New Stanford study confirms General Relativity
Steven L.
52 Years and $750 Million Prove Einstein Was Right
By DENNIS OVERBYE
The New York Times
In a tour de force of technology and just plain stubbornness spanning
half a century and costing more than $750 million, a team of
experimenters from Stanford University reported on Wednesday that a set
of orbiting gyroscopes had detected a slight sag and an even slighter
twist in space-time.
The finding confirms some of the weirdest of the many strange
predictions - like black holes and the expanding universe - of Albert
Einstein's theory of gravity, general relativity.
"We have completed this landmark experiment of testing Einstein's
universe," Francis Everitt, leader of the project, known as Gravity
Probe B, said at a news conference at NASA headquarters in Washington.
"And Einstein survives."
That was hardly a surprise. Observations of planets, the Moon and
particularly the shifting orbits of the Lageos research satellites had
convinced astronomers and physicists that Einstein's predictions were on
the mark. Nevertheless, scientists said that the Gravity Probe results
would live forever in textbooks as the most direct measurements, and
that it was important to keep testing theories that were thought to be
correct.
Clifford M. Will of Washington University in St. Louis - who was not
part of the team but was chairman of a National Aeronautics and Space
Administration advisory committee evaluating its work, and who wrote a
book titled "Was Einstein Right?" - said that in science, "no such book
is ever closed."
Einstein's theory relates gravity to the sagging of cosmic geometry
under the influence of matter and energy, the way a sleeper makes a
mattress sag. One consequence is that a massive spinning object like
Earth should spin up the empty space around it, the way twirling the
straw in a Frappuccino sets the drink and the whole Venti-size cup
spinning around with it, an effect called frame dragging. Astronomers
think this effect, although minuscule for Earth, could play a role in
the black hole dynamos that power quasars.
Empty space in the vicinity of Earth is indeed turning, Dr. Everitt
reported at the news conference and in a paper prepared for the journal
Physical Review Letters, at the leisurely rate of 37 one-thousandths of
a second of arc - the equivalent of a human hair seen from 10 miles away
- every year. With an uncertainty of 19 percent, that measurement was in
agreement with Einstein's predictions of 39 milliarcseconds.
Likewise, the "sag" should alter the space-time geometry around Earth,
warping it from the Euclidean ideal and cutting an inch out of the
Gravity Probe's orbit around it, so that the circumference is slightly
less than the Euclidean ideal of pi times the orbit's diameter, a fact
confirmed by the Stanford gyroscopes to an accuracy of 0.3 percent.
For Dr. Everitt, who joined the Gravity Probe experiment in 1962 as a
young postdoctoral fellow and has worked on nothing else since, the
announcement on Wednesday capped a career-long journey.
The experiment was conceived in 1959, but the technology to make these
esoteric measurements did not yet exist, which is why the experiment
took so long and cost so much. The gyroscopes, for example, were made of
superconducting niobium spheres, the roundest balls ever manufactured,
which then had to be flown in a lead bag to isolate them from any other
influences in the universe, save the subversive curvature of space-time
itself.
-- Steven L.
T Pagano
<sdli...@earthlink.net> wrote:
SNIP
[BEGIN PAGANO QUOTE]
On Thu, 5 May 2011 03:41:17 -0700 (PDT), Llanzlan Klazmon
<bill.m...@gmail.com> wrote:
>http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2011/04may_epic/
This was an extreme waste of money if proving rotation was the goal
(and it wasn't). In 1913 Sagnac's Interferometer experiments proved
conclusively that either the Earth rotated in a fixed universe or the
Universe rotated around a fixed Earth. And Sagnac's experiment
conclusively disproved Einstein's SR postulate concerning the speed of
light being the same for all observers.
Even if we assume for the sake of argument that all the bluster in the
web article is true (the experimenters expect themselves to go down in
history) how exactly did their experimental setup prove that the earth
rotates and not the universe? They never say. In fact, they presume
from start-to-finish that the Earth rotates. Furthermore they aim
the spin axis of the gyroscopes at a distant star which they assume is
a "fixed reference point."
While the experimental setup is different the attempt is actually to
demonstrate a GR explanation for the Lense-Thiring Effect. This has
already been done with a different experimental setup. See "A
Confirmation of the General Relativity Prediction of the Lense-Thiring
Effect," Nature, 431, 958-60, October 21, 2004. The authors of the
web article are simply conducting a different experiment to explain
the Lense-Thiring Effect via GR frame-dragging. Problem is that
neither the experiment in Klazmon's web link nor the one in the
referenced Nature report refutes the possibility that the effects
observed ARE the result of a rotating universe--fixed Earth as
explained by the Lense-Thiriing Effect.
The experimental setups fail to demonstrate some asymetry between a
fixed Earth--rotating universe and a fixed Universe--rotating Earth.
Otherwise Mach's Principle says that there is no way to distinquish
between the two models. Furthermore this doesn't solve the problem of
all of the interferometer experiments that refute the claim that the
earth is moving at 30 km/sec around the sun and 400 km/sec around
Milky Way.
Can we say, "crash and burn?"
Regards,
T Pagano
[END PAGANO QUOTE]
John Stockwell
> On Thu, 5 May 2011 11:55:23 +0000, "Steven L."
>
>
> SNIP
>
> [BEGIN PAGANO QUOTE]
> On Thu, 5 May 2011 03:41:17 -0700 (PDT), Llanzlan Klazmon
>
The Sagnac effect does not disprove special relativity.
http://www.mathpages.com/rr/s2-07/2-07.htm
-John
John Harshman
> On Thu, 5 May 2011 11:55:23 +0000, "Steven L."
> <sdli...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> SNIP
>
>
> [BEGIN PAGANO QUOTE]
> On Thu, 5 May 2011 03:41:17 -0700 (PDT), Llanzlan Klazmon
> <bill.m...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2011/04may_epic/
>
> This was an extreme waste of money if proving rotation was the goal
> (and it wasn't).
As indicated by the thread title, which you apparently didn't read. The
point is indeed confirmation of general relativity. Of course you reject
general relativity, because it makes your "ether" unnecessary and
invalidates your claim that the earth is stationary. At most, GR makes a
stationary earth reference frame equivalent to a rotating earth frame*.
But you demand a privileged reference frame. If GR is confirmed, your
claims are falsified. See why that matters?
*Though as I understand it, this is true only locally, and breaks down
over long distances. And even if all reference frames were globally
equivalent, we should ask which way makes more sense to think of it: the
whole universe revolving, or earth rotating in the way all other planets
do. Same deal with the annual variation: is it more sensible to think of
the entire universe making little ellipses around nothing, or the earth
making an ellipse around the sun in the way all other planets do?
> Can we say, "crash and burn?"
Hope you had insurance.
John Vreeland
<john.1...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>The Sagnac effect does not disprove special relativity.
>
>http://www.mathpages.com/rr/s2-07/2-07.htm
>
>-John
I am sorry but your evidence arrived after the statute of limitations
had expired on Pagano declaring victory. All evidence must be
clearly written in the Bible for it to be accepted as proper.
--
My years on the mudpit that is Usnenet have taught me one important thing: three Creation Scientists can have a serious conversation, if two of them are sock puppets.