Testing Relativity 322
MGDruss writes "NASA are proposing an empirical measurement on the ISS which would test general relativity to a precision within the bounds of superstring (and other) theories to predict deviation." We mentioned the Cassini experiment last year.
Let's have a little poll. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Let's have a little poll. (Score:5, Funny)
Testing mathematical theories by means of slightly twisted democracy.
Re:Let's have a little poll. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Let's have a little poll. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Let's have a little poll. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Let's have a little poll. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Let's have a little poll. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Let's have a little poll. (Score:4, Interesting)
So that's my vote
Although it'd be a little weird having to deal with all those extra dimensions all the time.
Cheers,
Justin Wick
P.S. As a JPLer, it's great to see JPL doing something hard-science related.
Re:Let's have a little poll. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Let's have a little poll. (Score:5, Interesting)
Nope, it will be phlogiston theory all over, not epicycles.
Phlogiston was covered in a real theory, IOW phlogiston explained (wrongly) how the burning process occurs and why some stuff burns and other stuff doesn't. Epicycles OTOH where never a theory, epicycles didn't try explain to the crazy motions of geocentric orbits but only to accurately describe them.
Even Ptolemy himself knew that epicycles where fundamentally wrong for two reasons: 1) the earth is not exactly at the center of the planets, suns and moons orbits (the center of the orbit is the halfway point between the earth and the equant); and 2) a planet on an epicycle would crash into it's own "heavenly" or "crystalline" sphere on which it was supposed to be mounted. IOW Ptolemy knew that epicycles wheren't compatible with Aristotle's theory nor with Pythagoras'; but he still affirmed that those theories were correct.
Re:Let's have a little poll. (Score:3, Funny)
I heard so on Coast to Coast AM [coasttocoastam.com].
I think it was right after the chupacabra guy the other night. Or was it the bigfoot guy? I can't remember.
Anyway, that settles it. Anyone who says otherwise is a tool of the Establishment!
Now if you will excuse me, I am getting into my orgone box.
Re:Let's have a little poll. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not a question of "String theory vs. Relativity". String theory is -designed- to postdict (opposite of predict) relativity and quantum physics as limiting cases.
In the same way relativity postdicts Newton's theory of gravity, or how quantum mechanics gives classical mech as a limiting case.
So the alternatives here are really:
Relativity is disproved but not String theory
Relativity -and- String theory are disproved
Or the most likely outcome:
Re:Let's have a little poll. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Let's have a little poll. (Score:3, Funny)
but.... (Score:3, Insightful)
What ever happened to the concept that the simplest explaination is probably the best?
Re:but.... (Score:5, Funny)
that only works in movies starring jodie foster.
Re:but.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:but.... (Score:3, Insightful)
If you throw enough dimensions into a model, it can model just about anything. It becomes like a Turing Complete machine that can be made to model just about any behavior.
However, being an accurate model and being a working model may be two different things.
Then again, maybe the Universe is made up of DNA-like stuff in which the "cells" are really complex machines instead of simple particles. In that case there may not be any underl
Re:but.... (Score:2, Insightful)
What simpler theory is there? (Score:5, Insightful)
Where is the simpler solution here? General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are NOT compatible in many cases (for example extremely small but extremely heavy objects like black holes cause things like infinite probabilities which does NOT make sense). We have no simpler solution. String theory is about all we have now.
Re:What simpler theory is there? (Score:4, Insightful)
Occam's Razor and the "simpler theory" (Score:5, Insightful)
Another non-explanation is the idea that "warped space" explains gravity. All it does is push the explanation back one step from "what is gravity?" to "why do masses warp space?" So which is the correct theory? I don't think there is one, and our ideas or "understanding" of the universe will continue to evolve with everything else around us. The Pythagoreans believed that math was truth, and that reality was merely an imperfect shadow of the real world hidden beyond the veil of our senses. Well, this isn't the Matrix, an no amount of passion for "perfect" answers (like "elegant" equations or crystal spheres in the sky) will make it so.
