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Read this article - start-up registering business in india ?The information on starting or registering a business in india, is not one of those things that are very well available. The government staff who do it, don't want any layman to be informed, because their bread and butter is in the bribe money they get on each and each thing they do to accept your registration to helping you understand what and how to do it.But things are better with egovernance now.. read on. I think the company registration stuff is one of the first things to be a successful egovernanance project for India.About this post:I am setting up this blog post, and will be updating it regularly as I find more information on this and other interesting areas of starting businesses in India.. also I plan to write posts on my experience over years in helping people operate or handle their businesses... in the context of Indian companies only.If you have something to share/add/suggest, you can email me at harish.palaniappan @ Email from Google and I will find time to discuss with you and add your information and experiences in this blog as well.Information On Companies, Acts, and processes in IndiaMay be these links help to kick-off your information collection drive:Starting your own business in IndiaForming a company in IndiaStarting a business - by doingbusiness.orgThe Indian Ministry of company affairs websiteStarting a business in singaporeMCA21 : Online company registrations and other e-form processesThe Indian ministry of company affairs has setup an online governance website since september 2006 (delayed by almost 6 months) with the help of Tata consultancy services.* Note: Before you read further, understand that this post is not updated regularly when the ministry of companies of india's policies or processes change.. so you should look at this as a starter only.. and do find for yourself more information at the Registrar Of Companies offices around India.. or in the mca21 website.Types of companies:In the different types of companies that can be registered (or that can be created in India at all legally), there's no possibility of starting a single person company.. At a minimum, you can only start a private firm with 2 directors.But, the government has been recommended by an expert committee, to add a new class of companies which is proposed as 'One person company' and probably may have OPC Pvt. or OPC Pvt. Ltd. as the ending name of the company.If this recommendation is approved (which probably will be by amendments in the companies Act), then there will be a possibility of registering One Person companies in India. As of now, you atleast make a friendly legal entity as a director apart from yourself, like your mother or wife, or some friend, and register your company as a Private company with minimum 2 directors.Though it is technically bad that India hasn't still recognized 'one person companies', practically it is better to register as a private company since that will avoid further paper work when your 'one person company' grows to have employees which then requires a conversion in your registration or possibly re-registration.-- continuted --If you are a small enterpreneur, as it happens always, and probably into Software solutions, planning to be a product-based company, or services-based company, thinking of selling your software products / services within India or abroad, then registering your company as a Private firm with 2 directors would do. But this would allow you only to do business within the country. For legally allowing yourself to attract foreign currency through sales or service costs, all you need is an Import/Export number/code (costs somewhere less than 2000 rupees i heard...this number you will quote later while filing your filing your returns.. for foreign currency revenues)...but registering as a private company seems to be the first job to do.To register a private company:1. You can do everything onlineDoing the process online means, you download forms, fill them up digitally using adobe acrobat reader software, attach your digital signature and submit it in submission page on Ministry of Corporate Affairs The website says it will give you service request number for every such submission and you can track status of application online with that number. Also, if a form is rejected and if it is put in 'resubmit with proper information' or something like that, then without additional cost you can refill and resubmit under the same request number.1. Get DSC (digital signature):For all this you need a digital signature. Since there is no paper involved you can only sign digitally.. and only legal and secure method is through digital signatures which are given unique to every person who buys one.Note that the digital signature has nothing to do with your manual signature, it is some very very long and undetectable code provided to you as a file through email or in a thumb drive like storage media.And yes, keep the file or DSC media safe once you buy, because anybody can just steal this file and attach your digital signature to all documents that accept digital signatures (which is only company incorporation or name change or efiling forms today.. but later many other processes in life, for example filing company returns, also might start being computerized and accepting digital signatures)You buy DSC from Digital Ceritifying Authorities in India like MTNL (delhi and mumbai), TCS(all over india), and otherslisted here.While visiting the above websites you will see that there are different classes of digital signatures, and might be confused on which one to buy. The one that is minimum required for our discussion is 'Class 2 individual' or higher classes but something that is for an 'individual'. It is worthy to note here that, 'Class 1 certificate for individuals' which is a basic type of dignital certificate, is for 'individuals' but this DSC is not given based on proof of identity or proof of address.. so the government may not accept 'Class 1 certificates'.Recommedation: Buy a 'Class 2 individual' certificate.2. Get DIN (Directory Identification number):This is probably the only low cost process in incorporation. It costs 100 rupees to get yourself registered as a director (or going-to-be-director) of some company within india.Seems like anybody can apply for a DIN, provided you have any of these.. driving license/passport/elector ID, which is a valid proof of identity, and proof of address.The step-by-step process of getting a DIN is given hereRemember to get a DIN for your mom / wife / partner also if you plan to ask them be the second director of your small company.MCA User RegistrationTo submit forms, on the MCA website, you need an identity on the website.For now, since you may not have a DIN and DSC, you can register as an individual, using the 'New user registration' link on Ministry of Corporate Affairs . Then you can login with your password just like in yahoo mail or hotmail.After you get a DIN and DSC, re-register as a Business professional, using