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Is the Earth in a Vortex of Space-Time?
da6d writes "Apparently, we'll soon know for sure.... NASA has announced in an article that 'A NASA/Stanford physics experiment called Gravity Probe B (GP-B) recently finished a year of gathering science data in Earth orbit. The results, which will take another year to analyze, should reveal the shape of space-time around Earth--and, possibly, the vortex.'" More from the article: "If Earth were stationary, that would be the end of the story. But Earth is not stationary. Our planet spins, and the spin should twist the dimple, slightly, pulling it around into a 4-dimensional swirl. This is what GP-B went to space to check."
Live long and vortexed?
Is Dr. Gene Ray behind this discovery?
http://www.timecube.com/
Huzzah for sensationalistic headlines? My first thought on reading that title was "Oh noes! We're being sucked into the vortex if d00m!!1"
Don't Mind Me, I'm Just Nuts
"If Earth were stationary, that would be the end of the story. But Earth is not stationary."
Are you on crack!? The earth is stationary. It is the sun that's moving.
Nice that it's finally proven.*
*That's what I think the linked article states, cuz.. uhh, I didn't read it.
You didn't have to RTFA to figure this one out, the summary itself states that it will take approximately a full year to analyze the data. Only once the data is analyzed will the vortex phenomona considered proven (or disproven, obviously).
If the Earth is in one of those time vortex things do I get paid overtime?
that explains the Bermuda Triangel huh ?, Maybe we will find flight 19 and a bunch of missing Millitary too.
CH
If Earth were stationary, that would be the end of the story. But Earth is not stationary.
I see they found that universal frame of reference they were looking for.
How much does Anna Nicole Smith distort this vortex?
On the bright side if we did get flushed through the vortex at least we would no longer be located in the unfashionable western edge of the galaxy.
It's only paranoia if your wrong...
Any astro-geek care to explain what all that means? Being in a vortex of Space-Time doesn't sound like a good thing. :o(
Though I think that happened to the Enterprise a couple times.
Bill
My Cortex is in Gore-Tex contemplating the Vortex. I'm getting a complex! I need a cold compress! I need to undress. I'm relatively impressed. Er... where's Eminem when you need him? Am I off-topic here?
...as I understand it, we spent millions of dollars and are getting all hot and bothered because we are proving what we suspected to already be true.
Wheee!
Honestly, this is a cool thing, so i don't mean to demean it. But it's the sort of thing only a geek with more than a passing familarity of physics would get excited for. Everyone else is thinking: A space-time vortex? Oh NO!!!!
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
I read it Nasa/ Astrophysics
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
Am I the only person who doesn't get any of this and just thinks it sounds like a SciFi novel? Now I think I understand how the people felt when they were told the world is a sphere.
The baby's fine -- please stop sending business cards.
I hope this gets proven because then Tempest will go down in history not as a video game but rather an interactive documentary on gravity.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
Well, if there's something wrong, it's best to not be caught without your Visual Guide to Surviving Timeless Space.
Behind the Gravity Probe B is here and here . It is a fascinating read, esp. about the gyroscopes.
"The four gyro rotors are made of fused quartz, fabricated to an extreme level of material homogeneity and then ground to the near-absolute sphericity (Figure 1). The spheres are round to within 40 atomic layers, which is proportionally equivalent to an Earth-sized sphere with surface height variations of only 16 feet...."
"It's one thing to have a virtually perfect gyro rotor, but that alone does not provide the necessary performance for this experiment......The electric fields center the rotors to a few millionths of an inch. They did not perform the spinning up electrically, however. Instead, they directed a precise stream of helium gas, traveling at nearly Mach 1, at the rotors. It takes about half an hour for the rotor to reach full speed, and it loses less than 1% of this speed over 1000 years in the super-vacuum of the cavity."
This is awesome.
If this test succeeds then ALOT of things that are considered throy can finally be taken seriously and we could see many many new advances in physics.
I mean.. with a fourth dimension nearly proved... what about a fifth dimension? What dimension is time? If time is a dimension then what lies outside of time?
