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Gravitation Anomaly Measured
Rob Riggs writes "Is there a hole in Einstein's Theory of Relativity? A story in The Economist talks about an apparent gravitation anomaly recorded during solar eclipses. According to Chris Duif at the Delft University of Technology, the 'Allais effect' is real, unexplained, and could be linked to another anomaly involving a the Pioneer spacecraft. More detailed information can be found in the paper he has just posted on arXiv.org."
I would highly doubt that Einstein's theory is flawed, but then again, they did not study the effects of gravity during a solar eclipse back then.
Where is Capn' Picard when he is needed
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
My wife had one of these after she went in for breast augmentation...
You mean that the sun and the moon together pull stronger than the sun alone?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Remember: there is no gravity. The Earth sucks.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
"lalalala lalalala I can't hear youuuuu. Don't matter what you're saying and whatever proof you claim you have -- I like my shiny little world and that's just not part of MY universe. lalalala"
My limited understanding of interstellar phsyics is that einstins equations have never really been solved for the third body problems. Am I wrong? If I remeber correctly we can only aproximate third body forces (tidal forces) even when using the newtonian model.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Why is this being carried in the Economist? Shouldn't it be picked up by New Scientist or some other scientific (or pseudo-scientific) publication?
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
It would seem to make sence that when 2 objects align their gravitational effects on a 3rd body would be "serial" and combine. If a pendulum were swinging at the time the gravitational force grew, it would sway further in one direction for some time causing the pendulum to move faster just by anertia?????
To think is to engineer, to engineer is to become God
The linked article has nothing to do with what I was talking about, and seems much more bizarre than gravitational lensing.
That will teach me to not RTFA.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
- Photons have mass.
- An eclipse means less photons are emitted and reach the measurer.
- Ergo, gravitational effect.
Although it is well known that if your effect has a name it instantly has more credibility, I'm a bit skeptical that this is the one that'll turn relativity on its ear (dark matter is another story...)Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
being the normal place one reads about new physics. Hmm.
ffs, all Einstein did is put together a unified theory of the universe based on knowlage of the time. He knew it wasn't the absolute theory of the universe and that it would be modified as time went by. Stop trying to dis. the guy and appreciate what he did.
According to the article, earlier results include those measured with "so called paraconical pendula". It's shocking to think that we have allowed ersatz paraconical pendula to be used in place of the genuine articles.
Mr. President, we must spend whatever is necessary to close the paraconical pendula gap.
Who is John Cabal?
You see His thoery is called special relativity theory. You are not generally related to him. it was your granma who had special relations
Einstein once said something along the following lines:
Testing theories is a very thankless task, because nature never says "yes." Usually nature says "no," meaning that a measurement contradicts a theories predictions.
Sometimes, nature says, "maybe," indicating that while the measurements are consistent with the theory.
But nature never says "yes," because your theory could be incomplete or erroneous but your instruments are either too inaccurate to detect the error, or you are not doing the right experiment.
Newtonian dynamics makes good enough predictions for alot of phenomena.
General Relativity is more precise in its predictions.
Given our difficulties in unifying it with quantum mechanics, it is likely that we don't have the right theory. As our instruments get more precise and we conduct more experiments, eentually we'll get a hint as to where we are going wrong.
Michael Moore visited a gravitometer station today, and just as he walked in, had the incredible fortune to witness the beginning of an unexplained gravitational anomaly event.
For real confirmation, an experiment on one of the Jovian moons would do nicely.
Yes, I'm serious about this. This is fundamental to our understanding of physics, which is in turn fundamental to our understanding of the origins, processes and fate of the universe. A billion to put a pendulum on the Moon would be money well spent.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
The next generation of penis enlargement spam:
... could be fake, but I haven't heard either way)
The Oregon Vortex (for those who don't know, it's a visual anomaly
This just makes me think that, however refined your theory gets, there is a deeper level of complexity. You can get infinitely close to the truth, but never quite there. Fortunately, in Real Life, small errors aren't that noticeable. Except, of course, things like the small fraction of mass that gets converted into a massive amount of energy in nuclear reactions.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I wonder if Gravity Probe B will be able to measure this effect if it is still in working order next time an eclipse rolls around.
(Side note-- I never heard of this probe until I saw it in a magazine. Why not?)
Obviously we need to reconfigure the main deflector to send a pulse of inverted neutrinios back at the anomoly. Or something.
I've never met a Physics major who's been in a threesome either.
Software piracy is victimless theft.