the same link.. and then on you will use your DSC to login to the website.3. Form 1A - Company name availability and blocking.This application is for blocking the name of the company you want to register.All forms that we are talking about in this or other steps are available hereBefore you download and fillup form 1A, you should check whether your company name is available through this pageFill up form 1A, with 2 DINs, affix your DSC, if you have to attach any documents scan them and attach them as files in the end of the form as applicable. Then submit the form. Note your request number and track the form until it is approved. We are almost half done.The above 3 items are the main items and all or most processes below can be done simultaneously.4. Role CheckThis is a simple process where a DIN and DSC are matched and verified to be of the same person, and also that this person is a valid signatory of the company.I am not sure, but this process might be neccessary only for efiling of tax or returns.. not for incorporation..Details about this step is here. http://mca.gov.in/MinistryWebsite/dca/rolecheck/rolecheck.html5. Form 1 - Incorporation Application:Download Form 1, fillup, attach digital sign and submit.6. Form 18 - Office address formDownload Form 18, fillup, attach digital sign and submit.7. Form 32 - DIN appointmentDownload Form 32, fillup, attach digital sign and submit.Steps 5, 6, 7 constitute the main parts... and if the Forms 1, 18 and 32 are approved, you will get a CIN or company identification number which you should quote alongwith your Company's PAN number (apply for one, if you don't have), in all future forms like tax forms, name change or address change forms.The overall cost of registering a private company with 2 DIN's through online mode, could cost as less as 2500 Rupees.. but this estimate can increase based on your capital investment which you will mention in Form 1A and others.As mentioned earlier,All forms are available hereAll process applications should take only a few days to be processed.All above processes might not have their old manual form filing methods sooner and everything will become digital because the ministry of company affairs is overwhelmed by its data, and is strongly being computerized. Already tax forms I think, are no more accepted in paper and government has recruited filing officers who help those who are not able to use a computer and do the process digitally.All above processes are part of a system called MCA21 and is managed and authorized for use by the ministry of company affairs and all its registrar of companies (RoC) offices.Initially, me and my friend hired a consultant for doing my friend's company's Registration(/Incorporation).Though this consulting company does it through Ministry of Corporate Affairs website only, they put in their experience of dealing with government processes.But, yes, you don't need to hire a consultant if you have the time to do it online, and if you know people who can attest your proof of identities (a gazetted officer), and if you know some lawyer who has authority to notarize with his signature anything that you produce on a stamp paper.Our consultant, was an authorized 'Company secretary'. It seems Ministry of Company affairs (MCA) has training and certifications for 'company secretary', which people take up and get authorized/certified (by the govt.) to provide these services to people. Company secretaries are obviously people authorized to do more than just incorporation.. like handling disputes between directors of companies, handling buyouts of companies, and many other things like that.. which require people with legal and indian acts and policy knowledge to do it.For us, our consultant would take care of verifying all documents, getting them attested, getting any legal papers notarized, and submit them through Ministry of Corporate AffairsCertain processes are easy.. and you can go to a consultant after these processes and save a few thousands in fee.For example, if you are a techie, and understand browsing and related technologies, then you are actually better than the consultant for getting your digital signature... and this one thing itself could save you more than 500 rupees. because I understand consultants cost 700 - 1500 rupees for filing your DSC application itself.Digital Signature:Just apply for a digital signature as mentioned above.. in TCS or MTNL websites.They will ask you to send some documents to a verification authority.The verification company will just verify your id proof and address proof and send you a digital signature kit with an eToken.An eToken is a protected pen drive/flash drive/usb drive, in which you can't do any data transfer but it will have your digital signature in it and when you insert it into any PC usb key, it installs the signature on the machine...not everything.. just the general part of it. you have to keep the key on the machine until you sign documents and remove it after.This kit and the digital signature costs 1,200 rupees for two years of validity.. (cost from TCS)If you apply from your machine, yourself, you will pay 1200 to the verification authority. nothing else. But if you use a consultant, he will do the online part also for you (assuming you are not the tech friendly person) and charge you twice or even more than the actual cost.Form 1A, and DIN application:These two forms are the initial steps, and probably easy steps for incorporation.Form 1A:Ministry Approval of Form 1A that you submit, means your company name and location is approved and you can start incorporation process. The name is valid only for 6 months and you should incorporate within 6 months.. or you can renew the name for another 6 months. The cost is a flat price of 500 rupees payable on http://Ministry of Corporate Affairs through credit card.If you are starting a software company, Form 1A will have no problems.. since the ministry won't question your address of manufacturing. Other businesses might have problems if the ministry feels your address is a residential area and you business is not proper to be there.. or things like that.In Form 1A, you have to give 6 or 7 company name choices.You type names... likeSample solutions Pvt., Ltd.,Sample software solutions Pvt., Ltd.,Sample Pvt., Ltd.,One of it gets approved.Director Identification Number (DIN):In India, to incorporate a company you need minimum two directors.. (yes, the law is outdated, and only recently government is considering recommedations that single person companies should be allowed to register)If you don't have another director, pull some friend you like.. or easier, get your mother or father as another director. So, atleast two directors should apply for and get a DIN to register the company under them. Later you can always change your directors, company name, address, anything.. just by submitting that form or application alone...and ofcourse paying for that change alone.If you are two or more people who will be directors, and if all of you have a valid passport, no other proof is required for submitting to