NASA Poised To Topple a Planet-Finding Barrier (nextbigfuture.com)

schwit1 shares a report from NextBigFuture.com: Babak Saif and Lee Feinberg at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, have shown for the first time that they can dynamically detect subatomic- or picometer-sized distortions -- changes that are far smaller than an atom -- across a five-foot segmented telescope mirror and its support structure. Collaborating with Perry Greenfield at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, the team now plans to use a next-generation tool and thermal test chamber to further refine their measurements. The measurement feat is good news to scientists studying future missions for finding and characterizing extrasolar Earth-like planets that potentially could support life. To find life, these observatories would have to gather and focus enough light to distinguish the planet's light from that of its much brighter parent star and then be able to dissect that light to discern different atmospheric chemical signatures, such as oxygen and methane. This would require a super-stable observatory whose optical components move or distort no more than 12 picometers, a measurement that is about one-tenth the size of a hydrogen atom.

Comments

Perhaps they will explain gravity

[paradigmsareconstruc]

One straightforwardly physical way to explain gravity is as a distortion of electron orbitals, similar to what is seen with the van der waals force. If atoms were to simply resonate with one another, and if electrons had sub-particles, that would seem to be a pretty good theoretical basis for explaining gravity as related to E&M.

From Quantum Generations: A History of Physics in the Twentieth Century, Helge Kragh

"ELECTRON THEORY AS A WORLDVIEW

By 1904 the electromagnetic view of the world had taken off and emerged as a highly attractive substitute for the mechanical view that was widely seen as outdated, materialistic, and primitive. As an indication of the strength of the new theory, it was not only discussed in specialized journals, but also began to appear in physics textbooks ...

In commemoration of the centenary of the United States' purchase of the Louisiana Territory, a Congress of Arts and Sciences was held in St. Louis in September 1904. Among the physics delegates were several international leaders of physics, including Rutherford, Poincare, and Boltzmann. The general message of many of the addresses was that physics was at a turning point and that electron theory was on its way to establishing a new paradigm in physics. In his sweeping survey of problems in mathematical physics, Poincare spoke of the 'general ruin of the principles' that characterized the period. Poincare was himself an important contributor to electron theory and he was now willing to conclude that 'the mass of the electrons, or, at least of the negative electrons, is of exclusively electro-dynamic origin ... [T]here is no mass other than electro-dynamic inertia' (Sopka and Moyer 1986, 292). The address of another French physicist, thirty-two-year-old Paul Langevin, was more detailed, but no less grand, no less eloquent, and no less in favor of the electromagnetic world picture. Langevin argued for his own (and Bucberer's) model of the electron, but the detailed structure of the electron was not what really mattered. The important thing was the coming of a new era of physics. As Langevin explained in his closing words:

'The rapid perspective which I have just sketched is full of promises, and I believe that rarely in the history of physics has one had the opportunity of looking either so far into the past or so far into the future. The relative importance of parts of this immense and scarcely explored domain appears different to-day from what it did in the preceding century: from the new point of view the various plans arrange themselves in a new order. The electrical idea, the last discovered, appears to-day to dominate the whole, as the place of choice where the explorer feels he can found a city before advancing into new territories .... The actual tendency, of making the electromagnetic ideas to occupy the preponderating place, is justified, as I have sought to show, by the solidity of the double base on which rests the idea of the electron [the Maxwell equations and the empirical electron] ... Although still very recent, the conceptions of which I have sought to give a collected idea are about to penetrate to the very heart of the entire physics, and to act as a fertile germ in order to crystallize around it, in a new order, facts very far removed from one another ... This idea has taken an immense development in the last few years, which causes it to break the framework of the old physics to pieces, and to overturn the established order of ideas and laws in order to branch out again in an organization which one foresees to be simple, harmonious, and fruitful' (ibid., 230)

Evaluations similar to Langevin's, and often using the same code words and imagery, can be found abundantly in the literature around 1905. They rarely included references to quantum theory or the new theory of