This one made my BRAIN HURT:
The Allais effect is a small additional acceleration, so tiny that it would take an apple about a day to fall from a tree branch if it were the only gravitational effect around.
Does this make sense to anyone? An effect having a physical size? That's like saying "I ran about a gravity yesterday, man I was tired."
African or European?
... involving a the Pioneer spacecraft.
Is that something like a the cheat?
This is left as an exercise for the reader.
at this place
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Let's assume for the sake of argument for a second that gravity is a wave...
Could this be constructive interference caused by the collision of the gravity wavefronts from the sun and the moon when they are lined up just right?
Just a thought, the real explanation is probably much crazier.
Knowledge != Intelligence
That's a good question. Unfortunatly, the rest of the slashdot crowd would rather bash your statment then answer it.
I feel your pain, it has happend to me before. But, this IS slashdot for ya.
Life is not for the lazy.
If gravity is (very slightly) blocked by mass, then one would expect to have a different weight on the dark side of the earth than on the light side. It this observed? After all, if you're on the dark side, the entire mass of the earth should be shielding you (ever so slightly) from the gravitational pull of the sun.
I am sure they have thought of this, physics being rather bright types, but as a veteran of 2 credits of astrodynamics: Could it be that during a solar eclipse, both the Moon and the Sun are aligned exactly with your local gravity vector, but pulling in the oppositie direction, thus causing a small reduction in net gravitational acceleration. If they were to make measurements while a solar eclipse was happening on the exact opposite side of the planet, a slight increase in the net acceleration would probably be noticed.
Odd question,
Scenario: A very high heavy object is left by itself in an empty universe for trillions of years.
Would not the inside of the object gets very hot from the extreme gravity?
Would that heat not then move to the outer cooler regions of the object?
Would the outer regions then not radiate that heat outward?
Obviously such an object could not lose heat forever, at some point it would simply run out of energy.
But if gravity is what is creating the heat, then what happens to the gravity?
Can anyone please explain the flaw in my logic?
Ironically, this was hailed as a proof of Einstein's relativity in the early 20th century, since the angle of deflection observed is much closer to the relativistic prediction, than to the Newtonian prediction.
the newtonian prediction being : 0.
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
Although, despite all proposed conventional explanations fail to explain the observations either qualitatively or quantitatively, it is likely that the reported anomalies will turn out to be due to a combination of some of these effects and instrumental errors. The judgement of some of the experimental results is hampered by the lack of a statistical analysis and/or data of sufficient length. Nevertheless, there exist some strong data which cannot be easily explained away.
And here's a point not covered in the paper: if these experimental effects occur when the moon is between the pendulum and the sun, then shouldn't they also occur every time the earth is between the pendulum and the sun...say, every night? If this effect is due to a large mass's ability to block gravity, then surely someone should have detected this effect from the earth blocking the sun's gravity by now!
On the other hand, if the effect is because moon cheese acts as a form of Cavorite, well, then I can't help you with that.
True! It's not a scrabble word, but it's a great Hangman word.
I always get a kick out of the blank stares I get when they've exhausted all 5 vowels and still have all blanks.
'RHYTHM' is a good one too.
Don't you mean parascientific?
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
The General Theory of Relativity consists of sixteen coupled differential equations that can be reduced to ten, which when just written out would take hundreds of pages. It is so complex that there are research programs just categorizing possible solutions.
Analytical solutions only exist for two cases: the overall case that describes a homogeneous universe, and the Schwartzschild case that describes a spherical body. There is also a linear approximation that gets gravity waves.
It's a bit premature to say that GR has a hole in it, because nobody has ever explored it fully. Perhaps this will lead to a solution of GR for this case, or perhaps not.
I thought running Eclipse on my Sun workstation was just ironic.
that's sad. isn't this the longest-running project nasa has ever been involved in, spanning four decades?! i've heard about it recently in several sources, perhaps only because i'm somewhat of a space enthusiast. if you mean that you're surprised that it's not being hyped by the mainsteam media, sit and think about the complexity of the project and what percentage of the population would actually appreciate hearing about it.
For years, it has been believed that electric bulbs emit light, but recent information has proved otherwise.
Electric bulbs don't emit light; they suck dark. Thus, we call these bulbs Dark Suckers.
The Dark Sucker Theory and the existence of dark suckers prove that dark has mass and is heavier than light.
First, the basis of the Dark Sucker Theory is that electric bulbs suck dark. For example, take the Dark Sucker in the room you are in. There is much less dark right next to it than there is elsewhere. The larger the Dark Sucker, the greater its capacity to suck dark. Dark Suckers in the parking lot have a much greater capacity to suck dark than the ones in this room.
