it's not necessarily a tl;dr i'm requestion, so much as a physic geek deciphering.
it's a very direct way of measuring the curvature of space. at least in theory. in practice it was such a delicate measurement that, by the time it was done, it was confirming a theory that we not only believe, but are already questioning / extending in other ways.
so it's a beautiful but largely pointless exercise that nasa is spinning in a "romantic" way because, well, astronomy and space science depend hugely on public goodwill for government funding.
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…
And it was selfless! This one singular goal to which he's dedicated himself, every one of the fifty years of work that went into it, ultimately ended up becoming--at least when boiled down to a headline--a footnote to someone else's greatness.
Don't forget that we do science because we don't know the answer, not because we do. The best-case scenario would have been that after forty years you prove that relativity is wrong.
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…
What you are describing is a very real danger, but if you are modeling actual noise, it's less of a risk than if you are modeling some small systematic shift that you claim you must subtract from the signal. With noise, it's more unlikely that the model would just by chance give a systematic shift to the data. More likely, if the model is wrong, it just won't decrease the noise level.
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…
What you are describing is a very real danger, but if you are modeling actual noise, it's less of a risk than if you are modeling some small systematic shift that you claim you must subtract from the signal. With noise, it's more unlikely that the model would just by chance give a systematic shift to the data. More likely, if the model is wrong, it just won't decrease the noise level.
It's was actually systematic shift, but a periodic one. It wasn't random noise.
According to the article below, everything measured by the probe has long since been measured in other ways with greater precision. Based on that, I'd have to say, this probe didn't really prove anything... http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20444-beleaguered-miss...
I thought this had been proven long ago by measuring the gravitation pull the sun had on light from stars as it passed by.
What you are describing is a very real danger, but if you are modeling actual noise, it's less of a risk than if you are modeling some small systematic shift that you claim you must subtract from the signal. With noise, it's more unlikely that the model would just by chance give a systematic shift to the data. More likely, if the model is wrong, it just won't decrease the noise level.
It's was actually systematic shift, but a periodic one. It wasn't random noise.
Well, true. If the noise was truly random, you couldn't model it, of course. I just meant "noise" in the sense of "apparently random variations that actually aren't random".
Does this mean that it is no longer the Theory of Relativity, but now the Law of Relativity?
That's not how theories work. A scientific theory is more like a framework and not really the same meaning as what people usually mean by theory (which is closer to hypothesis). Also nothing in science can ever be 100% definite; the term law shouldn't really ever be used.
As an aside to your comment, misuse of the word theory is a big pet peeve of mine.
In day to day conversation, people use it interchangeably with the word opinion (or as you mentioned hypothesis).
"My theory is the government should such and such." This is bogus! So later, when someone hears about the "theory" of evolution, it strikes them as something with which they can disagree.
Falsifiable scientific experiment -- the gold standard for physics -- cannot prove that something is right. It can only fail to demonstrate that something is wrong.