You want an alternative theory? Give Tom Van Flandern's Meta Model a try. It may be no better than the orthodoxy of Einsteinian Relativity and quantum mechanics, but at least it won't resort to mathematical trickery and the comforting reassurance of what we'd LIKE to believe. A good introductory article may be found at:
http://metaresearch.org/cosmology/physicshasits
Re:What simpler theory is there? (Score:3, Informative)
Althought I agree with most of your post I have to correct your last affirmation:
String theory is about all we have now.This is simply not true. String theory, been the most well known candidate for the Theory of Everything (ToE), is not the only one. If you wish to know about a different aproach to unifying Einstein's gravity and quantum field theory you can check Quantum Gravity [qgravity.org]
Re:but.... (Score:5, Insightful)
But my question is, if this has been tested by the Cassini test and others and the result has been proven, why are we bothering to do it again?
Re:but.... (Score:5, Informative)
Thus sayeth the article:
" LATOR would measure this deflection with a billion (109) times the precision of Eddington's experiment and 30,000 times the precision of the current record-holder: a serendipitous measurement using signals from the Cassini spacecraft on its way to explore Saturn."
AND
"The 0.02 as accuracy of LATOR is good enough to reveal deviations from Einstein's relativity predicted by the aspiring Theories of Everything, which range from roughly 0.5 to 35 as. Agreement with LATOR's measurements would be a major boost for any of these theories. But if no deviation from Einstein is found even by LATOR, most of the current contenders--along with their 11 dimensions, pixellated space, and inconstant constants--will suffer a fatal blow and "pass on" to that great dusty library stack in the sky."
So in other words they think that taking the measurements with 30,000 times the precision of the current measurements is enough to show if the current flock of string theories is plausable.
Re:but.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Newton's gravity was tested and proven. So why test for anything else? So what if mercury's orbit is a little odd. Gravity works.
Re:but.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:but.... (Score:4, Funny)
What? Mercury's orbit is odd? Why there must be another planet down there perturbing it's orbit.
Let's call that new planet "Vulcan".
I am off to point my telescope at the Sun now.
Re:but.... (Score:3, Insightful)
That still goes, but simpler!=simple. And especially "simpler" doesn't necessarily mean "simple" to you and me.
Re:but.... (Score:5, Insightful)
It has to still fit the inconvenient experimental facts.
Simplicity (Score:5, Insightful)
The dude [c2.com] who invented this principle phrased it this way (translated from the Latin): "Entities should not be multiplied more than necessary." But what entities are "necessary"? To Ockham, God was a necessary entity, yet you hear Ockham's Razor used to deny the existence of God.
Bottom line: OR is a highly subjective tool that should be applied with great care. And even then, it can mislead you -- the simplest plausible theory can still be wrong, due to evidence you haven't seen. OR is a strategy for coming up with good theories, not a law of nature!
Re:Simplicity (Score:4, Interesting)
(1) The simple practical reason that a simpler theory is often more practical.
(2) If the theory becomes drastically more simple, at the cost of a little accuracy, it may be pointing to a deeper insight into the problem. For example Ptolemaic astronomy could be made to fit planetary orbits as accurately as you like by adding enough epicycles. Initially Keplerian theory appeared to be less accurate, not more. Yet Keplerian theory was ultimately the way to go. In fact, this situation is common in everyday work. It's easy to fit a curve accurately to any amount of data by adding lots of terms but it's often the simple fitted expression that actually does a better job of interpolating correctly between the data points.
Never existed (Score:5, Informative)
You're probably referring to Occam's Razor [wikipedia.org]. One way of expressing that principle is that if two theories completely and correctly explain a phenomenon, the simpler one is preferred. If you think the simplest explanation is always correct, you're liable to believe that me when I say "apples fall towards the Earth because that's where you plant them" or "the Earth was created 5000 years ago". There's more to truth than simplicity.
Re:but.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:but.... (Score:2)
http://www.metaresearch.org/cosmology/gps-rela
http://rattler.cameron.edu/EMIS/journals/
Re:but.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:but.... (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.newtonphysics.on.ca/Newton-physics/N
Re:but.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Quantum Mechanics either postulates a pseudo-infinity of branching universes (which is a second kind of infinite set, unrelated to the inflationary model set, and which, again, we can never observe), or says that not only does the tree not make a noise if there's no one around to hear it, but the tree doesn't fall at all, rather it transitions outside of space-time from standing when you observed it earlier to already fallen when you observe it again.
