NASA Gravity Probe Set for Launch

The Real Dr John writes "NASA announced yesterday that its longest running program, Gravity Probe B, was ready and scheduled for launch on April 17th. The project has taken 44 years to complete, at a cost of approximately $700 million. The reason for the high cost is that the probe contains the most sensitive gyroscopic equipment ever created, which will be used to test Einstein's theory of gravity. Einstein predicted that the gravity created by a large body warped space-time, but he also predicted that if the large body was rotating it would create a drag effect on space-time known as frame dragging. Gravity Probe B will be able to test Einstein's theory using Earth's relatively small gravitational field because the instruments are so sensitive."

Comments

Re:45 years prep time... woo

[Anonymous Coward]

"Aren't Einstein's theories all established and confirmed? After all it was 50 years ago that Einstein himself died and it's 100 years next year when he developed his first theory of relativity. Don't we already know it all? The answer is no."

I wonder what other theories that are generally accepted throughout the scientific community have not been completely tested and/or verified.

All of them. It's not possible to perform every test of a theory that can be performed, nor is it possible to perform any given test to an arbitrarily high precision. There are tests of quantum electrodynamics that are accurate to 11 decimal places, but people still test QED, because we never know whether it goes wrong at the 12th place, or whether there's some new phenomenon that QED doesn't predict. Likewise, there are many tests of general relativity, many of which are very accurate, and nobody doubt's the theory's general validity --- but that doesn't mean that there might not be small deviations out there that point the way to an even better theory.