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Cassini Experiment Confirms General Relativity

Posted by michael on from the it's-all-relative dept.

MikeZilla writes "An experiment by Italian scientists using data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, currently en route to Saturn, confirms Einstein's theory of general relativity with a precision that is 50 times greater than previous measurements."

3 of 58 comments (clear)

  1. Help Me Here--some novice Questions by jazman_777 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It seems that, according to scientific philosophy today (and I say this as an observer, not a scientist), you still can't really believe this is _the_ truth about something. You have to keep thinking, "it might _not_ be true". I hear how a hypothesis must be "falsifiable"--what does that mean? So if science is a search for truth, how can you find it? And how does this experiment matter? I mean, didn't people already believe that relativity was (mostly, apparently, seemingly) true?

    --
    Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
    1. Re:Help Me Here--some novice Questions by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      There's a great quote answering your question in the article:

      "The question is not whether general relativity is true or false, but at which level of accuracy it ceases to describe gravity in a realistic way."

  2. Cute, but by CheshireCatCO · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Nice measurement, no doubt. But the article is a bit misleading. This isn't the most precise measurement of GR, just the most precise mesurement of this prediction. It sounds like they got this measurement to an error of one part per fifty thousand. If memeory serves, the measurements of the orbit on pulsar 1933+16 (the one that netted Taylor and Hulse the Nobel Prize about a decade ago) are precise to one part in something lik ten to the eleventh. And they agree with GR.

    One some level it amazes me that GR passes every test we throw at it with such flying colors. On another level, I agree with Albert: the theory is too beautiful *not* to be true.