government anywhere in the full process. A valid passport stands proof for name, address, and father's name most of the time... and the company affairs ministry seems to approve all applications with passport as proof for people, very smoothly.You don't need a consultant for submitting DIN if you follow the instructions clearly on the DIN pages that the ministry has.I think on Digital signature, and DIN .. ministry's website is clear.. and process itself is clear and easy to do by anybody who has used software like browsers, adobe acrobat, etc.,After two DIN's get approved, you can use the DINs and DSC of one director to apply for the actual, main, important form .. FORM 1. .. so this is why the first form we submitted was called FORM 1A (I was wondering why isn't called form 1 if its the first step in incorporation)For Form 1, we need the following.1. Form 1A approval (approving the name of the company)2. DIN numbers of directors (minimum two directors for pvt. ltd. company)3. Articles of Association (a stamped paper agreement signed by directors stating their claims of part ownership of company, has all about holding of shares, how they could be sold, how they could be bought back, blah blah..)4. Memorandum of Association (again a stamped paper document signed by directors stating what all are the objectives of the business, what all they want to sell/buy/resell/import etc., through the operations in the business, what all rights they will exercise in doing the business like renting space/real estate, having employees, etc., blah blah.. important part will be statement of objectives of business.. its like asking for incorporation only to do business on these lines.. if the operations or objectives change, you have to change the memorandum and resubmit for approval until which you can't do the new business)5. Form 18 stating the address of registered office of the company. (a simple form)6. Form 32 stating the DIN numbers of directors of the company. (a simple form)Sample word document templates for 3. and 4. can be downloaded from here (3) and here (4).Before you download, check up whether the ministry website has latest template of these files downloadable there.. as of this writing the ministry website hasn't put a link since this is a legal document and obviously it is a very important step which needs complete understanding by the person before signing it. The links above are provided only for you to have access to samples so you can read in detail before you get into doing it. Also, if you get to read, the 'Memorandum document (4)' read the 'objects' part carefully, because it says what you want to do with your business and you know this better than your consultant.Submitting Form 1 means, submitting all the above.In submitting Form1, you will need a consultant or help with the text from a Chartered Accountant, or company secretaries, or simply referrence documents from friends who have already done this.That's if.. you submit Form 1 digitally scanned and signed with the digital signature of one of the directors, through Ministry of Corporate Affairs... originals also have to be submitted to the registrar of companies.While submitting Form 1, you have to pay a registration fee which is based on a slab for the capital you are mentioning.. minimum capital is 1,00,000 rupees.. I mentioned just that, and the fee was 4,800 rupees for that.. (so that means it takes a minimum of 4800 rupees for registering a private limited company in India, not like I thought earlier that it could be done with around 2500 rupees).Government generally approves Form 1 submission in 1 day after the originals are submitted.Sometimes if the objectives of business stated in the memorandum is not clear / the AOA (3) or MOA (4) documents have mistakes / incomplete, then the registrar office raises a query or asks for deletion of objectionable points, or asks clarifications.. and the form has to be resubmitted if changes are made.. and I believe you don't have to pay again for corrections but I am not sure. For this part, probably being proactive, my consultant took a power of attorney from me and my mom for doing such changes himself, if they are raised, and to resubmit the memorandum himself without signatures from the directors (me or my mom).Once, your Form 1 is approved, within a day or two you will receive an email with a one page pdf certificate of incorporation(unsigned) with a Company Identification Number (CIN).. probably they will send an original signed one later which I am yet to receive.Actually, you should start business transactions, only after you receive this certificate.. though it happens usually that everybody does registration or incorporation a couple of years after starting business.Import / Export Code - IEC:After Registering the company, a software solutions provider, who wants to be able to provide services to foreign clients, or sell products online to people outside India, MUST apply for an Import/Export license.Bank account:For getting IEC, you need to have a current account in a bank under your new registered company's name. The bank will obviously ask your documents of company registration. Other than that, the bank will ask you a 'Board Resolution' from your company, signed by all registered directors of the company, authorizing one or more of the directors of the company to open and operate the account in the company's name. The board resolution is just a letter/statement from the people who represent the company, but some banks like it in a specific format and you can ask the bank to give you the board resolution format if they have. Some banks even have this format downloadable on their websites 'corporate banking' sections.The current account, will also be useful for you to do transactions in your company's name, which is a MUST for accounting your company's cash flows. Also, you will be able to accept payment from your clients in the name of your company through Cheques, direct wire transfer, etc., which clients will like since they will understand that your company is a permanent entity, and you are not somebody who takes money and can go missing.IEC application process is simple:You get an application form from the Zonal director general of Foreign Trade.. or download from their website (like their Tamilnadu/Chennai office website).Major attachments to this process are:1. your company registration form,2. a letter from your bank attesting that a current account is held under your company's name operated by one of the director's of the company, and the bank should attest in the letter the photographs of the directors of the company.The zonal director's office will guide and help you in the application process by rejecting the application with corrections mentioned clearly for you to correct and re-submit, each time you do it.Some consultants take close to 3000 rupees to do the IEC process.. my recommendation Do it yourself if you have not done this before, you will like to know and be clear of what is happening.

