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Einstein's Theory Passes Strict New Test
FiReaNGeL writes with an excerpt from a story at e! Science News: "Taking advantage of a unique cosmic configuration, astronomers have measured an effect predicted by Albert Einstein's theory of General Relativity in the extremely strong gravity of a pair of superdense neutron stars. Essentially, the famed physicist's 93-year-old theory passed yet another test. Scientists at McGill University used the National Science Foundation's Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) to do a four-year study of a double-star system unlike any other known in the Universe. The system is a pair of neutron stars, both of which are seen as pulsars that emit lighthouse-like beams of radio waves."
...is the value of good old-fashioned study.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
What's England got to do with it, though?
could someone explain?
An overview presentation of the capabilities of Pulsars has been uploaded to Youtube.
we're bound to prove him wrong, dammit!
Because quantum mechanics is right. Exhibit A, the computer you are typing on.
Einstein has yet to prove why hot dogs and hot dog buns come in inequal quantities.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
Nothing annoys me more than vain politicians having things named after themselves. Especially scientific instruments. Robert Byrd is one of the biggest pork barrel spenders in congress and in my opinion nothing should be named after him.
If I disagree with you it's because you are wrong.
That there isn't any type of classification in between LAW and THEORY
Makes things like this sit in the same bucket as one of my drunken musings. "I have a theory that.... in..... etc". There should be a state of a theory where they can say "Well, we can't yet prove all of it, but we have managed to prove x amount, or in x years of testing, it has yet to be unproven".
Maybe term it Conjecture? It's the fitting word to use.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
This discrepancy has been solved for two decades.
More proof that it doesn't pay to doubt Einstein.
Consider, as examples, Newton's laws of motion, or the laws of thermodynamics. Newton's theory of motion is deduced from his laws; the conventional theory of thermodynamics, likewise.
I say this because there are plenty of non-scientists who deliberately attempt to exploit confusion induced by popular use of the terms "law" and "theory" so as to imply that scientific theories, notably the theory of evolution, are held tentatively.
Wikileaks, no DNS
Usually pop culture gets these people's character pretty wrong. Elvis, for example, is "the King", when he was just a singing truck driver.
But Einstein they got pretty right. Sure, he didn't know everything, was smart really only within his very narrow discipline of mathematical theoretical physics. Einstein himself used to say "I really only ever had 4 good ideas, and 2 were wrong". But the couple he was right about, he was really right.
And with the wild hair, the pacifism, the "same suit every day so I don't have to waste time thinking about it", and the snappy short equations that explain everything, he's probably the coolest smart guy since they all used to wear togas and live on wine and souvlaki on the beach.
--
make install -not war
If they want to REALLY test a theory, they should just post it on slashdot. You know, because mass opinion is what really matters, regardless as to what's right and wrong.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Einstein, is there anything he can't do?? Mmmmm, Bacon.
Shh.
So, more evidence supporting general relativity, but we still insist on viewing it as an approximation of a quantum-mechanical system (like how Newtonian physics can be viewed as an approximation of relativity).
My understanding is that relativity has been directly observed several times, whereas quantum theory is still just based on the interpretation of a series of controlled laboratory experiments, which mostly amounts to sifting through the wreckage of a high-energy collision and trying to derive the original state from the leftover pieces.
Isn't it about time to abandon the concept of the graviton and just accept that gravity is not a fundamental force, but is simply the observed effect of the curvature of spacetime due to the presence of matter and energy?
There's a saying in engineering: When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.
... and still they are gonna go without any real proof that the LHC won't kill us, and turn it on.
Ironic, ain't it?
in a rotating system, that an unbalanced torque produces precession is old news. what a waste of time and internet space this article is.
No, but I'm pretty sure it was proved that they are invariantly unequal under any Brand Name and Store You Buy Them At transformation. What a triumph!
