General Relativity Is At Least 99.95% Right

ultracool writes to mention a ScienceDaily piece on compelling proof of general relativity. A team at the University of Manchester have used three years' worth of data on a pair of pulsars as a litmus test, against which they've benchmarked Einstein's theory. From the article: "Though all the independent tests available in the double pulsar system agree with Einstein's theory, the one that gives the most precise result is the time delay, known as the Shapiro Delay, which the signals suffer as they pass through the curved space-time surrounding the two neutron stars. It is close to 90 millionths of a second and the ratio of the observed and predicted values is 1.0001 +/- 0.0005 - a precision of 0.05%. A number of other relativistic effects predicted by Einstein can also be observed. 'We see that, due to its mass, the fabric of space-time around a pulsar is curved. We also see that the pulsar clock runs slower when it is deeper in the gravitational field of its massive companion, an effect known as "time dilation."'"

Comments

Interesting, but wrong

[joe 155]

How can they say anything is 99.95% right, have they never heard of the Cartesian method of doubt, I would say that second meditation doubt would weigh in at more than 0.05% on its own... I mean, how can you be sure that you're not decived every time you think of the universe or physics into thinking that this is the way it is, when it isn't. More over, how do you know the universe exists?

Over and above the possibilities of the universal physics being disrupted by deamons you have to consider that it might actually be wrong, which we'll take their word for at 0.05%... so all in all I'd say about 1-5% doubt - but you can never know