Some forms of inflationary theory imply the universe is big enough to have yet another kind of pseudo-infinity associated, simply because if it is billions of times as big on each axis as the part we can observe, patterns as complex as our own galaxy or the whole observable universe must repeat in detail, many, many times. Some of the 'brane' theories add a second kind of true infinity, so if these are right, we're trying to describe something with two separate kinds of real infinity and two sets of enormously large numbers (i.e. 10 to the 10 to the 10 to the 10 to the 81st power) needed just to describe its dimensionality, and all occuring from unrelated causes.
Assuming some of the "random" factors are not really random in different cases may make the results simpler, but a "non-random cause", existing outside nature (we might even say superior to nature, or supernatural for short), is predicting something we can't observe either, and that something starts sounding like the price of simplicity is saying "God did it, and who are we to ask questions?"
God is not a scientific hypothesis, not in the sense that science says there is no God, but in the sense that if God exists, 'he' will not allow us to perform repeated experiments and get reproduceable results from them, and irreproducable results aren't science. So much for simple.
Great. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Great. (Score:3, Interesting)
It should be noted that the man who wrote that episode never went on to write for Trek ever again. And it should also be noted that other episodes featuring warp factors of two digits were using a dif
Re:Great. (Score:5, Interesting)
Warp 10 is impossible.
Only be definition as given in the fantasy.
Since everything in ST is a fantasy and has no basis in the physical world.
If the ST writers wanted to write that infinite speed travel was possible, they could and it would be no more fantastic than what you have already.
Given the physical world. Travel at the speed of light for an object is essentially infinite so there is no basis between the physical world and the ST world to distinguish between what is possible and impossible. Travel greater than the speed of light is not "infinite" but it is not intuitive in the way it is portrayed on ST.
Get a life.
The warp scale represents speeds exponentially closer to infinity. According to the scale, 10 is the asymptote representing infinite speed. The single episode of Trek (Voy: Threshold) in which this feat is accomplished is often considered not canon by fans because the writer was a moron.
Bah. This is a bunch of crap. In the last episode of STTNG there is reference to Warp 13 (in the future Enterprise). This future time was only about 25-30 years from the TNG "present" which means it was in the same time period as the Voyager episodes.
The scale has been used very loosely in the movies.
What does this all mean?
It means that while the ST franchise has produced some enjoyable dramas, it is lame and sad to try to take anything in the ST world and rationalize it or explain it.
You ST nerds sicken me.
Re:Great. (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually, Trek has lots of basis in the physical world. All of the fictional concepts on the show are educated guesses at what future technology would be like. And if we forget that nothing can travel faster than light and accept the "Cochrane Equation" as a physical constant, Trek makes a lot of sense in terms of physics.
"You ST nerds sicken me." (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Great. (Score:2)
Re:Great. (Score:5, Funny)
Of course it is. Go fast enough and eventually it would be possible to go back in time and re-write bad plotlines. Or be able to see Slashdot articles before they are posted.
Wait...
Re:Great. (Score:3, Funny)
No wait that's a glitch in the matrix....
Re:Great. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Great. (Score:4, Interesting)
Single episode? I know they retconned all the TOS episodes where aliens modified the Enterprise to go faster than warp 10, but there's still TNG's "Where No Man Has Gone Before," in which the Enterprise-D exceded warp 10, and the future scenes in "All Good Things" where warp 10+ was no big deal.
Re:Great. (Score:4, Insightful)
What you're talking about are exceptions which use different warp scales, entirely different methods of traveling through space, supernatural beings, or in some cases alternate realities created by supernatural beings. All of which is perfectly explained and believable. The only one that isn't is Voy: Threshold. It's the biggest stain on Trek since TOS: Miri.
Re:Great. (Score:5, Funny)
So wait, the Enterprise being able to reach a velocity defined as an asymptote is okay and believable when an alien entity does it? That is the dumbest fanboy excuse I've ever heard.
The only one that isn't is Voy: Threshold. It's the biggest stain on Trek since TOS: Miri.