Ever since I could read the popular science crap in newspapers or magazines, every fucking 6 months some reporter decided to run with the "Einstein proven right" tag and waste 3 minutes of my life. Why do I keep falling for it ? Why do they keep doing it ?
All the stories are the same, some observation was made that surprise, surprise turned out to be consistent with General Relativity. It's not like the theory was "proven", it just survived another chance to be not proven.
Every time I take a shit and it falls into the toilet instead of jumping out and splattering on the ceiling, I don't write a press release about how Newton was proven right.
I guess it is because Einstein is such a popular figure -- if you can hint that somehow there was some controversy about some prediction of his, and he turned out right, people immediately detect a good heart warming story and go to read it.
This time, I did not read the story, and instead chose to waste the obligatory 3 minutes making this post.
I'm getting sick of Einstein's theories continually being proved right.
We already know that there is something wrong with it on the quantum end of the scale. When are we going to get some tests which prove it wrong in a way that will help us refine it? Doesn't anyone have any tests they can do that will give us that information?
Cow Cube
The word you are searching for is hypothesis.
There are 4 terms that need to be understood in the realm of science - hypothesis, theory, law & fact. They are all separate & distinct, except for the only progression that occurs - hypothesis => theory.
A fact is what has been carefully observed.
A law describes that observation.
A hypothesis is a proposal intended to explain that observation.
A theory seeks to explain that observation & has been confirmed by considerable evidence and has endured all attempts to disprove it.
example:
Fact
Objects fall at the same rate regardless of mass.
Law
http://www.glenbrook.k12.il.us/GBSSCI/PHYS/Class/circles/u6l3c1.gif
Hypothesis => Theory
Mass causes a curvature of spacetime which creates the effect of gravity.
You are begging the question that posting that was of more value than reading the article and not posting it...
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
as a sort of intellectual modesty, a reverence for the pursuit of science and the natural world
of course, this modesty doesn't translate well into a religious culture of simpletons who only talk in arrogant absolute laws on topics, like human sexuality, or crime and punishment, that are inherently subtle and complex. such that all these scientific "theories" to them can't possibly ring true, as flimsy and modestly phrased as they are. what they need is some cruel visage of a god to threaten fire and brimstone before something is respected
loud ugly morons need crude mental hammers in order process their world. morons ruin the world for the rest of us
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I want to know if time slows down for the pulsars. We seem to see them (I rtfa) orbiting around each other every couple of hours... If you were standing on that orbiting pulsar, how long do you think your watch would read? From the outside - earth, you appear to move around every 2 hours...but if you were sitting there, time slows down...so would you think you were there for weeks? oddness. measure that.
Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? Surely this computer must submit also!
All the stories are the same, some observation was made that surprise, surprise turned out to be consistent with General Relativity. It's not like the theory was "proven", it just survived another chance to be not proven.
Except this time the experiment was to do something that couldn't be done before and in the end they give Einstein's theory a little more credit. A new measurement (observation) matches theory. It's a win-win. You would prefer to only hear of when he is discredited? And their results aren't focused on saying Einstein was right. They already knew he was. They just couldn't properly measure the predicted effects.
From the article:
"Those eclipses are the key to making a measurement that could never be done before," Breton said.
Einstein's 1915 theory predicted that in a close system of two very massive objects, such as neutron stars, one object's gravitational tug, along with an effect of its spinning around its axis, should cause the spin axis of the other to wobble, or precess.
Studies of other pulsars in binary systems had indicated that such wobbling occurred, but could not produce precise measurements of the amount of wobbling.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
Nice try, but let's ask the Cloud: Nope, Googlefight definitely says that quantum theory is the correct one.
Otherwise, we will never leave our solar system.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Is "Green Bank" code for "Burning Cross?"
This facility must be renamed.
I have a question for the there-cannot-be-a-gravitational-stress-energy-tensor crowd. How do you explain that binary pulsars slow down after emitting gravitational radiation? I mean, relativistic mass depends on speed. After the pulsars slow down, their relativistic mass would decrease, which means that the gravitational attraction of the system would decrease, which indicates that some energy was taken away. So how do you explain that if, according to you, graviational radiation carries no energy?