So with all things, Dark Suckers don't last forever. Once they are full of dark, they can no longer suck. This is proven by the dark spot on a full Dark Sucker.
A candle is a primitive Dark Sucker. A new candle has a white wick. You can see that after the first use, the wick turns black, representing all the dark that has been sucked into it. If you put a pencil next to the wick of an operating candle, it will turn black. This is because it got in the way of the dark flowing into the candle. One of the disadvantages of these primitive Dark Suckers is their limited range.
There are also portable Dark Suckers. In these, the bulbs can't handle all the dark by themselves and must be aided by a Dark Storage Unit. When the Dark Storage Unit is full, it must be either emptied or replaced before the portable Dark Sucker can operate again.
Dark has mass. When dark goes into a Dark Sucker, friction from the mass generates heat. Thus, it is not wise to touch an operating Dark Sucker. Candles present a special problem as the mass must travel into a solid wick instead of through clear glass. This generates a great amount of heat and therefore it's not wise to touch an operating candle.
Also, dark is heavier than light. If you were to swim just below the surface of the lake, you would see a lot of light. If you were to slowly swim deeper and deeper, you would notice it getting darker and darker. When you get really deep, you would be in total darkness. This is because the heavier dark sinks to the bottom of the lake and the lighter light floats at the top. The is why it is called light.
Finally, we must prove that dark is faster than light. If you were to stand in a lit room in front of a closed, dark closet, and slowly opened the closet door, you would see the light slowly enter the closet. But since dark is so fast, you would not be able to see the dark leave the closet.
Next time you see an electric bulb, remember that it is a Dark Sucker.
Speak before you think
What about the scientific anomaly called NIGHTTIME?
By the time night hits you the people 30 minutes ahead of you have been cooling and the people 30 minutes ahead of them have been cooling. You're rotating your position into areas which are already cooling. When the moon eclipses the sun, that very sharp band of cooling is rapidly passed over the surface.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
If gravity is blocked by mass, it would be a simple thing to simply observe a pendulum at night time and compare that to daytime.
The earth would block much more solar gravity than the puny little moon.
Then again, we would need a pendulum which is attracted to solar gravity because every pendulum on earth which swings, is doing so because of the gravitational attraction of the Earth.
Pay attention... pendulums on earth fall towards the EARTH, NOT THE SUN.
And another thing:
if you allow a pendulum to swing freely for 24 hours, the reason its path will trace out a circle, is *because of inertia* and the earth is rotating. THE PENDULUM IS NOT SWINGING TOWARDS THE SUN'S GRAVITATIONAL FIELD.
Are there any economists here who can explain this more clearly?
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
Because it's interesting.
It would seem to make sence that when 2 objects align their gravitational effects on a 3rd body would be "serial" and combine.
They combine by addition. The claim here seems to be that there is something besides that happening - like the moon blocking a tiny bit of gravity from the sun.
Or are you thinking of tides?
Which makes me wonder if they took tidal forces, and the (delayed) flexing of the earth and motion of the atmosphere and water in response to them, into account correctly.
For now I'll presume they did, since missing that would be a stupendous booboo.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I'm inherently skeptical of any paper first heard of via a website. Call me old fashioned, but I'd rather wait for peer review to run its course and read this in something like the Journal of the AAS. Having said that, I read the paper and it's considerably less sensational than the summary suggests. The author considers it possible, if not probable, that the effects can be ascribed to a combination of experimental error and theorists not having taken into account the circumstances of the situation. He suggests that further research would be useful, but I've never read a paper that didn't...
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
Except that the sun the moon the earth and the pendulum are all accelerating way to fast to have anything to do with MOND.
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
The mobius strip by some definitions has only one side, what does this mean in terms of kinetics? Newtons third law states that every action has an equal and opposite reaction this is okay in a euclian universe, in a non eucldian the equal and opposite reaction is paradoxical because it is not a straight line - it is curved. If it is curved, eventually it will curve right back on itself and no longer be opposite.
The univese might be shaped like a klien bottle and be both inside of itself and outside of itself in terms of time. Help I'm stuck in a loop - help I'm stuck in a loop.
Just some zany ideas.
Laters
It's called an elephant's trunk whereas it is in fact, an elephant's nose, a nose by any other name would smell as sweet
"Photons have mass. "
They don't. They do have momentum though.