No, dude, Threshold isn't a universally reviled episode because the science doesn't make sense (if that were the case, there'd be very few good episodes of Star Trek) or because it broke continuity (something Star Trek has never been big on). It's a bad episode because traveling at infinite speed made Paris and Janeway devolve into salamanders.
Re:Great. (Score:2, Funny)
Sayyyyyy.....
Pff, already done (Score:5, Funny)
Still not a justification for ISS (Score:5, Insightful)
Now geology, that's a different story.
Re:Still not a justification for ISS (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Still not a justification for ISS (Score:3, Insightful)
This might be off topic too but it seems that you are of the opinion that a manned space station is a bad idea. If so, I think you are wrong. A manned space station will be usefull for alot more than this one experiment.
Re:Still not a justification for ISS (Score:5, Insightful)
sure when everything goes as planned we don't
need any human intevention, but since men first looked up to the sky the fact remains big projects always have something go wrong.
The robots are not able to improvise. Have you looked at the mars score card which was published on slashdot a while back? unmanned missions tend to fail.
To the best of my knowledge each and every manned mission to space had something go wrong, and a human being on board help fix it. You can't tell your robot to perform an unplanned spacewalk because something went wrong. and you just might want to do just that.
In addition to this, some of the tests we are intrested in doing involve testing how humans can live in space how we react to a micro-gravity enviorment these obviously require sending men and women into space.
Yes there are risks involved but there are many dangerous proffesions out there, cleanning windows on high-rise buildings is a dangerous job, but we still do it, and it gives back to humanity much less then space exploration.
Me.
Re:Still not a justification for ISS (Score:5, Insightful)
Humans are resourceful and adaptable, but we also have fragile bodies that need lots of facilities and supplies to survive in space. For the enourmous price of providing life support for a manned mission, you could duplicate an unmanned mission many times over. There are many good reasons for putting humans in space, but doing science experiments better than robots is not one of them.
Re:Still not a justification for ISS (Score:5, Insightful)
All of that would just be extra cost and effort for this mission. It could be done, but the fact that ISS exists means they don't have to. Will the savings on this one mission justify the enormous cost of ISS? No. But it does prove that ISS has the ability to function as a platform for some science that is perhaps a little more interesting than the meanial microgravity experiments of which they've been so fond thus far.
Re:Still not a justification for ISS (Score:5, Insightful)
Pick one of the two:
( )Because it's there.
( )Because we can.
If it wasn't for other explorers stepping outside the fuzzy warmth of their known reality you might very well be sitting in the temple of one of your dozens of deities praising how a blood letting ritual purged one of your wives of evil spirits, and you can't wait until the sun finishes its' revolution of the Earth so you can talk to her when she wakes up.
We constantly make every attempt to expand our horizons in order to gain more (or better) knowledge. Our knowledge defines our reality. I for one praise every failed adventurer and inventor because they are just as important as the ones who 'made it'.
And for those who complain about how these 'unnecessary' ventures take money away from needed social programs...
The poor, the malnourished, and the young don't vote. Can anyone recall the last time a politician had a surplus of money and opted to 'help' society? And no, bribing taxpayers with a return check is not providing for the well-being of humanity. If ISS had not been built I'm sure politicians would have found another less creative way of squandering the money.
Re:Still not a justification for ISS (Score:2)
()Because Mom told me I couldn't. ()I lost the bet. ()Alcohol. ()"Eh, why not!"
Re:Still not a justification for ISS (Score:3, Insightful)
Even forgetting, for now, the fact that the amount of money you can spend on the apparatus itself is reduced because you have to pay for the astronauts and their safety --
The movement of astronauts on the ISS is going to generate vibrations in the structure, which will be transmitted to the two interferometers. Those vibrations will lead to a loss in your abilit
Scientists think Einstein was wrong? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Scientists think Einstein was wrong? (Score:3, Funny)
They think that Einstein's theory is in a quantum state, being both correct and incorrect at the same time until they try and apply it to a given situation. Then it resolves into a definite true or false state.
Of course, I c
Re:Scientists think Einstein was wrong? (Score:3)
Re:Scientists think Einstein was wrong? (Score:5, Informative)
Thank you for playing.