I think it's interesting - general relativity makes some very hard to verify but specific predictions. Many competing theories to it over the last 50 years have made predicitions that have, one by one, turned out to be false. Rotational frame dragging is (I think?) one of the last unverified ones. According to Newtonian gravitation & mechanics, the rotation or non-rotation of the earth should not affect an orbiting satellite a whit (ignoring "complications" like variable atmospheric drag based on rotation rate, different shape of earth at different rotation rates, etc.), or put more abstractly, the rotation of an axially symmetric mass distribution should not have anything to do with its gravitational field. General relatitivity does not agree with Newtonian mechanics here, which brings up yet another interesting question:
Is there a difference between rotating reference frames and non-rotating reference frames because of the universe of matter around them, or is it self-generated? In other words, if we "removed" the entire universe except the rotating Earth, would rotation still have meaning? Could we still do an experiment and detect its rotation, or is that an artifact of the universe of matter around it that would vanish when it did? As far as I understand general relativity (and IANAP), it does not make a hypothesis one way or the other. Is the question meta-physical? Or is there some clever way to set up an experiment to actually tell?
Sigh - sometimes, I wish I was a physicist!
we gotta get outta here!
I suppose mentioning Stephen Hawking a deist first could've made the post more relevant--given that Hawking put forth the theory of the vortex.
Only once the data is analyzed will the vortex phenomona considered proven (or disproven, obviously).
Not so obvious. The word 'inconclusive' comes to mind.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
Douglas Adams certainly was a hoopy frood.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
really going down the cosmic toilet?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Now trying to find a relative time for just the planet earth is entirely pointless, i mean, why would a space-time vortex of the universe be made of independant space time vortexes.
If a hacker*god* got into one of the Vortex and accidentally set the year to 1468, only the earth would go back in time. very inconvient for trying to defend the earth in 2101
Of course we all know he would do such a thing, that bastard
isn't this just frame dragging??
Pretty much everything spinning with mass is in a vortex of space-time, if relativity is correct. The point is, has the Internet run out of good stories for this to be posted on Slashdot?
I don't want to read
"If Earth were stationary, that would be the end of the story. But Earth is not stationary.
Atheistic trash.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Parent's link is nice and making fun of the average impression people hold on "no time" (at least that's why I get a laugh out of it) as it doesn't make sense to think of "no time" as hitting pause on your remote control. It seems much more likely (almost a logical certainty?) that "no time" is like hitting a button on your remote control and suddenly you see the whole dvd/whatever in an instant, and in the next instant (not that it would be easy to differentiate between it) you see the whole dvd/whatever as well, and in the next instant, and the next and so on forever (forever is all that exists outside time).
s /universe.html
:)
Welcome to how god sees the complete existence of the universe or would see it if such an entity (god) exists. Realize that such a point of view removes the inherent contradiction between free will and fate. Also savour the following implication of "no time" or "outside time": unlimited bandwidth/information communication. That has implications making it possible for such an entity to be absolutely moral as it has absolute knowledge of everything that has ever happened, all causations and effects: if one didn't have such complete knowledge one couldn't make any kind of justifiably correct decisions; which in itself has further implications for everybody that are aware that their knowledge is less than absolute - humility.
Could it be that a phenomena such as spooky action at a distance through entanglement is our first observed clue into practical use of this "part" of existence?
Take all this and combine it with the speculative view of massless particles, i.e. a pure waves whose medium is space/time itself, as the informationrich, faster than speed, "dataway" of souls and you'll get both a bunch of kooks and people who realise that monotheistic religions might have been basically right all along... (some of you might not differ between the two, I know I know lol).
Offtopic but I'll throw it in anyway:
http://www.veritas-ucsb.org/library/origins/quote
For any and all atheists reading this don't worry, be happy
this comment is provided "as is" and without any express or implied legibility or congruity [...]
Title says it all :)
Who cares. This is Slashdot. Digg's summaries are shit, usually wrong, and the comments are worse.
Slashdot at least has some class and culture (I know... I know, but we're comparing a mushy apple (Slashdot) to a steaming pile of cow manure (Digg))
I hope they gave equal time to bible researchers, all answers can be found there.
Ok, but Earth moves around the Sun, and Sun moves around the center of the Galaxy. And that distant star moves around the center of the Galaxy too. Aren't there too many variables in this equation?
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
There is a bigger problem here. The earth is neither really flat or shereical.