Photons don't have rest mass. They do have mass (the E=mc^2 equivalent amount of mass to their energy) and produce (and are affected by) gravitational fields accordingly.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
And complain to him that his universe doesn't match our models of it.
A story in The Economist talks about an apparent gravitation anomaly
My submission of a story from The Gravatationist discussing the current US economy, was rejected this morning.
There's a Starman, waiting in the sky / He'd like to come and meet us, but he hasn't got the time.
what is light has mass, and that mass is contained in too equal and oppositely charged particals? like one half mass, one half negitive mass, this might explain wavelengeth and many other things, Just a thought..
AcrazyPhysicsPoet
We all must band together against the asome power of cheese
This also could explain why astronomers can't find the missing dark matter.
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
THE GRAVITY WELL IS AN ANOMALY!
(for those who don't get it: I DO NOT LIKE THIS GRAVITY!. or perhaps you simply lack the pokey gene)
It would be much cheaper to spend 1000x less for improved experiments on the earth- the effect as indicated isn't all that small, if one wanted to design a truly first-rate experiment.
I have a serious concern, though, about these reports- the effect is seen in both regular pendula (whose period depends on g and the length of the pendulum) and in torsion pendula (which are masses and springs, whose period is pretty much independent of local gravity). That would seem to imply that the effect is a change in time itself, which should be blindingly obvious to atomic clocks. But isn't seen there.
Curtains for windows?
Well, in Penteli mountain, there are verified gravitational anomalies (there are also a hell lot more noted in the Hellenic space by physicists).
:)
For example, you put your car in neutral in the outskirts of the mountain and instead of gravity to pull it down, it is tractored upside. Expert physicists claim there is another energy in the mountain area that is more powerful than the gravity itself, thus creating the effect.
NATO was interested (and presumambly is still) in that particular area. It's part of Greece's x-files
A very nice point. However I am not sure it works. Some of the earth's own mass is shielded so the orbit is slightly larger than it ought to be, so the gravitational pull on the sun side is slightly lower and that on the shielded side slightly higher than it should be. This will at least reduce any effect.
Thanks for pointing this out. This is getting much more complex than I originally thought.
Kinda sounds obvious to me. Just like tidal waves, the molten metals in earth gets pulled towards the sun and moon. This shifts the earth's mass upwards thus causing an increase in 'g'. Whats wrong with this theory? Has this already been proposed?
- Vinay
It pops out of existence*. All of its energy is deposited** in the solar sail. Photons carry energy in discrete packets - quanta - so you can tell a lot about a material by how much, if any, energy a photon has apon leaving a material, if it isn't completely absorbed too.
*a photon is an abstract concept, really.
**depending on the energy of the photon, a number of different things can happen. It can be absorbed, absorbed and re-emitted, not interact at all, cause pair-production... Lots of interesting things. We'll just talk about the specific energy band the sail is designed for.
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
I've asked my girlfriend many times about involving a third body, but she consistently refuses.
I learned in an Astronomy course in the mid-90's that astronomers noticed that the universe has 10 times more mass than what is visibly detectable because of observations of movements due to gravity. I think they noticed this in relation to galaxies as well as globular clusters. The remaining 90% was dark matter, or dark matter and dark energy or something they just couldn't detect. Could this Allais effect be an alternative explanation for that missing 90%?
Okay, I don't know shit about physics except some of the real basics. But I want to blab anyway. From what I gather, they say it's supposed to be all connected. Energy is related to mass and the speed of light (E=mc^2). Mass is related to gravity, more mass more gravity (Jupiter). Mass and velocity are related to time, time slows as you approach the speed of light, mass increases. Energy moves at the speed of light. Mass is infinite for matter moving at the speed of light. And there are formulas that connect them all. Yay. I suppose the relation of mass, velocity, and the speed of light looks kind of like the graph of y=1/(x^2), where x is velocity and y is mass; x<0 are tardyons, x=0 is the speed of light, x>0 are tachyons. Okay, so I think I got that much. Now about gravity- does the effect of gravity happen instantaneously like quantum entanglement? For example, if the sun was moved, would all the planets instantly alter their orbits, or would the effect on their orbits have a delayed effect that would reach them at the speed of light because of something like gravitons? Does quantum entanglement mean that the entangled particles, at some wierd mathematically inversed level, are the same point? Someone give it to me in layman's terms so I don't get a nosebleed.
