A second point against a dwarf companion is that perihelions of all the planets would be affected dramatically, elongating the orbits much greater than exists right now. When the dwarf is crossing the zodiac it would tug the orbits to one side. When the dwarf is 90 degrees from that point it would warp the orbits closer together and there would be a pattern all the planets would follow year by year and would be observable annually.

You need also to explain why light is bent gravitationally and produuces Einstein crosses in the universe without General Relativity and how GR has calculated the delays in pulse signals from binary neutron stars. Those calculations match observed results.

Antigravity machines have nothing to do with GR. GR does not allow a mass to unwarp spacetime. That is like asking the tides to stop rising when the moon is overhead. if such a machine was built, the antigravitational forces would have to exceed the electrical forces that hold it together and it would fly apart before the inventor could put it together.

Spacetime does ripple. Everything ripples because everything can vibrate. All accelerations produce ripples whether it is the acceleration of electrons, protons or boats through water or humans on ground.

If LIGO or LISA fail to detect any gravitational waves, it is because gravitational waves are very weak since gravity is weaker than electrical forces by 10^37 times and both EM and gravitational waves obey a weakening with distance by the inverse square law. Big events are needed and they are simply too far away.

Gravitational waves carry a lot of information.
This from Kip Thorne's "Blasck Holes and Time Warps":

"1.)Gravitational waves are the binding energy of two colliding objects, such as black holes. The ripples are produced right near the coalescing holes' horizons, they are made of the same material (a warpage of the fabric of spacetime) as the holes, they are not distorted at all by propogating through intervening matter like light is.

2.)They tell us just how heavy each of the holes was, how fast they were spinning, the shape of the orbit (circular? elongated?), where the black holes are in our sky, and how far they are from earth.

Black holes will be an energy source that will be batlled over in the galactic future. Cities will be created on girder-work rings, giant superconducting coils that will thread a magnetic field through through the hole's horizon and will hold it on the hole, despite its tendency to pop off. As the horizon spins, it drags the nearby space into a tornado-like swirl which in turn interacts with the threading magnetic field to form a gigantic power generator. The magnetic field lines become transmission for the power.. Electric current is driven out the hole's equator (in the form of electrons flowing inward) and up the magnetic field lines to the ring world. There the current deposts its power. Then it flows out of the ring world on another set of magnetic field lines and down into the hole's north and south poles (in the form of positrons flowing inward). By adjusting the strength of the magnetic field, the world's inhabitants can adjust the power output: weak field and low power in the world's early years; strong field and high power in later years. Gradually the power is extracted, the hole will slow its spin, but it will take billions of years to exhaust the hole's enormous store of spin energy..

3.) Gravitational waves also will contain a partial map of the inspiraling holes' spacetime curvature. It will test general relativity with more accuracy than any other experiments have. Will the map agree with Kerr's solution of the Einstein field equation? Does space swirl near the spinning hole?To what degree? Does the swirl change as one approaches the horizon agree with Kerr's prediction?

4.)As the two event horizons merged they are predicted to produce a nonlinearity. (A quantitiy if linear if its total size is the sum of its parts). Strong curvature will produce more curvature, which in turn produce still more curvature-much like the growth of an avalanche. Nonlinearity is understood in a quiescent black hole; there it is responsible for holding the hole together. What is not understood is what the nonlinearity does, how it behaves, what its effects are, when the strong curvature is violently dynamical. Scientists will be readjusting their supercomputers for their simulations."

From me…How do we apply it to the present? What are the immediate benefits that might be realized?

First, the topology of space will be understood at a greater level. Topology dictates what shapes existing shapes can truncate or stellate into..the limits of what shapes they can change into.

Now molecules can form with other molecules into compounds but shape always plays a major role in each change. There is likely a topological geometric signature that describes how a virus enters into a cell and spreads or how a vaccine enters a body and interfaces with all the necessary cells to produce antibodies.

Today microbiologists are doing way too many experiments to realize cures for diseases. In the future a topologist will generate a software program that will indicate which experiments are heading in the wrong direction and might poison patients needing help. Animals will no longer necessarily be the guinea pigs they are for science today and cures for diseases may come very quickly.