I’d guess this question varies a great deal from person to person and since we can’t understand what another person’s life is like from the inside it is likely that each person’s subjective view of the answer is only partially accurate and makes a lot of false assumptions about others. That said, I can share some of the things I have noticed seem to be different for me than for most people:1)Complex is easy; simple is hard: If you ask me to devise a detailed map of human identity or of the connections between psychology, art, philosophy, science, politics and history that led to the birth of modernism I could take either issue and draw it out on a whiteboard in front of you with pretty comprehensive depth and breadth without using google or taking more than a few seconds to think about it. If you ask me to keep a home tidy or to comprehend what seems to most people to be obvious social politics in a corporate setting I couldn’t do either one— I could tidy the home once but I don’t know how to live outside of my mind enough to maintain such things and I cannot comprehend things that don’t make sense to me and most social politics are completely nonsensical to my way of thinking and thus incomprehensible and usually undetectable.2) My answers are usually different than others: In my college classes, for instance, when the professor asks a question like “explain how visual perception works” most people will answer with the technical explanations from the textbooks about the visual and brain apparatus involved in visual perception. My answer, though, is likely to focus on how visual data triggers established neural pathways and our brain makes many associations with prior information and experiences we’ve had related to the visual stimulus and so the visual inputs are augmented by our unique histories and cause us to experience them in different ways and see them differently. Both answers are correct, though I often fear mine is wrong, but show a different way of thinking about such questions. Most people think of the most immediate technical answers but when I think about visual perception I see a whole web of a process that includes not only the physiological actions but also the psychological/phenomenological actions that create our perception of visual things.3) I think about things in a very nonlinear way: related to the previous question, I usually think about things in a very web-like way. For instance, I am a therapist and when I first meet a client and am trying to understand their world I go about it differently than most therapists I know. Most therapists use some structured sequence of questions to build an understanding of the person in a linear way: Personality+Historical events+symptoms= diagnosis and then they create a linear treatment plan in order to attempt to return the client to health.I rarely use a structured form of history taking. Instead let’s imagine I have a pre-existing template in my mind of a human being’s mental world. It has some rough categories penned out like a mind map: personality traits, Identity constructs, social network & history, problems in functioning, motivations, beliefs about self/others, rules, spirituality, reality testing system, childhood history, history since childhood, accomplishments & failures, intimate relationships, values, goals, self-talk, habits etc… there are many dozens of these rough categories in my mental template and throughout my conversation with the client I am plugging in data points and connections between data points at every part of this web at once and also plugging these points into a larger web of psychological knowledge that generally exists in my mind.So for instance, if someone tells me that they have an obsessive need to do everything three times in order to feel safe I will ask them if any significant event happened at age 3 (based on my pre-existing knowledge web) and then when they describe some trauma that occured to them when they were three I will put a dot in childhood history, attachment disruptions, magical thinking related to establishing safety, established neural habits that are interfering with life now, causes of shame/embarrassment, control issues and fears, trust in self/self-efficacy, social anxieties, and probable causes of relational inadequacy/distress just to name a few. Then I will ask something like, how has this affected your life? And what have you tried to solve this problem? And I will fill in more detailed data points depending on the answers and draw connections between all of these and also other points in my growing conceptualization of their perspective.When I think about this person I see the whole web at once and then pinpoint certain areas if I need to remember details and I can visualize those details without having to refer to my notes which gives me the ability to help make associations easily in sessions and remember most things about my clients more easily than linear thinkers seem able to.My treatment plans tend to be less linear as well. I tend to have a treatment web and to try to devise interventions that work on multiple layers of the person at the same time— resolution of symptoms + increasing positive experiences simultaneously rather than sequentially4) I think a lot about how I think: It’s kind of like a never ending puzzle that I can work on if I get bored. How do I know this thing? What was the sequence of thoughts that led to this conclusion? What are the data points I chose to include/exclude in making this decision? Why did I choose them? What made me come up with a different answer to xyz question than everyone else? What thoughts are leading me to feel this way? How can I change my thinking to have a mental experience that I’d prefer? The possible questions are endless.5) I wonder a lot about things most people don’t think about: I wonder if consciousness is infinite, if infinity could be understood as a ball with an infinite number of points so that all things possible and impossible are included within it? Would this ball of infinity be God? What if consciousness is the smallest particle that all things are made up of? What would differentiate between living and non-living things? Could there be some unified connection between all units of consciousness that links them? Would each unit of consciousness have self-awareness or just any awareness? Would that mean that things are as they are because the units of consciousness that create it have become convinced that they are the thing they appear to be? What if they became convinced otherwise? so on and so on…6) I have very high standards for myself: I am not allowed to submit any work that does not meet my standards for myself and I must chose subjects of study which will challenge me rather than what would be most easy to complete. For instance, in one of my PhD classes we had to choose a famous psychologist and connect them with other psychologists that influenced them and also those who they influenced in order to create an intellectual lineage. It would have been most easy to choose a psychologist like Bowlby with his attachment theory or someone equally famous. However, I am specializing in