Scientists, _know_ that Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity are inconsistent with each other. It is believed that both are basically special, simplified cases of a more encompasing theory - and that neither can be 'built' on to agree with the other the way you suggest.
Note that that this doesn't mean that either theory is completely wrong within the boundaries of their frameworks. Just as it's perfectly acceptable to design an everyday building or car or airplane using Newton's law of gravity, NASA put those satellites into orbits using General Relativity and design the lasers on them using ordinary Quantum Mechanics.
Intro to sub atomic physics! (Score:2)
Re:Example, Please? (Score:2)
and so on. basically GR is a 'classical' theory, so any quantum effects don't belong.
Unfortunately, the kind of 'patching' that Newtonian mechanics went through to give the original QM (Hamilton-Jacobi formalism, integral invariants) does not have a working equivalent fro GR.
Re:Scientists think Einstein was wrong? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Scientists think Einstein was wrong? (Score:3, Insightful)
I wouldn't say so. The standard model is already encountering problems - granted, it's been amazingly good at predicting some stuff, but then so has been classical mechanics; depends on what kind of questions you're asking. It's just that with current technology the experiments that could fail the Standard Model tests are easier to construct than ones to fail GR tests (still waiting on the gravitational wave detector
Re:Scientists think Einstein was wrong? (Score:3, Informative)
I don't wish to pretend to understand all the issues, but I have suffered through enough physics that I believe myself to be capable of giving a simplified and reasonably correct overview (bearing in mind that I haven't had a physics class for a while now) --
Yes, we all like Relativity... on a large scale.
Just as we all like the Standard Model... at the very small scales.
The problem is that the two models are inconsistant. In fact, they outright contradic
Re:Every Theory Needs to be Tested.... (Score:2)
You go from hypotheses to theories, theories to principles, principles to laws. (with a few steps inbetween of course)
All you're really saying is that the evidence is more strongly for something as it progresses towards a law. True, evolution is still a theory (or theories), but I'd say that breakthroughs in genetics lately are mounting enough evidence to call it "principles of evolution" soon -- if not
James P. Hogan: "Suggested NASA Experiment" 1997 (Score:3, Interesting)
SUGGESTED NASA EXPERIMENT Posted on August 17, 1997 contents
RELATIVITY EXPERIMENT
A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine at NASA invited me to submit any suggestions I might have for possible experiments to be carried out by future mission, involving advance physics. Since a few people have been in touch regarding the skepticism I've expressed in the past about the basis of Relativity, I thought my response might be of general interest, and so reproduce it below.
[To give credit where due, a virtually identical proposal was submitted to NASA some years ago by the late engineer and metallurgical consultant, Carl Zapffe. Nothing came of it. If anyone thinks I'm way off the mark, I'd be happy to hear from them.]
Dear Les,
Herewith the following, offered in response to your invitation.
INTERFEROMETRY BEYOND THE TERRESTRIAL MAGNETOPAUSE
The Einstein Special Relativity Theory (SRT), we all "know," forms one of the cornerstones of modern physics. Its predictions are utilized on a routine basis, and it has withstood every experimental test.
These predictions boil down, essentially, to applications of the principles of (i) mass-energy equivalence (E=mc*2), (ii) mass dependence on velocity, and (iii) time dilation. Experiments verifying these relationships have been performed with increasing precision in the course of the past century. These are the proofs that the textbooks cite in support of SRT, and which its defenders point to when questions are raised concerning Relativity basics.
But it turns out that _all_ of them can be derived by purely classical procedures, independently of any Relativistic considerations. They don't say anything unique about SRT at all. (i) follows from the principle of conservation of momentum and Maxwell's equations. Carl Zapffe gives three derivations in his book "A Reminder on E+mc*2," with numerous references that show how it was implicit in the physics known at the end of the nineteenth century. Regarding (ii), Petr Beckmann, in his "Einstein Plus Two" (1987), shows how the increase of "mass" with velocity arises as a manifestation of the electrical inertia of charges moving through fields--analogous to aerodynamic drag.
