Comment on "Gravity Waves, Chaos, and Spinning Compact Binaries"

Abstract

Levin (gr-qc/9910040) has shown that spinning compact binaries can be chaotic at second post-Newtonian order. However, when higher order dissipational effects are included, the dynamics will no longer be chaotic, though the evolution may still be unpredictable in a practical sense. I discuss some of the additional work that needs to be done to decide how this unpredictability might affect gravitational wave detectors such as LIGO.