working with gifted people so I chose a somewhat obscure psychologist (Kaimeirz Dabrowski) and so instead of taking maybe 5 hours it took me 20 but I felt that I had learned enough to meet my standards.7) I rarely apply my standards for myself to other people: If other people would rather take the easy way to a goal, when I’m insisting on taking the hard, I don’t feel any judgment about their choice. In fact I often wish I could just be satisfied with “good enough” in my life more often.8) I am comfortable with paradox and enjoy playing around with it: It doesn’t bother me to imagine Schrodinger’s cat as being both dead and alive at the same time. I find it fascinating that if there are an infinite number of possibilities then those possibilities must also include the possibility that there are no possibilities at all. I love paradox and find them to be among the most interesting things to think about— especially when it makes my mind “hurt” :)9) I see connections that other people rarely do: If you ask me if there is any connection between democratic socialism and potatoes I will tell you that I’d guess that the potato famine in Ireland probably influenced people’s feelings about the necessity of having a safety net to prevent people from starving and since it happened at around the same time as the rise of socialism in Europe I would guess that it was used as a point of support at the time. My understanding is that most people don’t think in this way.10) I can visualize in ways most people seem unable to: I can match a paint swatch to a piece of furniture in my mind and bring it home to find it is perfect (or close enough that no one could tell the difference). I can remember someone’s name by visualizing when I watched them write it down. I can visualize all of the components of a system and how they interact in something like a mind-map in my mind. I can visualize rearranging dots and lines in various ways in my mind so as to see the most efficient solution to a problem.11)I rarely compare myself to others: This is probably the one that matters most in my daily life. I almost never compare myself to others because, in my experience, it is rarely a useful measurement of anything objective and is not a reliable source of information about anything subjective. I tend to compare myself to myself.

If I predict that a ghost will appear in the castle tower every midnight, I might put a camera with a timer in the tower and attempt to capture an image of the ghost. I could repeat this process every night for a year. Perhaps the ghost only shows up at midnight on certain holidays. My hypothesis about the ghost would be falsified if none of the images show a ghost.BUT, if I combine all of the images I’ve taken into one image, so that a blurry, ghostly form begins to take shape as a result of all of the dust floating around in the individual images, can I announce that I have taken a picture of a ghost?If I select only the subset of images that produce the most ghost-like form when combined, can I announce that I have taken a high-resolution picture of a ghost?I think that most people would say that the answer to those questions is, ‘no‘. Yet in the scientific community today, gravitational wave and black hole physicists are doing both of these things and getting praised for their work.The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration combined blurry telescope images into one image, fine-tuning calibration constants about regions of interest until what they wanted to see finally appeared.The gravitational wave observatory LIGO-VIRGO filters their noisy data with a template of what they want to see. In many ways, this is like taking a ghost-shaped filter and applying it to a photograph.What is fascinating about these multi-billion dollar projects is that these sorts of logic errors occur at every single layer of their experimental design and those who work on the projects show no awareness of the ways in which their work is out of line with the scientific method. In the LIGO-VIRGO experiment, a cursory examination reveals:The lack of attention to earlier measurements,The lack of a control variable,The use of templates or tunable filters to extract what they want to see in noisy data,The impossibility of distinguishing the source of what they are measuring,The impossibility of determining the source’s properties,The lack of awareness of the limitations of their theoretical approximations,LIGO claims to have confirmed general relativity by using general relativity to construct theories about black holes. Is this circular reasoning? Is the dog still chasing its tail? Obviously yes, but some people require more convincing than that, so I will go through each of the points listed above.Earlier MeasurementsIn principle, the scientific method ensures that the community will correct its errors, but if it doesn’t study its own history, there is no guarantee that it won’t repeat its errors over and over again.Back in the 1960s, hundreds of independent research groups constructed devices to measure gravitational waves and they all compared their results. Each research group thought that it had measured gravitational waves, but when the results were combined, they all had to conclude that no one had been measuring gravitational waves from deep space. They had all been measuring different sources of noise.Remembering Joseph Weber, the controversial pioneer of gravitational wavesFast forward fifty years and the physics community has given a Nobel Prize to a group that claimed to have measured gravitational waves with a device so expensive it is impossible to duplicate it enough times to make sure it isn’t just measuring noise.I find it rather strange that the physics community keeps forgetting the science lesson in which the teacher says, “you must repeat your measurement under many different conditions for it to be worth anything” and “you can’t measure control variables.”Control VariablesIf you didn’t pay attention in science class, I’ll remind you of the purpose of a control variable. In an experiment, the control variable is not changed. The purpose of an experiment is not to study the control variable. The control is used for comparison. This is a fundamental principle of the scientific method and LIGO, along with many other modern physics experiments, is blind to it. All of the modern physics experiments which attempt to measure the noise floor of empty space (LHC-Higgs, COBE-CMB, LIGO-VIRGO, BICEP, etc..) are dubious for similar reasons — they have no control variable because they are trying to measure the control variable – it is like a dog chasing its tail or like a person trying to take a picture of a ghost.If your measurement tool is moving around by the same amount as the thing you want to measure, you aren’t going to be able to measure it very well.Templates and Filtering DataThe purpose of the scientific method is to make sure that you are seeing things that are really there. A scientist does not want to be biased by what he wants to see, but I’m afraid that LIGO has built bias into their experimental