Essentially, these are effects arising from the energy differences of relatively moving systems. The question they lead to is whether the results observed regarding (iii) (e.g. the extended lives of cosmic-ray muons) are in fact confirmation of "time" being dilated, as per SRT, or result from the physical slowing-down of clocklike processes in motion through a field. The only way to test this empirically would be to sit on an incoming muon and observe whether the laboratory clocks (at rest in the field) also slow down (as the observer-referred SRT holds) or speed up (as a field-referred theory would predict). This has never been done. (A whole literature exists on all this, but I don't think that here would be the place to elaborate further.)
So, the standard proofs turn out not to be proofs at all. All that's left, then, is the interpretation of the 1881 Michelson-Morley attempt to measure an "ether wind," and its many variations performed since.
The null results returned by these experiments have two possible interpretations: (1) There is no ether; (2) the ether local to the Earth is entrained in its orbit around the Sun. (1), of course, is the orthodox line. The constancy of the speed of light for all observers is a _postulate_ that follows from accepting this interpretation. Contrary to common belief, it has never been verified experimentally. (The claimed verifications all involve round-trip measurements that average out the c+/-v velocities that arise in field-referred theories.) Having thus conferred constancy on a velocity, it then becomes necessary to distort space and time in order to preserve it. This, in effect, is what the transformation equations of SRT do.
Treating th
Re:James P. Hogan: "Suggested NASA Experiment" 199 (Score:2)
Re:James P. Hogan: "Suggested NASA Experiment" 199 (Score:4, Insightful)
This has been done, many times. Parent post is a crackpot.
discrete time (Score:2)
In this case Google isn't my friend and I can't turn up anything (or at least I don't know what to search for) - does anyone have any good links or summations of what that theory involves?
Just curious, because if it holds sound then man did I lose that argument :)
Re:discrete time (Score:5, Informative)
Read this today morning (Score:2, Interesting)
The "Evicting Einstein" title of the article is misleading. IMHO, the Theory of Relativity cannot be proven incorrect...it can only be proven *incomplete*. Far too much evidence/data exists to prove the interaction of light and gravity and space-time as predicted by the GTR.
Even if the Quantum theory is proven correct, the Theory of Relativity will live on as an effect of the quantum theory - since it explains the effe
Re:Read this today morning (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, it can be proven incorrect. They key idea behind general relativity is the relativity principle, and that may simply turn out to be false.
The fact that GR makes numerically good predictions is nice, but there are plenty of othe
Re:Read this today morning (Score:3, Insightful)
> You can only disprove a theory. And the easier a theory is to disprove, the better the theory.
Yes, another one of those "facts" that physicists know. Why bother looking into those lesser sciences (statistics, philosophy, mathematics, cognitive science, psychology, etc.), where people actually have some understanding of what theories are and how they get proven or disproven? Oh, no, "we are physicists, we don't need to understand these things, we know what we are doing". Sure.
You cannot prove a phy
Test General Relativity? (Score:2, Funny)
Cost? (Score:2)
M-Theory & Supersymmetry (Score:3, Informative)
Re:M-Theory & Supersymmetry (Score:2)
About superstrings (Score:5, Informative)
Accuracies Needed (Score:4, Funny)
but it has already been proven (Score:2, Funny)
To me, this is a very simple explanation and since the simplest explanation must be true, I think we have a winner.
I call it the 'Spears theory of enlightened time-travelers'.
Wasn't there an earlier test? (Score:2)
Question (Score:3, Interesting)
Slight sidebar perhaps...
In the article it says that GPS would not be possible without the use of Relativity Theory.
Why is this? Is it due to time dilation effects at the speed of the satellites?
Or something else I'm not thinking of?
Re:Question (Score:5, Informative)
string theory *not* being tested here... (Score:5, Insightful)
String theory predicts deviations from General Relativity at very high energies and very small distances. I would be very surprised to read of a string theory model -- or class of models -- that predicted solar system scale effects in their basic framework. The importance of string theory effects is suppressed by a huge factor depending on the local energy density in the experiment you are testing. The string energy scale is so far away that it would be a great coincidence if it just barely showed up in the solar system but did not, e.g. rip it all apart. Sort of like crashing your car through the window of a bookstore and having the resultant mess just precisely turn one page of one book.
