Predicting gravitational wave strain from GW150914

RSI also predicts how far gravitational waves stretch space. The theory holds that the Eternal Consonance is an incompressible universal continuum under a tension of about 0.73 N. A field this stiff should allow only tiny displacements, even from enormous events.

The paper estimates the strain, the fractional stretch of a detector arm, as h ≈ Rₛ/r. Here Rₛ is the combined Schwarzschild radius of the merging bodies, and r is the distance to the detector. The black hole merger GW150914 converted about 3 solar masses into about 5.36 × 10⁴⁷ J. Its combined radius is about 192 km, and its distance about 410 Mpc (about 1.27 × 10²⁵ m). The estimate is h ≈ 1.5 × 10⁻²⁰.

LIGO measured a peak strain of about 1.0 × 10⁻²¹, a displacement of about 4 × 10⁻¹⁸ m. The simple estimate is about fifteen times the measured value. An estimate from the Schwarzschild radius alone can only indicate the scale of the effect, and a strain formula built from the medium's tension and density remains an open goal. In RSI, the field's stiffness explains why so much energy moves so little.