The paper is talking about effects on the order of 0.5*10^-10 m/s^2. I don't know how anyone could measure this with a pendulum. Also, the paper doesn't show that this effect isn't accounted for by Einstein's theory. I think they need to solve the equations for the Earth/Moon/Sol system before saying that the effect disproves the theory. The only theory they talk about is Newton's theory, eg. a = gm/r^2, which we already know doesn't hold for the scales that they are talking about.
Seems to me like the effect is most likely due to someone walking their dog a couple blocks away.
More interesting is how everyone wants to prove that Einstein's theory is wrong. Seems to me like a bit of brain-envy.
Nice try, but this article only goes about 0.5*10^-10 of the way to convincing me the chuck the field equations.
The effect is there on the GPS clocks. Its clear that something funny is going on but only some times and so far the experiment hasn't been consistently duplicated which is the traditional hallmark of bad science so I expect this problem isn't getting the attention it deserves. I also expect this is the last major breakthrough in basic science that could be done in a basement and its clear that if you can explain what the heck is going on, some people in Stockholm will give you a prize
I am not sure why this can't be explained normally, without changing anything. Object X (orbiting Object Y) is between Object Y and the object it orbits, Object Z. The gravitational pull from the direction of Object Z should be increased by the gravitational pull from Object X, thereby negating or increasing the amount of gravitational pull measured (esp. by pendulum) on the surface of Object Y depending upon position (Northern Hemisphere/Southern Hemisphere, Summer/Winter). I just wonder if the idea of location on the surface of Object Y (quaintly called Earth) has been factored into these various experiments, not to mention the location of the total eclipse in relation to the location of the experiment.
Or maybe my head is pointed away from the sun, thereby causing my body to have more difficulty pumping it to my sorely overworked brain.
The customer is only right if I say so.
Absurd. You get no boost in light speed, you just force the light to become a standing wave and eliminate the (infinite) majority of available states of electromagnetic field by imposing specific boundary conditions on it. How can you force such nonsense in people's heads? Light speed in vacuum is equal to c which is constant, period.
A word of explanation: Casimir effect is when you hold two conducting plates in the vacuum parallel and near to each other. Since they are conducting and flat, electromagnetic field (check the Maxwell equations) has to be zero inside them. We thus impose a boundary condition on the Maxwell equations (since their solutions have to continuously drop to zero in magnitude when near the plates) and these boundary conditions carry on into quantum electrodynamics, limiting the possible states photons can have between the plates.
These experiments, the grandparent poster wrote about, slowed down the light impulses in the media, not in the vacuum. Think of it as of a sprinter running on the olympic track (photons in the vacuum, constant speed) or the same sprinter running among the bushes, getting caught by them and thus effectively being slowed down (photons in the media).
Someone raise my karma, or I won't be able to post on the topic I really like and happen to now something about.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
Victory or awesome!
Errr... /. but the moon's shadow!) And thus, the "nightime" part or Earth has no relavence?
I may be missing something... but I thought the article was about an effect caused by an eclipse... ie. the moon is between the earth and sun... So is this about a pendulum that's in the path? (no, not
..bright screens for bright people, but now I've got to wear sunglassess.
has a science section? Never knew that.
Just a few minor corrections (and please correct me if I'm wrong):
That is my understanding as well.
Sort-of. It is easier to prove that photons have no rest mass with Special Relativity.
The concept of "changing mass" is actually an outdated concept. It is more helpful to imagine that it would take infinite kinetic energy for any object with mass to travel at the speed of light.
Of course, with a large amount of kinetic energy, I've often wondered whether an arbitary object could be turned into a black hole by accelerating (sp?) it fast enough?
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
- Jerome Klapka Jerome
Why do I get the feeling that fully half the people commenting on this article have been kill-filed by the sci.astro newsgroup?
--- Generation X: The first generation to have SIG lines inferior to their parents... ---
Am I the only one that, at first glance, read this as "Gravitation Anatomically Measured" ?
You think of The Economist. Where else will you find the all latest scientific breakthroughs?
There is no "Einstein's Theory of Relativity." There are two of them: General and Specific. The cited article accurately points out it is General Relativity.
_________________
My trunk monkey can beat up your trunk monkey.
Yes, these are really good and quite useful.
My point is that claiming that there is a hole in GR is not obvious, as GR is not completely understood analytically.
I'm sure that a lot of people will try to find a numerical solution to GR that accounts for the effect, and for all we know right now, they just might find it.
