On Sun, Aug 4, 2013 at 5:57 PM, Bill Gosper <billgosper@gmail.com> wrote:
Then, can gravitons be detected?
Not directly. Wikipedia says, "...a detector with the mass of Jupiter and 100% efficiency, placed in close orbit around a neutron star, would only be expected to observe one graviton every 10 years, even under the most favorable conditions. It would be impossible to discriminate these events from the background of neutrinos, since the dimensions of the required neutrino shield would ensure collapse into a black hole. "However, experiments to detect gravitational waves, which may be viewed as coherent states of many gravitons, are underway (e.g., LIGO and VIRGO)." -- Mike Stay - metaweta@gmail.com http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~mike http://reperiendi.wordpress.com