Think about, how could th earth be round and humanity not realize it for thopusands of years? Ever though that the earth is more of a partial elitical tye thing? With the continents moving around the edges without our knowledge. Satilites are confused because they are stuck at the vertex of the whole thing for a reason which I am yet to figue out.
Common knowledge denoted this is perfectly correct.
The word 'inconclusive' comes to mind.
Not as often as the word 'hooters'.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
"curvaceous lines of the dimple"? Who wrote this copy? Is someone from Cosmopolitan moonlighting as a writer for NASA?
Curiously enough Rudolf Steiner once stated that the laws of physics aren't the same everywhere. According to him they gradually change the further you get away from a certain point in space. He said something like:"Very much like the gravity influence of an object declines the further away you get from it, so do the laws of physics change."
This could be the proof of his statement.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I'm more interested in teh gravity waves than frame dragging. Frame dragging can be explained with other methods, even if I can't give any examples at the moment. Don't hang me for it I'm more interested to see if the gravitational waves exist, so that we can actually get to the point of understanding what causes gravity.
Yes, I said it.
What promises does it hold?
Autonomous Retard -- Is your camp safe? UnsafeCamp.com
Einstein's got it backwards once again!.
The spin doesn't cause frame dragging, it's the other way around.
Because frames are dragged in discrete units *quanta* we wind up with cosmological "coincidences" like planets on a plane, never seeing the dark side of the moon, etc.
If you want to spin an object with mass, ya gots ta drag its frame a notch or two first.
Vizzini: Let me put it this way. Have you ever heard of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates?
Westley: Yes.
Vizzini: Morons.
Add Einstein to the list.
And I thought I felt dizzy this morning because of a hangover.
it's Eddy. Eddy's in the space time vortex, remember?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
My first thought on this was "Whatever! Another crackpot theory about how the universe has special mystical things happening." But then I stopped and thought "Oh yeah, we thought the earth was flat, once." My prediction, in the end, is that this will mean nearly nothing in our generation when all is said and done. Just like the earth being round meant nearly nothing back then, the freaky time vortex we live in will have very very little to do with the common man today. Once we invent some magical mystical space transportation, yeah, it'll probably matter, but not until then.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
"Energy-momentum is what causes space-time to curve,..."
Just for clarification: So, gravity by itself doesn't cause space-time to curve?
A couple of other things:
1) Since the Earth is traveling so fast around the Sun itself, the spin of the Earth isn't like a basketball on Meadowlark Lemon's finger, as one might imagine it spinning on it's own axis, but is traveling in a linear fashion as it goes around the Sun; meaning, no point on the Earth is ever, relative to Space itself (and assuming Space has an exact center, if not, then, at least, the Milkyway having an exact center), to occupy the same 'space' twice.
Assuming the Milkyway is moving, as a galaxy, in some direction, perhaps even rotating around something, and that the Sun is assumed to be rotating around the center of the Milkyway, and the the Earth is rotating around the Sun... Doesn't that really mean that "spinning" is a perceived phenomena and not a reality? Instead, since the Milkyway (presumably) is traveling relative to Space itself, and the Sun is traveling around the center of the Milkyway, and then the Earth around the Sun, the best we can come to spinning is some form of zig-zagging through "Absolute Space" (assuming such a thing exists, if not then we can define it as "the center of all Space"). And,
2) If a ray of light is traveling through Space and is then deflected by an object, does the light ray, in any way, know that it has been deflected? If it were us and we were looking forward, we would 'see' our destination (who really knows what we would 'see' while traveling the speed of light) and light traveling from that destination would have also been deflected by an object that we, as a ray of light, would also be deflected by. Thus, wouldn't we seem to continue in the same path we were traveling in in the first place? Would a ray of light even notice it was being deflected?
So, finally, I think spinning is a poor choice of words for describing gravitational fields since it precludes the assumption that either the Sun is stationary relative to 'all Space' or 'the center of all Space' or the Earth is stationary. But, we know the answer to the later. Or, better yet, that we have sufficient knowledge about the Universe to know that our frame of reference, from Earth and this Solar System, is enough to preclude that we know that which is stationary. Which we can't know that because we likely do not really know the rotational period of the Sun about the Milkyway nor the movement of the Milkyway itself.