design by using black hole-shaped templates to filter and tune their data — sometimes by hand. In the image below, you can see what their data looked like without their fine-tuned filtering and it looks nothing like the ‘black hole ringdown signature’ that they published in their Nobel Prize winning paper.This was what LIGO published and used to win a Nobel Prize. It later came out that the template was tuned or fitted by hand so that it matched some simple black hole calculations from a textbook.This is what the same data looks like with only a whitening filter and a Fourier transform.A Response to “On the time lags of the LIGO signals” (Guest Post)I think they have used a ghost-shaped filter to help them see more ghosts, but this isn’t even the worst of their problems.Distinguish the SourceEven if a ghostly apparition or a black hole collision really happens somewhere in the universe, LIGO has no way to distinguish its signature from some more mundane, local occurrence. As in, they cannot distinguish a deep space gravitational wave from a more local wave, yet those who claim to measure black hole collisions in deep space believe that they can do this. If ghosthunters can’t know if they measured a cloud of smoke or a ghost, how can LIGO know if they measured the sun burping or colliding black holes?A LIGOnaut or ghost-hunter might respond to this criticism by pointing to the measurement they took of a gamma-ray or ectoplasm burst occurring at the same time that they measured a ghostly collision signature, but there again, I see evidence of mass delusion. There were 4700 authors, or one-third of all astronomers in existence, on a paper about correlations between something that LIGO measured and something that other astronomers measured, but the timing of the signals doesn’t match up and if a message goes out to the ghost hunting community to start looking for ectoplasm because someone thinks they saw a ghost, I think it is quite possible that ghost hunters might find a booger left by a kid and determine that it is ectoplasm.ShieldSquare Captcha (the big Science magazine issue dedicated to the measurements was behind a paywall)This should worry people because false alarms about weak gamma-ray detections regularly prompt LIGO to dig through their noise for evidence of signals that look like black hole mergers.“The Fermi team calculated the odds of such an event being the result of a coincidence or noise at 0.22%. However, observations from the INTEGRAL telescope’s all-sky SPI-ACS instrument indicated that any energy emission in gamma-rays and hard X-rays from the event was less than one-millionth of the energy emitted as gravitational waves, concluding that “this limit excludes the possibility that the event is associated with substantial gamma-ray radiation, directed towards the observer.” If the signal observed by the Fermi GBM was genuinely astrophysical, SPI-ACS would have detected it with a significance of 15 sigma above the background. The AGILE space telescope also did not detect a gamma-ray counterpart of the event.A follow-up analysis of the Fermi report by an independent group, released in June 2016, purported to identify statistical flaws in the initial analysis, concluding that the observation was consistent with a statistical fluctuation or an Earth albedo transient on a 1-second timescale.”Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope – WikipediaThe sort of gamma-ray detection at Fermi that initiates the search for correlations with LIGO happens many times per day and when thousands of people are all expecting to see something buried in noise, I think a fluke is still a possibility. Call me crazy, but I think that skepticism is a good thing to hold onto when you are dealing with noisy, sensitive measurements taken by highly motivated groups of people.Maybe I am just being too strict in my interpretation of the scientific method. After all, if something dark and mysterious happens in deep space and causes the sun to burp and that causes the Earth’s core to gurgle and that causes a lake to heat up which causes a thunderstorm which causes a lightning strike which hits a Schumann resonance and LIGO detects that, did LIGO detect a gravitational wave? By the standards of modern physics, many people would say, ‘yes‘. But modern physicists do lots of strange things in their attempts to measure unmeasurable things. Neutrinos, Higgs particles, cosmic microwave background radiation, oh my.Determine the Source’s PropertiesSuppose that I believe that the blips measured by LIGO really come from deep space black hole collisions and I believe that they have accurately estimated the size of the objects which collided, even though those estimates are absurdly larger than what they had expected to see based on other measurements and based on the theory of black holes.Suppose that I blind myself to these errors. Can I believe in the extrapolations from these estimates which are used to determine the distance to the collision, or have they made mistakes there, as well? In their first gravitational wave announcement, they wrote that the collision was 1.3 billion light-years away.If you detect a wave at two locations and you know its propagation speed, you can determine the direction from which the wave came, but not the distance to the thing that caused the wave. LIGO claims that they can determine the size of the objects which created the wave they detected based on the frequency of the wave. Larger frequencies correspond to larger objects. From there, you need to guess how far away such objects typically are. They use the estimates of how big they think the objects were and how far away such objects typically are to make an estimate of how big the wave should be when it gets to us. Ignoring circularity of logic, an absolute measurement of the amplitude of the wave should then tell you more about how far away it was and since they assume that the signal traveled at the speed of light, they conclude when the event occurred.There are a lot of assumptions in this chain of logic and while it might make sense at first glance, an absolute measurement of the amplitude of the wave isn’t really possible with their apparatus. Every redshift, amplification, or filtering of the signal is associated with a factor that adds an error to a determination of the absolute amplitude of the signal, and by tuning these difficult to determine error estimates, you can give yourself just about any result you want.Theoretical ApproximationsSurely the people who built LIGO weren’t so stupid as to ignore all of these issues. They must’ve had a fundamental, basic research justification for this experiment. It can’t have been built solely for the sake of the engineering byproducts and busywork. One would hope that the leaders of the project did not knowingly send a small army of students off on a decades-long, multi-billion-dollar wild goose chase or ghost hunt.I’ll unpack the theoretical basis of the experiment in four layers: general, colloquial, technical, and esoteric. Pick your favorite poison. The language degenerates