If people want to know about how I automate things in emacs, sure... but please don't inflict that on my future grandchildren

Let's read arxiv.org/abs/2308.12988

A LIGO style detector assumes the gravitational field is a classical coherent state ... I simply don't know what a LIGO-style graviton detector would be. There's a bunch of literature (by folks like Dan Carney) on how to try to measure the quantum nature of the gravitational field

Heavier mirrors *do* help!

Oh yeah sorry I forgot to address that. This is not really the operating principle of LIGO : ) I don't remember what changing the laser frequency (while keeping power fixed?) would do to the noise curve. But it's pretty irrelevant… what really matters is isolating the mirrors as much as possible

As to the question: why density? Because the way that gravitons couple to sources (matter) in the action is basically through a term like
∫ h_{ab} Tᵃᵇ dVol
in the action. So, larger stress-energy tensor, more coupling to gravitons. For nonrelativistic matter that we control in the lab, ρ dominates

He ends up saying "nR³ ≲ 1 because the scatterers cannot be packed closer together than their own radii, m/R < 1/2 because a scatterer cannot be smaller than a black hole of the same mass ..." Similarly, GR is trying to "hide" from strongly coupling to GWs.

There's an astrophysicists' twiddle calculation. Here's one version of it, from the Les Houches 1982 summer school, where Thorne was sketching out how to get nontrivial scattering of GWs from matter: duetosymmetry.com/files/Thorne...

to make your detector denser and more massive. Before you get to the desired sensitivity requires to detect a single graviton, your detector's compactness has crossed the threshold of black hole formation. So trying to detect a single graviton means your detector collapsed to a black hole!
2/2

There were some classic thought experiments (Dyson?) about how hard it is to detect a single graviton. Something along the lines of this: You want to couple the graviton into your detector as much as possible. But all you can do to make the coupling stronger is... 1/2

Ghost-free bigravity, or something else?

There's no way that's a real person, is it? I refuse to believe anybody has that train of thought

Watching master craftspeople work is so satisfying

a Poincaré section! So, Lie transport

(in case anybody is wondering how I turned out the way I am)

I got my hands on a CRC handbook in middle school and discovered the haversine and the gudermannian and was so tickled