Einstein would probably have been surprised at this particular application of relativity.
It's all relative and while this experiment may prove/disprove certain ascertions, it does nothing to answer the question of what happens to the speed of light when:
Vehicle A traveling in car at 80mph with it's headlights illuminated toward a double slit apparatus and one side has been saturated in a Bose-Einsteinian Condensate.
Things that make you go hmmmmmmmmmmmm
If car A travels speed A and the headlights are on does that mean that the light from the headlamps exceed the speed the light respective to the speed of the vehicle?
Remember the speed of sound was also a constant at one time. Can you imagine the change in physics and if c is not a constant?
-drunk anonymous coward
You are so close to the event horizon of the space-time vortex that letters are being sucked out of your post! Here, grab my hnd -- I'll pul you bck -- o sht! Nw IM to clos..!
I'm not sure the Earth is, but /. certainly seems to be most days...a vortex of morons.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Did NASA lose it?
It is the four-day simultaneous harmonic time cube that proves that there is no rotation, only the four corners of the cube which shift simultaneously and harmonically like a prism. You have the dumbness within you to lack the perception of this majestic normality. Fnord!
No it won't. GR is derived from several axioms - in particular, the assumption that the laws of physics are the same everywhere that they are meaningful. If G Probe B get expected results, then it would back up this assumption, and do disprove Steiner.
all this racket you, guys, are making is completely distructing me from my research of the epicycles.
You can't handle the truth.
< P >
it's the same coin, recycled. At least you'll have company, working with yourself several times over on a doppelgang! (credit to Terry Pratchett in Pyramids)
Don't forget, it's turtles all the way down.
Those websites are not funny, are F!#@KING SAD.
Bah, don't worry about it, there was a 'vortex' *cough*wormhole*cough* but it was closed a few years ago by John Crichton.
There must have been a malfunction in the Doctors TARDIS. You know how often he materializes in the U.K.
"Only once the data is analyzed will the vortex phenomona considered proven (or disproven, obviously)."
Not so obvious. The word 'inconclusive' comes to mind.
Well, if the theory predicts a certain effect of a certain magnitude, and it is within this probe's sensitivity, barring any equipment malfunction it should come up with a "correct" or "incorrect" answer. Obviously, if the answer is "incorrect" there's some work to be done. "Inconclusive" is typically used if there's an open-ended question where the effects are too weak to support either hypothesis (e.g. "H1: These are corrolated" and "H2: These are not corrolated"). But if you have a specific magnitude in mind: "H3: These are strongly corrolated with p > 0.6" you can design an experiment that will quite surely yield a result.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Hah! We of the pastafarian faith all snicker as you infidels again try to measure space not knowing that his noodly appendage has changed your observation to a space-time vortex.
Just as the bones of dinosaurs and the stars in the sky were placed by our noodly master, so is this great work of his doing.
Avast ye ignorant dogs! Worship ye great master and his wee midget. For he be a harsh mistress, and his noodly wrath shall send ye all down to Davey Jones's Locker!
The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET.
The experiment isn't so much to test if earth is in a so called "space-time vortex" (a nicely hyped up, futuristic word, btw), but to verify (and test) the effects of frame dragging. Or, so said the research project's leaders some time ago when they began the mission. Books like "The Fabric of the Cosmos", "The Elegant Universe" (both by Brian Greene) and "Three Roads to Quantum Gravity" (by Lee Smolin) mention this experiment, and do a somewhat better job of explaining what frame dragging is, and its implications for physics.
Hmmm,
Not to be a jerk here, but it cannot be "proven", it can only be shown to be incorrect. The reason why we call them theories is because we cannot be absolutely sure of why something happens. At the macroscopic level we of course can be very close and it doesn't matter very much, this is basic physics and the reason that newton's laws are still used even though they have been proven wrong.
Einstein has several theories/conjuctures that have proven to be wrong, but they didn't substantually change the outcome of E=Mc^2 so the normal jarhead scientists who are a beyond newton use einstein, be there are levels beyond that, string theory, uncertainty principle etc. We cannot know we just keep making rules that fit the situation. This is just testing to see if an effect that einsteins theory predicts is true or not. If so, no changes, but that doesn't mean that it is proven to be true. If not, then we try to figure out where the theory is wrong and fix it.
