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New Satellite Experiment Helps Confirm Einstein's Equivalence Principle (presse.cnes.fr)
Part of Einstein's theory of general relativity posits that gravity equals inertial mass -- and for the first time in 10 years, there's new evidence that he's right. Slashdot reader orsayman reports:
Most stories around space today seem to revolve around SpaceX, but let's not forget that space is also a place for cool physics experiments. One such experiment currently running into low orbit is the MICROSCOPE satellite launched in 2016 to test the (weak) Equivalence Principle (also knows as the universality of free fall) a central hypothesis in General Relativity.
The first results confirm the principle with a precision ten times better than previous experiments. And it's just the beginning since they hope to increase the precision by another factor of 10. If the Equivalence Principle is still verified at this precision, this could constrain or invalidate some quantum gravity theories. For those of you who are more satellite-science oriented, the satellite also features an innovative "self destruct" mechanism (meant to limit orbit pollution) based on inflatable structures described in this paper.
"The science phase of the mission began in December 2016," reports France's space agency, "and has already collected data from 1,900 orbits, the equivalent of a free fall of 85 million kilometres or half the Earth-Sun distance."
The first results confirm the principle with a precision ten times better than previous experiments. And it's just the beginning since they hope to increase the precision by another factor of 10. If the Equivalence Principle is still verified at this precision, this could constrain or invalidate some quantum gravity theories. For those of you who are more satellite-science oriented, the satellite also features an innovative "self destruct" mechanism (meant to limit orbit pollution) based on inflatable structures described in this paper.
"The science phase of the mission began in December 2016," reports France's space agency, "and has already collected data from 1,900 orbits, the equivalent of a free fall of 85 million kilometres or half the Earth-Sun distance."
And this explains why humans have never, and can never, go anywhere near the north and south poles.
Is there any lay text around that explains how the experiment works? The article doesn't have and talks more about space pollution than relativity & gravity.
For those of you who don't pay attention to space matters, de-orbiting satellites is important because of something called the Kessler Syndrome. In effect, too much traffic up there would make it very difficult to get into space for thousands of years. This is also part of why the Chinese anti-satellite weapon test a while back was a big deal.
We try to track everything, especially everything above a certain size, so we can prevent collissions.
There's slightly more than a stub on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Real lawyers write in C++
This is what we pay taxes for.
I wouldn't exactly say it's cooler, but it's something that any good theory of gravity is going to need to explain, and we need a new theory of gravity, because General Relativity doesn't play nice with quantum physics...but they both seem correct everywhere we can test either of them (usually, though, we can't test them in the same places).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Pure inventions on the part of the round-earthers to hide the locations of the edges.
But the truth of the flat Earth will still win in the end; the Flat Earth Society has now members from all around the globe!
I was missing these AC cow posts. Much more amusing than our recent flat earther coward.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj