishing” emails sent to up to nearly a dozen campaign and committee staffers in a renewed effort at penetrating their networks, said Dmitri Alperovitch, the co-founder and chief technology officer of CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC to repel attacks on its network. Staffers at that point were alert enough to reject entreaties to click on the unsolicited email messages that would have allowed the hackers into their computers, he said. But at least one top Clinton campaign staffer, communications director Jennifer Palmieri, told Yahoo News Sunday that she received an alert from Google in mid-October informing her that her personal Gmail account had been targeted by a “foreign state” actor and that her password needed to be changed. “They were targeting us throughout the election,” said another former senior Clinton campaign staffer, who asked not to be identified. “They never stopped trying to get back in.” Hillary Clinton’s director of communications Jennifer Palmieri, longtime aide Huma Abedin, and campaign manager Robby Mook at a campaign rally in Portsmouth, N.H. (Photo: Brian Snyder/Reuters) The disclosure of the late campaign attack could fuel a mounting controversy over U.S. intelligence findings that link Russian intelligence to the cyberattacks for the express purpose of throwing the election as part of a campaign, orchestrated in Moscow, to defeat Clinton. The Washington Post reported Saturday that the CIA has briefed members of Congress on an assessment that the Russians targeted Democratic political organizations and campaign officials as part of a specific effort to defeat Clinton and elect Trump. This goes beyond an earlier public finding that U.S. intelligence officials were “confident” that the Russian government was behind the cyberattacks, but did not ascribe a motive for the Russians doing so. One piece of damning evidence behind the new finding is that the CIA and the FBI have both identified specific individuals associated with or close to the Russian government who provided the DNC emails to WikiLeaks, which began publishing them in July, a senior law enforcement official told Yahoo News. Despite reports of a clash between the CIA and the FBI over the motive behind Russia’s intelligence service in launching the operation, the differences are more a matter of “degree” and emphasis, with the FBI believing there may have been “mixed” motives for the Russian effort, the official said. Still, “we all agree they did these things,” the official said. But President-elect Trump doubled down on his rejection of the intelligence findings in an interview with Fox News anchor Chris Wallace that aired Sunday, dismissing any conclusion that points to Russian government involvement. President-elect Donald Trump is interviewed by Chris Wallace. “I think it’s ridiculous,” Trump told Chris Wallace in interview that aired on “Fox News Sunday,” his first Sunday show sit-down since winning the election. “I don’t believe it.” “If you look at the story and you take a look at what they said, there’s great confusion,” Trump added. “Nobody really knows, and hacking is very interesting. Once they hack, if you don’t catch them in the act you’re not going to catch them. They have no idea if it’s Russia or China or somebody. It could be somebody sitting in a bed someplace. I mean, they have no idea.” Alperovitch of CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm that first publicly linked the cyberattacks to Russian intelligence, said Sunday that he was “puzzled” by Trump’s remarks and assumes he has not yet been fully briefed on the matter. (CrowdStrike, whose principals include Shawn Henry, the former chief of the FBI’s cyber division, was initially hired by the DNC to investigate the cyberattacks and defend its network last May.) “At this point, the matter of attribution on the intrusions has been settled,”Alperovitch said. “There is nobody that looks at the evidence who disputes this.” Asked his level of confidence in his firm’s findings, he responded “100 percent.” CrowdStrike Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Dmitri Alperovitch speaks during the Reuters Media and Technology Summit in June. (Photo: Keith Bedford/Reuters) Much of the evidence, he said, revolves around the nature of the sophisticated tools used by the attackers on the DNC and forensic evidence showing strong similarities to Russian cyberattacks that have occurred in Ukraine and other Eastern European countries — as well as to intrusions of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the White House and the State Department and other U.S. government agencies. “The digital fingerprints are of the same origin,” said Alperovitch. CrowdStrike initially identified two sets of attackers on the DNC’s servers: One, dubbed “Cozy Bear,” was associated with the Russian FSB (the successor to the Soviet KGB) and which first breached the DNC’s network in the summer of 2015. Another, dubbed “Fancy Bear,” has been associated with Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU. The latter infiltrated the DNC’s network in late April of this year in what turned into a far more devastating attack, resulting in the disclosure of 20,000 internal DNC emails to WikiLeaks — an act, according to Alperovitch, of “information warfare.” (He acknowledged that a third Russian intelligence service, the SVR, which has responsibility for foreign intelligence operations, may also have been involved.) “When we look at this over 10 years — literally hundreds of intrusions — [and] you look at the tradecraft, you look at the victims, it all points to Russian intelligence services,” Alperovitch said. In addition, he said, there was another separate cyberattack discovered in late September from an undetermined party that penetrated DNC computers with software containing sensitive voter analytic data that was being provided in regular memos to Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook, the sources said.