" In 1954, a man named Maruice Allais spent a month studying and measuring the swing of a Foucault pendulum in his Paris laboratory. He dutifully recorded the direction of rotation, which corresponds to the spin of the Earth. Allais' experiment happened to coincide with a solar eclipse, and while the moon blotted out the sunlight, something strange happened to the pendulum: It slowed. "
Unfortunately inside the economist article http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm? story_id=3104321
the editors claim the opposite :
""ASSUME nothing" is a good motto in science. Even the humble pendulum may spring a surprise on you. In 1954 Maurice Allais, a French economist who would go on to win, in 1988, the Nobel prize in his subject, decided to observe and record the movements of a pendulum over a period of 30 days. Coincidentally, one of his observations took place during a solar eclipse. When the moon passed in front of the sun, the pendulum unexpectedly started moving a bit faster than it should have done."
Geez if one tells a nice story, get all the contributing parties synchronized :)
Robert
You know, there just might be enough pull in the data to make Einstein turn in his grave.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
Sorry, no - Casimir effect has nothing to do with C.
The Casimir effect is a measurable attractive force (really a repellant force from the opposite sides) between two parallel plates that are very close together.
According to QED, there is no absolute zero-energy vacuum - all space, no matter how empty, has energy that spontaneously forms particle/antiparticle pairs that pretty quickly annihilate (see Hawking Radiation, Quantum Foam, etc., Fenyman Diagrams, etc.). These pairs, frequently being wavelike, come in a whole bunch of frequencies.
So, place two plates parallel to each other and real close, and the only frequencies of waves that can fit in there are those with wavelengths that are whole-number fractions of the distance between the plates. On the outside of the plates, however, an infinite number of frequencies can occur, so there is a greater force/pressure outside the plates than inside, so they are forced together.
Interestingly, unlike gravity and magnetism, which follow an inverse-square law, the Casimir effect follows an inverse-hypercube (4th) law, so it gets much stronger than gravity or magnetism when you get really close, but falls off much faster. Source
-T
Proponents of Process Physics claim that Einstien's original case for general relativity was built on a misinterpretation of critical 19th century experimental data and contend that the consequential abandonment of the ancient notion of Æther was wrong headed.
From their perspective, gravity should not be seen as a force field but rather as the cummulative effect of all massive bodies continuously absorbing/dissipating Æther. Locally the earth sucks most of the Æther and we experience the resulting downwards pressure.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
Obvious flamebait.
Wow, Syzygy really is a word. Somehow, I don't remember that one from the decade-old high school science corner of my brain. That's almost as good as Xyzzy.
-jim
In Soviet Russia, Gravitation Anom
Wait a sec, who's knocking at the door.
Hello we're from Homeland Security, and you're under arrest under the Patriot Act for being a Communistic Terrorist usi=20 ]} } } }&..}=3Dr}'}"}[NO CARRIER]
When looking at the explanation in the article that "the pendulum unexpectedly started moving a bit faster than it should have done" and then seeing them trying to use the same explanation for the *slowing* of both probes, it didn't make sense. If indeed large bodies do block gravitons and lessen the effect of gravity, the probes would surely have passed through the "shadows" of several high mass bodies and actually *accelerated*. No? So the claim that it "it slowed" would fit the profile of what's happening with both probes.
*Fortitudo, aequitas, fidelitas.*
Keep up that attitude bitch and you'll make it on to my shitlist incredibly fast. You have been warned motherfucker.
A pendulum is a gravimeter. The frequency varies as the square root of g. Dr Duif doesn't know what he's talking about. Now, I don't think modern gravimeters use pendulums, but if the gravity/acceleration changes, the frequency of a pendulum will change.
Let's all remember that NASA managed to miss Mars entirely by forgetting to convert metric measurements to the U.S. Standard... (what kind of scientists work in feet and inches anyways?) So don't take their word on the matter to heart, because they really don't know what they're doing.
for free wallpapers, visit Sargosis.com
This is really creepy to hear after playing Doom 3 all night. The pioneer spacecraft is going to comeback in 100 years with a doorway to hell!
There are two possibilities which immediately come to mind. Does anyone know of research about these:
Don't forget, there is still the unexplained slowing down of extra-solar space probes. There are things going on; things we don't understand.
Mys-TEER-i-ous things (with waggling fingers)...
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
Given: No massive particle can travel at or faster than c
So when I get my light-speed space ship working, I'm going to have to lose the beer gut to use it?
paintball
That's always what they stumble upon in Star Trek before all Hell breaks loose.
John Kerry is a Joke!