quickly and the esoteric and technical arguments are, of course, the most tedious, so I’ll do them last.Generally speaking, by conflating relative and absolute coordinate systems and language, LIGO has convinced an influential subset of people that impossible things are possible. We can imagine having an absolute, godlike perspective, but we cannot actually adopt one through our measurements because nothing is truly stationary. We can only measure things from a relative perspective and LIGO’s experimental design implicitly assumes it can take an absolute, godlike perspective. I find that thinking about bubbles helps illuminate the folly of this way of thinking.Colloquially speaking, If you believe in the original Michelson-Morely experiment, then LIGO cannot measure the flexing of the Earth because if the Earth stretches in one direction, it must contract in the other and their device is insensitive to this motion. Also, if light and matter waves change their shape in the same way at the same time, you can’t use light waves to measure matter waves. In contrast, you can measure how the Earth flexes by comparing the path traveled by a particle beam in a linear accelerator to that of a light pulse with a stable arrival time, showing how matter aether and luminiferous aether behave in different ways.Technically speaking, Previous experiments with Michelson interferometers suggested that in absolute space, light’s wavelength and the interferometer cavity dimensions will change in the same way at the same time while the amount of time required for light to be reflected by the mirrors will be constant. In relative space, the cavity dimensions are constant because they track the changes of the general relativity coordinate system while the amount of time the light requires to enter and exit a mirror changes (and you might wonder why they thought there would be an advantage to making the interferometer several kilometers long). In either case, the changes in one arm of the interferometer exactly counteract the changes in the other arm of the interferometer such that when the Earth turns or when a wave passes through, no change will be measured at the detector.LIGO insists that they can bypass this issue by adding ‘fresh light’ to the system which allows them to sample the changes in the cavity size. This complication makes the system too difficult for most people to visualize intuitively and this causes them to fall back on mathematics which open the door to errors of approximation. From my perspective, those who claim to understand how the fresh-light concept works are akin to those who admire the emperor’s new clothes.I’ll try to debunk the fresh-light concept in the language of reflection time. When a gravitational wave arrives, the reflection time at the first mirror and the combiner mirror are decreased at the same time that reflection time at the second mirror and the combiner mirror are increased. If you think sequentially, fresh light that hits the first mirror gets slowed down and it will be compared to older light that has been sped up on the second mirror. The difference between the fresh light and the old light will show up as a change at the detector. This is what would happen if the laser were pulsed, but LIGO’s laser is not pulsed, it is continuous.LIGO has conflated a discrete process with its continuous-wave apparatus. If you think of simultaneous processes, as is required for an apparatus that uses continuous waves, there is no such thing as fresh light or old light – there is just light and you see that the concept is nonsense. They are using sequential thinking for a simultaneous process and if a person cannot mentally animate two processes occurring in parallel, then he will be more likely to believe in LIGO. In a broader sense, most of the mathematics we use in physics is an attempt to sequentially approximate simultaneous processes and if you think about entanglement or quantum mechanics from this perspective, the concepts lose their relativistic mystery.At this point, a determined LIGOnaut might pull out some technical jargon. Complicated figures would be employed in an attempt to convince us that sequential, discrete analysis can be used to approximate their continuous, simultaneous process.“Cannot light from a laser be considered pulsed but at a fast rate since it is produced with stimulated emission so that light entering the vacuum arms with the mirrors are pulsed at LIGO-VIRGO? By slowing the rate that light is emitted from a laser, pulsing is more obvious.”But any non-LIGO physicist knows that stimulated emission in a laser means that the photons are emitted in proportion to the particle number squared. It is a collective, oscillatory effect in which large groups of particles oscillate in synch, making the waves they generate coherent rather than random. This process is not conducive to the emission of individual photons as in an incoherent process. Pulses of laser light are produced through a different process which involves giving a continuous wave a frequency chirp and sending it through a collection of dispersive elements, like prisms or diffraction gratings. If LIGO is using this justification, it is yet another instance of the conflation of concepts that should not be mixed. The rate of light emission would have to be slowed to the level of individual photons for this pulsing effect to be measurable within a system designed for coherent light and the detector would need to be sensitive to changes in the number of individual photons arriving. Direct measurement of individual photons is not possible with their system. In any case, if the system is only sensitive to changes on the level of individual photons, then it makes no sense to have the powerful, continuous-wave in the interferometer at all.I recall a similarly obtuse debate about the physics of the beam-splitter, but I’d rather not dive into that at the moment.Esoterically speaking, in Lorentzian Maxwell’s equations, transverse and longitudinal waves will have the same speed in free space and, just as in the original Michelson-Morely experiment, if you use those equations to describe the experiment, LIGO shouldn’t be able to measure anything, but if one decides that the continuous, Lorentzian Maxwell’s equations in relative, Riemannian, curved space are merely an approximation of a more discrete, grainy, recursive system described by Galilean Maxwell’s equations in absolute, Cartesian, flat space, then there will be discontinuities between transverse and longitudinal waves which might be measured as a sort of friction coefficient that corresponds to the strength of the ambient gravitational or magnetic field. In olden times, one would call these discontinuities magnetic monopoles, but today, we call them all sorts of things – displacement currents, positrons, electrons, matter, antimatter,.. black holes.Perhaps the inventors of LIGO were trying to determine the properties of the magnetic monopoles filling space. That might be worth doing. “Wait!” You might say. “Magnetic monopoles do not exist. I learned that in my first physics classes.”