I saw it live -- from a parking lot in Clearwater, FL. Although Clearwater is 150 miles West of the launch site, the launches were still easily visible. (Night launches were *spectacular*!) What I remember noticing first is the SRB's veering off while still under thrust. My first thought was that the mission was aborted to attempt an emergency landing; however, safety procedures would never have permitted this until after the SRB's had burned out and separated. It was a minute or so later before we heard on the radio that the Challenger had actually exploded.
In fact, there are remarkable similarites between "Dark Matter" and "Epicycles". People forget that the ancient Greeks were practicing very good science when they came up with an ingenious way to explain planetary motion. The epicycle theory explained planetary retrograde motion within the limited measurement accuracy of the time, and was the dominant cosmological theory for centuries. When sufficiently accurate measurements were taken, the earth-centric model was put to rest.
One wonders if the same thing will happen to Dark Energy. Right now it has prevelance because nobody has a better solution. Still, it smacks of the same type of ad-hoc, "band-aid" solution as epicycles. It will be interesting to see if the Dark Energy theory leads to a revolution in the understanding of matter or whether it lands in the dust bin of discarded physics. Will future generations be laughing at it?
Slashdot Mirror
I saw it live -- from a parking lot in Clearwater, FL. Although Clearwater is 150 miles West of the launch site, the launches were still easily visible. (Night launches were *spectacular*!) What I remember noticing first is the SRB's veering off while still under thrust. My first thought was that the mission was aborted to attempt an emergency landing; however, safety procedures would never have permitted this until after the SRB's had burned out and separated. It was a minute or so later before we heard on the radio that the Challenger had actually exploded.
You're wrong -- GPS satellites are in 12 hour orbits, not 24: http://documents.wolfram.com/applications/astronom er/Notebooks/GPSSatellites.html
In fact, there are remarkable similarites between "Dark Matter" and "Epicycles". People forget that the ancient Greeks were practicing very good science when they came up with an ingenious way to explain planetary motion. The epicycle theory explained planetary retrograde motion within the limited measurement accuracy of the time, and was the dominant cosmological theory for centuries. When sufficiently accurate measurements were taken, the earth-centric model was put to rest. One wonders if the same thing will happen to Dark Energy. Right now it has prevelance because nobody has a better solution. Still, it smacks of the same type of ad-hoc, "band-aid" solution as epicycles. It will be interesting to see if the Dark Energy theory leads to a revolution in the understanding of matter or whether it lands in the dust bin of discarded physics. Will future generations be laughing at it?