Here's an alternative theory - no idea whether it's true but it's somewhat plausible... One of the twists of operational aviation meteorology is the diurnal effects on atmospheric pressure caused by daily heating/cooling. http://www.eclipse2006.boun.edu.tr/sss/paper01.pdf
A top-secret government program involving instantaneous travel to other solar systems by means of a device known as a st
Photons are gluten intolerant.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
I have my own idea that might explain it. I recast gravity in my theory and it seams to work on the quantum level and in General Relativity. http://homepage.mac.com/timg/iblog/index.html
these are the voyages of the fast-food chain McDonalds. It's continuing mission, to explore new countries, to create a race of fat people, to go boldly where no fast-food chain has gone before.
Most of the posts are supposing the physicists doing this are real dumb. That in itself, is stupid. I think one or two have interesting points (e.g. "Einstein is Saf e") and most of the others are way off base. The paper is a summary of research by other people. The problem being discussed was noticed by Allais 50 years ago when he ran a month long pendulum experiment (three drops per minute I believe) that happened to intersect the time of an eclipse. The paper goes over a number of possible reasons for error and includes some as yet unpublished data on experiments intended to uncover them. The possibilities are c reative and followed up scientifically, for example one is done in remote China with nobody within 200 meters. All tests showed the suggested errors to be miniscule, although the paper does suggest that a combination of them might just cover it.
It would appear that a significant anomaly has been detected by various experiments and that professional scientists are taking it much more seriously than say cold fusion. It also is clear that there is a lot still to learn about gravity and that NASA is one of the groups that is working hard to figure out why its space probes don't move as expected. Some people even think gravity moves 20 times faster than light and other stories. It is not a shut case yet. In the paper mentioned in the post, they are saying that most people couldn't in the past solve the problem because they were thinking in terms of the Moon "shielding" the Earth from gravity, which the paper does not believe. They think it is more like an extra horizontal force that sometimes occurs during eclipses (of which there are different kinds including variations of angles). So all the posts about shielding are off base.
NASA has suggested that if experimental error really can't be the culprit, it might be caused by the same thing that apparently is accelerating Voyager more than expected.
I'd like to quote from a NASA article on the people who built Gravity Probe B.
I think that is cool. It says to me we have a good chance about learning a lot more about gravity and lots of other fundamental physics in the near to medium term future.
The paper also notes that one more individual experiment will not solve it; many simultaneous and comprehensive experiements are needed over the next few eclipses. It also suggests that it might be interesting to investigate "gravitational lensing by relativistic dark matter" although I cannot tell if that suggests we are in the midst of a river of high speed dark matter or what, something invisible passing between the Earth and Moon? Somebody with astrophysics degree please finally step in. Sounds like it might be interesting to have the ISS get involved too!
Links:
NASA decrypting the eclipse ('99)
Gravitational Anomalies - Literature List
In Search of Gravitomagnetism (NASA Gravity Probe B)
More interesting is how everyone wants to prove that Einstein's theory is wrong. Seems to me like a bit of brain-envy.
I suppose, then, Einstein must have been pretty jealous of Newton. I had always thought that Einstein worked upon General Relativity to understand more about the Universe, but it's clear that he just wanted to prove Newton wrong out of envy.
Theories are proved wrong all the time. Attempts at combining Quantum Theory with Relativity have all failed. It's not unthinkable to suggest that both Relativity and Quantum Theory may be subtly wrong. There may be a greater theory that explains both large-scale gravitation, and small-scale quantum effects, waiting around the corner.
Relativity is the best theory we have for explaining large-scale gravitational effects, but no-one has been able to fit it together with what we observe at the quantum level. Isn't it logical to suspect that Relativity is not the be-all and end-all of physics?
It's good to be skeptical. But as well as being skeptical of the article (and perhaps rightly so), be skeptical of Einstein's work as well. Scientific theories, even well-established ones, should not be blindly followed, but continuously tested.
Well, what comes to mind (and is probably incorrect but I won't let that stop me, this *is* slashdot after all) is that if gravitational lenses like the sun can bend light from e.g. distant stars, perhaps a heavy body can bend gravity in a similar way.
(remember this is just an unlikely hypothesis - don't shoot me.)
If the moon is exactly between the sun and earth this would mean slightly more gravity than just g-moon + g-sun because of the extra gravity bent towards earth around the moon.
I'll go tar and feather myself now.
before we start thinking about things like subspace and the ever elusive back door to space travel, the worm hole lets think about some things that are more plausible, namely the combined effects, of the daystar and the moon. lets think about the effect of the gravity from the sun + the moon and the electromagnetic effect, and do the math behind it first. for all we know depending on the angle that the moon and sun make in reference to the ground of this feable rock, on that fateful day of observation, the combined gravitational effects, may have reduced gravity just enough to cause this effect.
