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'Einstein Probe' Delayed
isorox writes "The BBC is reporting that a NASA satellite designed to test frame dragging, predicted by the theory of relativity, has been delayed for 24 hours because mission control couldn't verify the correct software had been loaded. The probe was proposed 35 years ago, but has never had the funding until now. The question remains is what happens if Frame Dragging isn't observed - will the experiment be wrong (in other words there's no point to it), or will we get faster-than-light ships for Christmas?"
You expect negative results from good experiment in science sometimes...
There are four possibilities:
1) Bad result, but result appears to confirm the prediction - this is not a successful experiment
2) Bad result, but result appears to invalidate the prediction - this is not a successful experiment. Possibility of an insufficiently sensitive instrument, or just a badly designed experiment.
1) Good result, but result appears to confirm the prediction - this is a successful experiment - a negative result is as valid as a positive one.
1) Good result, and result appears to confirm the prediction - this is a successful experiment
As a classically trained scientist, I'd be loathe not to point out a misconception here.
Experiments themselves are never 'wrong' experiments are merely poorly designed or interpreted. If they are niether of these then the experiment simply gives you data which you must explain. If it doesnt give you the expected results, it may not be the design that is in error, but instead our understanding of the world.
Data never lies, except when viewed through a human bias.
Excuse me, but are you nuts ??
The American space program is one of the safest in the world, thats why they're being so cautious with the shuttle fleet.
The Russian space program on the other hand has been known to take huge saftey/performance/cost trade offs in order to get things off the ground ( no pun intended ). Just because the Russians are launching day and night does NOT imply a higher operational saftey. You are mistaking the effect for the cause, sir.
I guess one could accuse certain modern physicists of coming up with "theories that fit reality". But we should remember that Einstein came up with his theories when most of them could not have been possibly proven correct or wrong, so there are at least some theories there, that are not after the fact descriptors of reality but true predictors of the behaviour of the universe.
As far as the usefulness of this, it is also usefull to know how the world around you works. Take nuclear physics -- i am sure people would have characterized the early experiments with radium as pointless, but now the long term future of humanity depends on nuclear energy. The ultimate destruction of humanity also depends on nuclear energy. So whether you are pro or anti humans, nuclear energy is your best bet!!!
Alright! M$ joke on the very first sentence of the first post! Now this is the kinda science.slashdot.org I like to read.
I didn't spend all that time playing Dungeons and Dragons and not learn a little something about courage.
Neither does the expense that goes into things. This is not intended to prove a point on its own, but the ratio of safe to unsafe launches is one point to consider; the number of unsafe launches, on its own, is another. In this case, "unsafe" is determined by Mother Nature proving it so.
If they've cut corners wisely, the fact that they've cut corners is less significant than some might want us to believe.
NB: YMMV. IANAL. Take the above with a grain of salt.
When Ira Flatow asked him what would happen if the probe did not find anything and that Einstein might be wrong, he "hemmed and hawwed" a lot and said that wouldn't be the case - that Einstein was right. He also mentioned that the data would go to a physicist and then be released to the public.
It's not that I'm wearing a tin-foil hat (well maybe), but science is based on conducting experiments in the open and openly sharing data with an unbiased view and procedure, even if it means that Einstein might be wrong.
While I completely agree that the data should be made public eventually, the scientific community has had many bad experiences when incomplete and poorly analyzed data has made it into the public and caused sensationalist headlines. Take for example preliminary asteroid observations. Not only does this cause unnecessary worry but it also makes the involved astronomers look bad, as journalists and the public in general does not understand the difference between "modified based on additional data" and "the first data was wrong".
There are critics of Einstein that are academically serious and not off their rocker like some zero point/tesla fanatics. There have been critics of Einstein ever since he released his theories. You don't hear much about them as they are all heaped into one group and astrocized.
I am not saying that Einstein was wrong (not in the sense that Newton was wrong either), but that true science is keeping an open mind, rather than cower to the politically favorable theory of the moment.
Well, I guess there are two issues here.
1. Those who claim that the theory of relativity is wrong in general. Those people ARE off their rockers and academically unsound, considering that all experiments to date have validated the theory. And for sure, they have never suggested any new interesting experiements and predicted outcomes that Einstein's equations didn't.
2. Many if not most serious modern physicists suspect that there may be scales of time, mass and distance where the theory or relativity breaks down (e.g., at the center of black holes), just as with your analogy of Newton's theory. It is possible but unlikely that this probe will measure such deviations. However, this does not really constitute "criticism" in our everyday sense of the world. Indeed, most scientists probably view Einstein as the greatest physicist of all time.
Tor
Why the name Gravity B? Was there a probe called Gravity A?
Not per se; GPB is designed to detect and measure frame-dragging, independent of what any particular theory (such as GR) predicts for the magnitude of the effect. Of course, everyone expects the result to confirm GR's prediction, but that's a different matter.
