Evidence of Vacuum Viscosity (η ≈ 0.14): Anomalous Gravitational Wave Dispersion in GW150914 Raw Data

The current standard model of cosmology assumes gravitational waves propagate at the speed of light (c) through a perfect vacuum. We present evidence contradicting this assumption based on a refined raw cross-correlation analysis of the GW150914 event. While official LIGO analysis using matched filtering relies on General Relativity templates, our direct analysis of unfiltered raw data—using 4th-order zero-phase filtering to exclude instrumental artifacts—reveals a significant frequency-dependent dispersion. We detected that low-frequency components (35-100 Hz) arrive with a time lag of Δt ≈ -20.26 ms relative to high-frequency components (150-300 Hz). This observed dispersion challenges the vacuum persistency assumption and suggests that the vacuum acts as a physical medium with a viscosity constant η ≈ 0.14. This discovery unifies the "tired light" phenomenon observed by JWST and decoherence problems in quantum computing into a single physical framework: the Primary Energy (PE) theory.