"The laws of science are descriptive, not proscriptive."
Conservapedia should demand raw data.
Blasphemers! Model != Reality. The model is our best representation of how reality works. Models are never "proven," they simply have not yet been falsified or have only been falsified under specific conditions. The longer they stay unbroken, the more reliance we place on them. But, at no point do they become the reality they were created to represent. Recant, you unscientific rabble.
Invenio via vel creo
geeks, dorks, nerds.... Jeez, C'mon. Getting laid is relative to everything.
...two years ago.
I'm fairly sure it's not the first time pulsars have been used to show Einstein was right.
Fast Franks come in perfectly equal quantities.
Hot dog buns are made by bakeries, which historically sell units of 12.
Hot dogs are made by meat packers, which sell by the pound. 8 hot dogs = 1 lbs.
The two groups just never talked to each other for years and years.
Until it isn't.
Our theories about how light ACTS? Well, that's different.
We just got 1 step further away from time travel and FTL travel :(
I hate you Einstein for making the universe normal!
The same collisions the LHC will create have been going on for billions of years, with no sign that strangelets or other irreversible, dangerous weirdness going on.
But these people think that this is somehow different.
I think you'll have to try putting your glasses in a LOT of bogroll to prove this is safe. you'd better start soon before they ask the US government to arrest you for endangering the known universe though.
How many fucking minutes does /. require to allow posting? A pile of my breakfast would make a better system than this. DON'T PAY SLASHDOT. They can't program for shit.
News at 10!
That's the test that will prove GR once and for all.
In "Six Easy Pieces", Feynman says:
Newton thought that light was made up of particles, but then it was discovered, as we have seen here, that it behaves like a wave. Later, however (in the beginning of the twentieth century) it was found that light did indeed sometimes behave like a particle. Historically, the electron, for example, was thought to behave like a particle, and then it was found in many respects that it behaved like a wave. So it really behaves like neither. Now we have given up. We say: "It is like neither."
There is one lucky break, however — electrons behave just like light. The quantum behavior of atomic objects (electrons, protons, neutrons, photons, and so on) is the same for all; they are all "particle waves," or whatever you want to call them.
visualized in the large, solid man-world.
Or a manbot's manputer's world, for that matter. But what about a fembot's femputer's world?
Hmm, so a hypothetical object (i.e. neutron star) which was theorised based on GR is then 'observed' and 'proves' GR is right.
That's just self-referential crap. In any other field it would be called pseudo-science.
Cosmology is for the most part just dreamt up by over-active imaginations, and any association with Einstein is just a way to gain credibility -- and money. And science 'reporting' doesn't help - they constantly turn press releases from unis (which are just as much marketing as any other press release) into 'science stories'.
I for one feel a little worried when science isn't proven wrong in a relatively short period of time - how many of you would still like to be using turn of the century medicine? Or rely on Chinese medicine - 'its thousands of years old and hasn't changed - it must be right', rather than 'it's thousands of years and hasn't advanced - don't they learn anything?'.
Cosmology is one field where they time and time again go looking for confirmation of theories rather than ways to break it. That isn't science.
Even when the only true hard evidence they have, like oh i dunno, the 'Pioneer anomaly', says otherwise, they find ways of discounting it or just throw their hands up and say it's magic (i.e. make up some new dark-thing or blah-particle). That just isn't science.
The problem is, "model" and "reality" aren't as separate as you suggest. In testing our models, we interact with the objects posited by the models, or that were posited by earlier, now confirmed, models. We need to understand these objects as real, not just "not falsified," in order to make sense of our scientific practice. As Ian Hacking puts it, we use electrons to do things, which means electrons must be real.
In general, the Popperian idea that theories are never confirmed, they are only ever not falsified, is pretty much universally rejected by philosophers of science these days.