This is not a bad experiment to do, because there are theories -- mostly cosmological ones -- that predict differences in gravity that would show up in this theory, but they are definitely non-standard modifications to particular theories. I have done work on these kinds of theories, and let me tell you, it is a certain amount of work to actually generate theories that even care about such low energies and large distances that you can test them even with an "ultimate" measurement.
I am disappointed by the rather slipshod understanding of science and the issues that this article represents. "Evicting Einstein" is a sensationalistic headline, and it's just not true -- as anyone will tell you, Newton was not "impeached." A much better angle that this article could have taken was that of exploration of gravity, as opposed to "putting the chalk scribblers in place."
Re:string theory *not* being tested here... (Score:4, Interesting)
I am an interested layman, so the following may not be entirely accurate. But it may give you an idea.
It is not entirely true that such small-scale effects can only appear on a small scale. If space is discrete, it can also affect the travel of light. Imagine a grid with 1 cm or 1 inch on a side. Now, draw a line from (0, 0) to (10, 1.1).
If space is discrete, the beam can't do that and it will do something else. Since space is most likely not a perfect grid, I don't feel like I can say exactly what it would do, but it would be impossible for the ray to be at (10,1.1) and as a result it would affect the direction it could travel.
If space is continuous, the ray can indeed be at (10, 1.1) and the ray will behave differently.
I have seen people talking about using light from extremely distant galaxies to try to detect this effect, seeing if the light shows "quantization" in certain parameters (not the traditional quantization, but seeing that only certain directions exist in the light), but since we can't source or control the light, my impression was we could not get enough info for it to matter.
The article did not say this is what they are trying to do, but based on my understanding it is plausible and would account for the article. Since we can source the light and even guarentee phase consistency (allowing us to use interference), we can make up for only having a handful of AU instead of billions of lightyears by controlling the light perfectly.
Even if this is not what they are doing, I hope it shows you a way that even ultra-microscopic effects can be magnified enough to be detected in this experiment.
I'm quite impressed; this is straightforward in a way, but audacious and excellent thinking out of the box.
Re:string theory *not* being tested here... (Score:3, Insightful)
However, the fundamental problem is that such effects would show up in other experiments as very large corrections. It would be interesting to see how this competes with the large-distance time delay experiments. They have two advantages over this: very large distances (megaparsec, 10^11 times longer), and much higher energies (the spacing of the lattic
Blasphemy! (Score:5, Funny)
Oh wait, I've confused Science with religion, again.
Re:Blasphemy! (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh wait, I've confused Science with religion, again.
I know you're joking, but you bring up an interesting point: experiments like this are an excellent example of the difference between science and religion, and a refutation of those who argue that science is a religion. Einstein is (rightly) revered, a figure whose importance to physics is equivalent to the status of, if not Jesus or Mohammed, at least a Christian Apostle or a major
Re:Is it no surprise? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you read the article, you will see this is not a "low gravity experiment". They are placing an interferometer aboard the ISS, above atmospheric distortion. An unmanned rocket would probably do the job more cheaply. But, as long as governemnts are already wasting billions of dollars sending people up to the ISS, we might as well give the interferometer to them and tell them to turn it on, thus sparing a separate rocket launch.
This still doesn't mean the ISS is anything other than a giant orbiting multibillion dollar turkey.
Re:Is it no surprise? (Score:2)
"I swear, as God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!" [jumptheshark.com]
- Arthur Carlson
Re:wait...... (Score:2)
Re:wait...... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:wait...... (Score:3, Insightful)
First of all, I suggest you do go to the trouble to read the article. It is interesting and, amazingly enough, it answers your question. We know that GR doesn't work for really tiny things. We know that it works for really big things. We want to know more about how it works in the in-between area. Therefore we are doing this experiment.
You are implying that theories are either right or wrong and if they are wrong they are not right at all. For starters, this is wrong. Just because you know something
Re:Food for thought... (Score:3, Interesting)
-- As a note, one gram of pure U235, if converted to pure energy (100% efficency, e=MCC) would power New York city for 1 day. A black hole with top spin is theorised that you could extract 45% of it's mass as inertial energy.