11–20 of 33 posts
it's not necessarily a tl;dr i'm requestion, so much as a physic geek deciphering.
RobotRollCall gave an explanation of the thing in the relevant /r/science thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/h45c8/nasa_announced_... (side note: RRC is one of the best commenters to ever happen to /r/science, or more generally Reddit)
For Dr. Everitt, who joined the Gravity Probe experiment in 1962 as a young postdoctoral fellow and has worked on nothing else since, the announcement on Wednesday capped a career-long journey. There's something so profound about that. To think of how many jobs I've held in my comparatively short life, how many minor career changes I've had here and there, how many massive shifts in interest and passion I've had over…
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20444-beleaguered-miss...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
RobotRollCall gave an explanation of the thing in the relevant /r/science thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/h45c8/nasa_announced_... (side note: RRC is one of the best commenters to ever happen to /r/science, or more generally Reddit)
Wow. If he/she has any spare time, or interest, at all he should teach mini science courses online to the public. He has a gift.
Does this mean that it is no longer the Theory of Relativity, but now the Law of Relativity?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But I find such "adjustments" distasteful. Well, you have to deal with it somehow. If you know the source of the noise, there's no excuse for not modelling it.
Sure, but the point is that if there's something wrong with your model of the noise, the result could be completely invalid. Look at the history of Milliken's oil-drop experiment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan.27... He got the wrong answer, but subsequent researchers who got different results kind of smoothed their own results to match the "correct" (actually wrong) expected result. I'm no…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But I find such "adjustments" distasteful. Well, you have to deal with it somehow. If you know the source of the noise, there's no excuse for not modelling it.
Sure, but the point is that if there's something wrong with your model of the noise, the result could be completely invalid. Look at the history of Milliken's oil-drop experiment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan.27... He got the wrong answer, but subsequent researchers who got different results kind of smoothed their own results to match the "correct" (actually wrong) expected result. I'm no…
Given Dr. Everitt's commitment to this experiment, I'd wager he was humble enough according to that definition ... though that assumption of mine would simply be a "halo effect" instance?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but the point is that if there's something wrong with your model of the noise, the result could be completely invalid. Look at the history of Milliken's oil-drop experiment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan.27... He got the wrong answer, but subsequent researchers who got different results kind of smoothed their own results to match the "correct" (actually wrong) expected result. I'm no…
The role that psychology and social dynamics plays in science ought to be more studied. To ignore it is foolish. One person I knew in commutative algebra said that he always adds references to the famous people in the field in his papers for ass kissing purposes. It's just one anecdote but this sort of stuff, I suspect, is much more common than it is thought.