On board the Columbia moss and sunflowers were sent up to see how microcurvature of spacetime affects them. Moss has been know to react to gravitational fields by growing up walls and onto inner roof tops of caves. Sunflowers, on the other hand, have spiral patterns in their florets called Fibonacci sequences that disappeared onboard the Columbia while moss turned into a beautiful spiral patterned flower like the sunflower does at earth's surface. This gives us a direct connection of spacetime curvature to the life sciences and tells us that some distant earth-like planet with a greatly differing gravitational field will escort evolution through an entirely different path.

I'm sorry, I didn't phrase that well.

Of course the Scientific results will be pure gold.

But I meant 'useful' in the engineering sense. We're not gonna tap into to gravitational waves to power spaceflight (or just lightbulbs for that matter).

Splitting the atom gave us nuclear power of course, but splitting the proton isn't likely to be directly useful in that respect. But CERN still gave us the Internet – and will now likely lead the way in distributed computing.

What I was trying to say is that the research may *seem* useless to John Q. Public, but all the infrastructure &c that gets invented, engineered and develop will in all likelihood give us countless benefits we never dreamed of.

In short – the future is never futuristic. Where were the Ipods and 3G mobile phones in the 50es pulp fiction? We suck at predicting what good research will be, but in the long run there will always be something good coming out of even the most fundamental research.

I do not understand why you doubt it. First of all, confirming or denying their existence will definitely bring us closer to understanding the universe and its laws of physics. Second, if we develop devices sensitive enough, gravitational waves may be used for observing objects and events in the universe otherwise invisible. Gravitation waves unlike EM waves won’t be screened by galaxies, stars, gas, dust, or other material. Theoretically gravitational waves could be used even for communication. And since it is not yet entirely clear whether gravitational waves are limited by the otherwise absolute speed of light, if they turn out to be faster (although it is unlikely), it would have indeed revolutionary consequences. Then of course, understanding gravitation and space time warping is the first aspect needed for actively using those aspects. And since we do not really understand it yet, we can only speculate whether it is possible or not.

If only we can make a fast detector spectroscope and observe spectral lines oscillating momentrarily when gravity waves flow, that should prove it.

I have given the idea, now lets see who can make this experiment.

By the way I have other thoughts, see my web site at cosmicdarkmatter.com

Seriously dude, read up a bit on astronomy.

But I have every confidence that engineers will find something to use the improved laser precision for.

As with the Apollo programme going to the Moon did not in itself mean much, but the whole infrastructure needed to go there gave us microchips, teflon, solarcells and so on and so forth.

Surely there should be two parrallel detectors so that the two detectors can be compared.

One more thing that comes to my mind is the issue of 'space-time'; Einstein predicted that there will be distortion in space-time, does it mean that even a solid object like Earth will also experience temporary distortion? I doubt if that would be so profound. This will call for transfer of a huge amount of energy to compress and expand earth, which is not a perfect elastic body.

As long as we are trying to detect two points in space experincing shrinkage or elongation of distance as a result of gravity wave it may be fine but if we are trying to find if it squeezes and expands earth and therefore two points in its surface that will be too much of an assumption.

I wonder why the mirror on moon that reflects the laser beam from earth has not been used? Using software filtering we could have removed all known natural distortions and at least figured out if there is any indication of earth and moon getting temporarily separated during a gravity wave event. We can even dedicate a geo-stationery satellite for this purpose

I think even if the wave is able to cause a ripple to pass through a ruler measuring it (rather than a planet sized wave/ripple, maybe a pea sized wave/ripple) a beam of light fired from one end of the ruler to a detector at the other end should detect no difference even when it also passes through this ripple because the properties of the light beam (traversing a constant distance at a constant speed) … it has to traverse the effect and as the effect alters space/time, it equally affects the light beam as it passes through the ripple…

Putting these thoughts down in words is VERY difficult!

I still have not read an article that can explain this to me. Will it work or is it a waste of money?