Trump Team Challenges Intel On Russian Election Influence

Donald Trump's presidential transition team on Saturday challenged the veracity of U.S. intelligence assessments concluding that Russia was trying to tip the November election to the Republican. A senior U.S. official said the CIA has determined with "high confidence" that Moscow's interference in the presidential race was intended to help Trump. The assessment is based in part on evidence that Russian actors had hacked Republicans as well as Democrats but were only releasing information harmful to Trump's rival, Hillary Clinton, according to the official. The official was not authorized to discuss the private intelligence assessment publicly and insisted on anonymity. Trump's transition team questioned both the quality of the intelligence community's information and its motivations. In a statement late Friday, the transition team said the officials making the assessment are "the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction." On Saturday, spokesman Sean Spicer said there were "people within these agencies who are upset with the outcome of the election." Spicer also denied a report in The New York Times that Republican National Committee systems had been breached during the election. He told CNN the party committee has worked with intelligence agencies that have told it "with certainty that we haven't been hacked." Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said he would press for a congressional investigation in the new year. "That any country could be meddling in our elections should shake both political parties to their core," he said. "It's imperative that our intelligence community turns over any relevant information so that Congress can conduct a full investigation." There was no immediate official response from Moscow. But Oleg Morozov, a member of the foreign relations committee in the upper house of the Russian parliament, dismissed the claim of Russian interference as "silliness and paranoia," according to the RIA Novosti news agency. Morozov described the allegations as an attempt to force the next administration to stick to Obama's anti-Russian course. The investigation ordered by Obama will be a "deep dive" into a possible pattern of increased "malicious cyber activity" timed to the campaign season, White House spokesman Eric Schultz said Friday, including the email hacks that rattled the presidential campaign. It will look at the tactics, targets, key actors and the U.S. government's response to the recent email hacks, as well as incidents reported in past elections, he said. The president ordered up the report earlier in the week asked that it be completed before he leaves office next month, Schultz said. "The president wanted this done under his watch because he takes it very seriously," he said. "We are committed to ensuring the integrity of our elections." The Kremlin has rejected the hacking accusations. In the months leading up to the election, email accounts of Democratic Party officials and a top Hillary Clinton campaign aide were breached, emails leaked and embarrassing and private emails posted online. Many Democrats believe the hackings benefited Trump's bid. Schultz said the president sought the probe as a way of improving U.S. defense against cyberattacks and was not intending to question the legitimacy of Trump's victory. "This is not an effort to challenge the outcome of the election," Schultz said. Obama's move comes as Democratic lawmakers have been pushing Obama to declassify more information about Russia's role, fearing that Trump, who has promised a warmer relationship with Moscow, may not prioritize the issue. Given Trump's statements, "there is an added urgency to the need for a thorough review before President Obama leaves office next month," said Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., senior Democrat on the House intelligence committee. If the administration doesn't respond "forcefully" to such actions, "we can expect to see a lot more of this in the near future," he said. The White House said it would make portions of the report public and would brief lawmakers and relevant state officials on the findings. It emphasized the report would not focus solely on Russian operations or hacks involving Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and Democratic National Committee accounts. Schultz stressed officials would be reviewing incidents going back to the 2008 presidential campaign, when the campaigns of Sen. John McCain and Obama were breached by hackers. Intelligence officials have said Obama and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney were targets of Chinese cyberattacks four years later.