What problem? Is this a problem you know they actually have, or merely one that you believe they probably have?
How is delaying the launch for 24 hours "suspicious"? It's still going up, just one day late. That's not bad for a project in development for 30+ years.
This isn't about "saving face", this is about sending up a working experiment. Sheesh.
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Off their rocker... Tesla fanatics... them be fighting words!!!
We kind of have a LOT to thank Tesla for after all. Go read some of his patents if you have any doubts Selected Tesla Patents.
In my opinion if Tesla where alive today he would have been one of the biggest Open Source advocates around. The reason why everybody who turns on a light swich fed by AC current generated by one of Tesla generators doesn't thank him for it is mainy due to his lack of capitalist motivation. He believed in information and advancement for all mankind with his work, not making a few million for himself.
In fact Westinghouse owed Tesla many million (I think an estamate was around 6 million) for royalties on patents Westinghouse purchased on AC generators and motors. It would have bankrupted the Westinghouse business if they had to pay, so Tesla wrote the debt off and thanked Westinghouse in believing in AC currents when lunatics like Edison where running about trying to create a DC based domestic electrical system. He died a poor man basically because he donated his work on AC generators/motors to the people of America and the world by not enforcing royalties due.
Tesla is basically the exact opposite of Bill Gates. He actually created and invented things. And he didn't try and change people outrageous liscence and royaltiy fees every time people used his products. He believed in the betterment of man kind through his work, not becoming the richest guy in the world.
</rant>
It will then become more difficult to support ethical relativism, and to argue that truth and values are not objective, absolute, eternal, and/or rationally based.
This paragraph scares me. Can someone explain to me their link between new physical theories and new ethical theories?
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
In fact Westinghouse owed Tesla many million (I think an estamate was around 6 million) for royalties on patents Westinghouse purchased on AC generators and motors
I think billions in today's money is more like it. It is unfortunate that he did not have the business accumen to negotiate ongoing royalties so he could fund his later experiments.
Instead of negotiating a lower royalty rate, he let Westinghouse off the hook.
Tesla was a great person. But what I am referring to are people who live in the realm of pseudoscience with perpetual motion machines and free energy devices.
The difference between Tesla and these people is that Tesla produced stuff that worked. While these latter people use his technologies to justify stuff they have that does not/can not work.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
What you misheard/misunderstood was the standard NASA procedure for data. The Principal Investigator gets the data exclusively for a year, then it's released into the public domain along with the specs/calibration data needed to analyze it.
Yes, and this is why they embargo the Hubble pictures too.
Just because it is standard procedure doesn't make it right. When I wrote out my check for taxes this last week, some of that money goes to fund NASA. The public funds NASA in its entirety. So, they should have access to the data at the same time as anyone else, IMNSHO.
And saying that the "public is too stupid" for the data doesn't hold water either. There are scientists amongst the general populace that can interpret the data just as well as any NASA funded scientist.
I know that a 99.99% percent of the public doesn't care about this. There are a few scientists/astronomers peeved about hubble pictures though. Also, for me, it's the principle of the thing. Spending billions of public money on medical research and then give the patents to drug companies to exploit is another area that I think needs looking at. The patents should belong to the public that funded the research in the first place.
Live data frankly wouldn't mean much - even to a scientist. It will take considerable calibration work to convert the raw data into valid data
"Calibration work" or "making fudge"? I think that the complicated nature of this is being overplayed.
They have an idea of what the gyro spin should be like if frame dragging exists (or what it should be like if it does not exist). They can plot this against the the data they receive from the gyros, and post it on the website.
the experimental data increasingly shows that Einstein was mostly right.
The only kind of data that we have had up to this point is time dilation data, outside some drifting satellites that may have experienced frame dragging. This probe is the first to measure directly the effects of one of his theories.
So I would argue that it is not so much "increasing data" but "scientist's increasing faith" that Einstein was right.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
"they are trying to measure not only what has been completely PROVEN but also in the most inane manner. Just about everything else that affects the gyroscopes are larger effects, what they are trying to detect is so small."
Huh? I think that is what makes these experiments interesting: measuring the small effects hidden behind the larger, ordinary ones. Otherwise, we would still believe F = Gm1m2/r**2 says it all about gravity.
"but we're beyond that (can you say strings)"
String theory is not the only possible contender, see Scientific American, Jan 2004 for Loop Quantum Gravity as an alternative. It is still open which of these hard-to-prove theories is a better model, and every piece of evidence about GR and QM is useful. If frame dragging is found not to occur, it makes it much easier to drop GR in developing a theory of quantum gravity, whereas if it is found to occur, then that result has to be taken into account in coming up with a more comprehensive theory.
No experiment, well done, is useless.
We can describe gravity's effects but we can't say how it does the trick.
I think that sums science up: you always have to say "nature behaves AS IF it were this way"; we can see the hands on the watch go round but we cannot open the case (Einstein).