Lando
/* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
in particular, the assumption that the laws of physics are the same everywhere that they are meaningful.
/.!
True, but I think you can even broaden this statement by saying that is just one of the simplyfing assumptions (unless there is a reason to believe otherwise) for any scientific work.
Anyway, having an idiotic Steiner reference modded up more than your post is a very sad day for
Have the eco-nuts and new-age-zealots finally overran this place!?
the Universe moves around YOU!
1. The experiment agrees with GR and NASA says that GR is right about frame dragging.
2. The experiment doesn't agree with GR and NASA says that it messed up and they'll ask the tax payers for a do over.
This experiment is not legitimate. If they get the result they expect, they'll accept the result. If they don't get the result they expect, they'll just say (rightly) that it was a flawed experiment. We won't get any more validation of GR than we already have. If they really want to validate frame dragging, they need to look for weirdness associated with very large spinning objects, like black holes. If you could study black holes enough to find some behavior along the axis that contradicts classical physics, that would give you some meat to back the concept of frame dragging.
That's what I reckon, anyway.
Next question?
Leave it to Slashdot (and, well, most news media) to put their ignorance of science on display. There is no way to measure, and not even any real meaning, to "stationary" in relativistic physics. There is no absolute reference frame with regard to translational movement, it's all relative to other bodies (thus the name). However, rotation is different, because rotation is motion of a body relative to itself. And it turns out this has, subtle, consequences in the interaction of matter with space-time.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"The earth is stationary. It is the sun that's moving."
THE sun? What makes you think there's just one?
Place nail here >+
There would be many ways to test for a rotating frame even in the absence of any other mass. Any gyro will stay fixed, and you could observe that you were in a rotating frame. My favorite test for Earth's roation and no way to observe the stars would be the Foucault Pendulum. http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/PHYSICS_!/FOUCAULT_PEN DULUM/foucault_pendulum.html
This can be constructed with nothing more high tech than a mass and a decent cable. I think this would be the lowest tech, highest sensitivity test you could do.
"Astro-geek" is priceless and "I think that happened to the Enterprise a couple times" is just what came to my mind after reading the headline. :)
The filesystem is the package manager
Ow! That makes my head hurt!
...about their forthcoming press release?
From the article: "First, though, there are a lot of data to analyze. Stay tuned."
They did! The whole press release was to tell us they haven't analyzed the data yet, and to stay tuned for the next press release...
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
I was reading the article, and was lulling in the mixed feelings of awe, pride and my inconsequence in the universe, and thought, wow all this by the same country that is bringing us the iraq war...
/. QOTD at the bottom of the page
then i read the
To save a single life is better than to build a seven story pagoda.
Of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
where hydrogen is built into helium
At temperatures of millions of degrees
The sun is hot
We need its lightThe sun is not
A place where we could live
But here on Earth there'd be no life
Without the light it gives
we need its heat
We need its energy
Without the sun, without a doubt
There'd be no you and me
"Our planet spins, and the spin should twist the dimple"
It's over for me. I'm spent.
"Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important." (Lisa Hoffman)
If it weren't, it'd be a lot harder to pilot my TARDIS.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Note: Because the photon is traveling at the speed of light, and because time compresses the closer you get to the speed of light, when your AT the speed of light, like a photon, there IS NO TIME between when your sent out and when you end.
Thus, for the photon, it excisted for exactly 0 seconds, and thus, again from it's point of view, nothing happend to it because things happening is always definied over an interval of time.
Quick answer: It doesn't 'see' any change because it doesn't see, there's no time too.
Seeing that I'm not really into breasts as much as I'm into other things that I won't go into here... I tend to prefer the term "sweater meat" since it's much more apt. ;P
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Damn, I would just love GP-B to find out that ain't no fucking "vortex", I mean I would love it to find out that ain't no curvature of space-time. I would also love someone to find out that photons have a weight, because at the moment I don't feel like admitting that everything in the relativity is true, it's just too hard.
You just got troll'd!
They are both rotating around a center point between the two, and they have to be rotating, else they'd crash into each other because of the gravity pull on each other.