The TGD View of the Recently Discovered Gravitational Hum as Gravitational Diffraction

Abstract

Scientists from the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) have now officially made the first detections of the gravitational wave background. This gravitational hum was not detected by Earth bound instruments. Rather, they make themselves manifest as periodic changes of the spinning rates of pulsars with the frequencies of the gravitational waves involved. The periods are of order year. In the LIGO experiment the periods are measured as fractions of a second. The strength of gravitational hum is unexpectedly large. The basic insight of the TGD view is that diffraction produces very high intensities but only in preferred directions and that in diffraction the amplitude of the scattered field is proportional to the square N² of the number N of scatterers rather than N. The identification of dark matter as phases of the ordinary matter with an arbitrarily large value of Planck constant suggests the existence of tessellations of the hyperbolic 3-space identifiable as light-cone proper time hyperboloid of Minkowski space. Gravitational diffraction could occur in astrophysical scales at these tessellations.