“If you’d known these equations 300 years ago, you’d have been very powerful.” “A student just like you came from this University and won a Nobel Prize.” She says the words “paradox,” “puzzle,” and ‘”mystery” several times and is selling physics to impressionable young people as a discipline which can make them powerful, noble, and famous. Notice how she ignores the approximation inherent in setting the divergence of the magnetic field equal to zero in Gauss’s law.Basically, magnetic monopoles are localized swirls of space and time and modern physicists have taken to calling them ‘particles’ and confusing people about the concept of antimatter. A black hole is a representation of the largest ‘particle’ we can think of and when we imagine their collision, we picture matter and antimatter annihilating and releasing energy, just as we observe in our Earthly particle colliders. This is why the idea of a black hole is so appealing to the physics community. Yet just because an approximation like general relativity works on one length scale, there is no reason to believe that it works on another. That is why approximating black holes with general relativity is too much of a fanciful stretch for many people. It is understandable that people are curious about them because if black holes are like virtual particles in colliders, then they borrow energy from the vacuum and disappear as quickly as they form, however, if the vacuum is fed by an outside source of energy, then a black hole might form and remain for a long time. If black holes exist, it tells us something about whether positive or negative entropy rule the universe and this has a certain quasi-religious, psychological impact on many people.ConclusionI don’t, of course, know how all physicists think, but I know two physicists very well: myself and my husband, a man who believes in LIGO’s measurements.His funding sources have nothing to do with LIGO and he is very secure in his job, but he has been conditioned to believe that it is impolite, politically unwise, and not his business to think critically about anyone’s research other than his own. The politically astute thing to do in the case of LIGO is to approve of them and give them the benefit of the doubt without spending any time thinking about the issue, even though he would be an ideal person do deconstruct their engineering designs. He genuinely has not given the matter two seconds of thought.He stopped listening to me early in my post-doctoral work when I began to have ideas independently of him. At that point, he refused to talk to me about anything related to work. Any time I tried to explain something, I got shut down. I soon figured out that the reason he shut me down was that he really couldn’t understand what I was saying. His mind works in a very narrow, specialized fashion and he couldn’t understand any of the associations I was making.I find the following argument quite clear, but he can’t even force himself to read such a thing because he is so specialized.If general relativity is a static approximation of a more dynamic system, then its predictions about black holes will be inaccurate. Black holes might not exist.Even if general relativity is an adequate approximation of a dynamic system and black holes do exist, the method of creating an image out of noisy, contaminated data is still inaccurate.Using a single result produced through faulty data analysis to claim confirmation of a hypothesis based on an extrapolation from an approximation is terrible science on multiple levels.A theory might be supported through results produced with many independent experimental methods addressing many hypotheses about the theory, but using multiple data analysis methods with a single data set to claim confirmation of a theory is absurd.Those who make images of black holes and gravitational wave measurements are doing all of these things and physicists like my husband refuse to worry about such matters outside of their narrow purview.The best that science can do is to create a controlled experiment in which changing one variable causes another variable to change. Since this is not possible in astronomy, we must rely on astronomers to exercise restraint when they interpret their data. That restraint appears to be sorely lacking in the present-day community.……………………I’ve been writing about these issues for a while, but I’m not sure how to hit the right buttons to get the message across.Evolution of Group DelusionThe Schumann ResonancesNewton’s Bad ApplesMy earliest work on this topic can be found here:https://www.quora.com/profile/Kirsten-Hacker/answers/Laser-Interferometer-Gravitational-wave-Observatory-LIGOIn recent months a few physics apostates have begun to make noise about these matters, as well, noting that LIGO has produced nothing but false alarms over the past year. As in, once they got their systems in full operation, they were forced to rule out all of the things they would’ve ordinarily proclaimed to be black hole mergers. What does that say about all of their earlier, published detections? Nothing good.A guy I met on Twitter named Thaddeus Guttierez is taking a more academic approach to being a LIGO gadfly by attempting to identify things like lightning strikes that occurred at the same time as LIGO’s claimed detections, and while he doesn’t appear to be in the mainstream academic community, he speaks their language. He sent me these links to mainstream LIGO gadflies:Noise residuals for GW150914 using maximum likelihood and numerical relativity templatesGRB 170817A-GW170817-AT 2017gfo and the observations of NS-NS, NS-WD and WD-WD mergersWhat can we really infer from GW 150914?https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.02823.pdf…https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.07421.pdf…A common thing for a young or aspiring physicist to say is, “If your ideas are so great, why haven’t you published them in a peer-reviewed journal?” They might not know that for an ex-physicist, ex-post-doc like me who is unaffiliated, publishing in a peer-reviewed journal is very expensive. APS journals charge two thousand dollars and Springer journals only waive their fees if you are employed by an approved institute.I found one online peer-reviewed journal (Frontiers | Peer-Reviewed Articles - Open Access Journals) that does not seem to charge. It appears to be a new model for scientific publishing in which the referees are not anonymous, but I’m a bit suspicious of it. As in all internet media, it is far too easy to distort an author’s impression of their work’s distribution. (I just checked into this a bit more closely, and they do charge a fee for publication – if your paper is accepted. I don’t know how much it is. I think they should pay me, not the other way around.)……After putting effort into debunking this stuff, I do ask myself why I bother and I think that I want to demystify the pop-sci nonsense used to lure young people into physics servitude. I think they might find better things to do with their time and I’d like to help them avoid the mistakes I made.