NASA Gravity Probe Confirms Two Einstein Predictions 139
sanzibar writes "After 52 years of conceiving, testing and waiting, marked by scientific advances and disappointments, one of Stanford's and NASA's longest-running projects comes to a close with a greater understanding of the universe. Stanford and NASA researchers have confirmed two predictions of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, concluding one of the space agency's longest-running projects. Known as Gravity Probe B, the experiment used four ultra-precise gyroscopes housed in a satellite to measure two aspects of Einstein's theory about gravity. The first is the geodetic effect, or the warping of space and time around a gravitational body. The second is frame-dragging, which is the amount a spinning object pulls space and time with it as it rotates."
I'm tired of Matt Welsh (Score:5, Insightful)
Please, can somebody restore the fortune database? Thanks.
Uh, and First Post.
NASA and the USA (Score:5, Insightful)
I am not an American, but I have seen both the blue pearl image and the pale blue dot image. I have read about how long these projects have run and the astounding quality of the instruments that must be on satellites like these along with the massive foresight it must have taken at launch time to make them relevant decades later. You can criticize the USA all you want for their wars, and I have heard some harsh criticism of NASA too but the most astounding images and discoveries have always come from the here because they are on the pinnacle of space exploration. The world would be a lot less interesting if it wasn't for them.
Re:I'm tired of Matt Welsh (Score:4, Insightful)
I have to agree with this, several bugs. The most annoying one is having the comments scroll to the top of the page when I click anything.
Links are now unclickable, at least on the first 4 or 5 tries. Each time you click a link in someone's post, the page jumps and/or another post expands/collapses. The sheer level of ignorance and/or lack of interest in their own site on the part of the Slashdot owners is mind-boggling.
(Click on links? I must be new here.)
Seriously, Slashdot, fix your goddam site.
Re:Why it took 52 years (Score:4, Insightful)
No modern theory of gravity predicts anything else
Except Moffat's, of course.
And while every experimental anomaly is first dismissed as error, the fact (you remember those things, facts?) is that scientists have an excellent record of poking away at anomalies until a robust, consistent explanation is found. Sometimes the explanation is mundane--the Pioneer Anomaly, for example. Sometimes it is profound--the anomalous precession of the orbit of Mercury comes to mind, which was measured quite precisely in the 1850's, if I recall correctly, some sixty years before the underlying cause was found.
People who say things like this are simply ignorant of the history and timescales on which science actually operates. It is entirely implausible that a group of people who have collectively worked over hundreds of years to account for dozens of tiny numerical anomalies in extremely difficult precision measurements would suddenly throw up their hands and say, "OK, I guess we can ignore the data now!"