Good point. However, given our current understanding of gravity, the moons distortion of space shouldn't have any influence on the gravity we experience from the sun. This may seem a bit odd, but its because forces such as gravity arise from the exchange of virtual particles, and they can pretty much do what they want and dont care about spatial distortions. If they did, black holes wouldnt have a gravitational field as all the gravitons would be stuck inside!
We think light is fast, but wherever it goes, dark has always got there first.
Apologies to Terry Pratchett.
The Economist is simply the best weekly news print magazine in the world.
Yes it is, and has been for MANY years.
I just want to add that I did not know the magazine existed until I read (in the 1980's) that it was BILL GATES FAVORITE MAGAZINE. Back then he was a good guy, to be emulated. How times change. By the way, have you seen (on TV) his partner's BOAT FLEET???
Maybe gravity is like slow water: it piles up behind the moon when obstructed then start to flow faster on release (see the first graph) as in when the moon moves out fo the way, then goes back to normal.
Did they assimilate an Igor? Would certainly be handy with spare (body) parts!
Non tam praeclarum est scire Latine, quam turpe nescire
-- Cicero
In New York City, Dark is faster then anywhere else in all the universes.
Especially in the Bronx.
Huh?
Yeah, but it's not nearly as good as jozxyqk :o)
Where else will you find the all latest scientific breakthroughs?
Ummm, Bush's daily breifings?
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Where is the evidence you cite that there is an effect on GPS clocks? I searched the article on arXiv.org for GPS, global, positioning, clock, time, atomic and didn't find anything. GPS clocks see a total solar eclipse (from the earth's shadow) every orbit and depends on timing down to nanoseconds, so if GPS sees something, it should have been reproduced thousands of times for every orbit of every satellite...
Curtains for windows?
The "justification" for this article on physics being in The Economist is apparently spelled out in the first paragraph of TFA:
In 1954 Maurice Allais, a French economist who would go on to win, in 1988, the Nobel prize in his subject, decided to observe and record the movements of a pendulum...
So I suppose there could be an article in Physics Review about an Economics discovery made by a Nobel Prize winner in Physics, but I won't hold my breath.
Tag lost or not installed.
1.food, especially: a suspension or solution of nutrients in a state suitable for absorption.
2.intellectual sustenance.
3.an insipid piece of writing.
I think that pabulum is generally understood to mean baby food.
My objection to "The Economist" is that it is particularly weak in its use of the established principles of economics.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
This is similar to the argument that .9999 (repeating) equals 1. No matter what "mathematical genius" says, I don't agree. "Really really really small" does not equal nonexistant.
Many people have tried to explain this to me in their "correct" way, but I don't believe them. I've seen decent and poor attempts to prove this and they're all based on an assumption somewhere in the proof.
There is some stuff out there, like dust and gas and whatnot. If the Pioneer craft hit some of that stuff, then that would make it slow down wouldn't it? Of course, someone has probably already thought of that and discounted it for good reason.. Still, barely measurable gravity perturbations that only occur during eclipses, making verification difficult smells of mass hysteria
Eat at Joe's.
That board with a nail in it may have defeated us today, but the humans won't stop there. They'll build bigger boards with bigger nails and soon they'll build a board with a nail in it so big it will destroy them all!! Ha ha ha ha.....
So instead, imagine that the entire universe outside of a body is radiating a particle shower that pushes the body in all directions, effectively cancelling out (or if not cancelling, being unnoticeable because the entire local area is subject the same way to it).
Now imagine that a big body like the sun is blocking out a portion of the particle shower. It will block out a portion of the entire sky that decreases with the square of the distance. so we got 1/r^2; the probabilty for blocking the shower increases with the mass of the sun m1 and the probability for receiving a particle in the shower and catching its impulse is proportinal to m2.
So we get gravity=m1*m2/r^2, which is exactly the law of gravity.
The only thing that annoys me at the moment with my theory that in one year Stephen Hawkins will say that it is his theory. Well, I guess he can flesh out the math where I can't(or try to contradict it). (Tell this to Homer Simpson).
Well, back to the Allais effect, so if three bodies line up, the gravity of one body should be smaller than expected because the other body is blocking the particle shower a bit already. Calculating the effect should give a number which tells the intensity/catching number of the shower.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Both your stupid and you smart ideas have probably occured to others before. Therefore, destroy the patent office (but not their offices).
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.