Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: jr2 on February 26, 2010, 04:45:02 pm
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The First Test That Proves General Theory of Relativity Wrong
A spinning top increases its weight much more than expected
(http://news.softpedia.com/images/news2/The-First-Test-That-Proves-General-Theory-of-Relativity-Wrong-2.jpg)
According to Einstein's theory of general relativity, a moving mass should create another field, called gravitomagnetic field, besides its static gravitational field. This field has now been measured for the first time and to the scientists' astonishment, it proved to be no less than one hundred million trillion times larger than Einstein's General Relativity predicts.
This gravitomagnetic field is similar to the magnetic field produced by a moving electric charge (hence the name "gravitomagnetic" analogous to "electromagnetic"). For example, the electric charges moving in a coil produce a magnetic field - such a coil behaves like a magnet. Similarly, the gravitomagnetic field can be produced to be a mass moving in a circle. What the electric charge is for electromagnetism, mass is for gravitation theory (the general theory of relativity).
A spinning top weights more than the same top standing still. However, according to Einstein's theory, the difference is negligible. It should be so small that we shouldn't even be capable of measuring it. But now scientists from the European Space Agancy, Martin Tajmar, Clovis de Matos and their colleagues, have actually measured it. At first they couldn't believe the result.
"We ran more than 250 experiments, improved the facility over 3 years and discussed the validity of the results for 8 months before making this announcement. Now we are confident about the measurement," says Tajmar. They hope other physicists will now conduct their own versions of the experiment so they could be absolutely certain that they have really measured the gravitomagnetic field and not something else. This may be the first empiric clue for how to merge together quantum mechanics and general theory of relativity in a single unified theory.
"If confirmed, this would be a major breakthrough," says Tajmar, "it opens up a new means of investigating general relativity and its consequences in the quantum world."
(http://news.softpedia.com/images/news2/The-First-Test-That-Proves-General-Theory-of-Relativity-Wrong-3.jpg)
The experiment involved a ring of superconducting material rotating up to 6 500 times a minute. According to quantum theory, spinning superconductors should produce a weak magnetic field. The problem was that Tajmar and de Matos experiments with spinning superconductors didn't seem to fit the theory - although in all other aspects the quantum theory gives incredibly accurate predictions. Tajmar and de Matos then had the idea that maybe the quantum theory wasn't wrong after all but that there was some additional effect overlapping over their experiments, some effect they neglected.
What could this other effect be? They thought maybe it's the gravitomagnetic field - the fact that the spinning top exerts a higher gravitational force. So, they placed around the spinning superconductor a series of very sensible acceleration sensors for measuring whether this effect really existed. They obtained more than they bargained for!
Although the acceleration produced by the spinning superconductor was 100 millionths of the acceleration due to the Earth's gravitational field, it is a surprising one hundred million trillion times larger than Einstein's General Relativity predicts. Thus, the spinning top generated a much more powerful gravitomagnetic field than expected.
Now, it remains the need for a proper theory. Scientists can also now check whether candidate theories, such as the string theory, can describe this experiment correctly. Moreover, this experiment shows that gravitational waves should be much more easily to detect than previously thought.
Photo: the experimental apparatus. Credits: ESA
Thoughts? There's a bunch of comments on the site if anyone wants to check them out / comment over there. I thought it mildly interesting. I'm sure the scientist types here will think it more so.
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Unified theory provided by a dredel? Thanks Judaic peoples!
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my initial thoughts bounce around the area of does motion as either the change of position of matter or the exertion of the energy needed to move that mass affect the dimensional barriers, could this relate to the effect that movement has on time.
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HG wells time machine design, the inner-space miniaturisation centrifuge, mass effect relays, the device from that Jodie Foster film 'contact'. . . . .
They could all be possible?
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It amazes me how often this "theory-shattering news" gets spread around in slightly different forms. Anytime I see such an article involving spinning superconductors and gravitomagnetism and MONTHS OF TESTS AND ANALYSIS BEFORE MAKING THIS ANNOUNCEMENT!!!111, I die a little. :/
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Nothing in there seems to scream "general Relativity is wrong". It's just not 100% right. Which is perfectly normal in science. Theories get tested and refined all the time. News at eleven.
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It just happened to be numerically off by 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 times. That doesn't mean it was completely wrong...
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It just happened to be numerically off by 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 times. That doesn't mean it was completely wrong...
The magnitude of the error is irrelevant. Whether it was off by 10 times or ten trillion is not the point here. If it's significantly different from predictions, that's all that's of interest.
As The_E said, nothing about this suggests that "general relativity is wrong". What it does suggest is that there may be a hole in GR which will allow new theoretical discoveries, much as holes in Newtonian mechanics allowed the discovery of relativity.
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It just happened to be numerically off by 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 times. That doesn't mean it was completely wrong...
the magnitudes involved here are so small simple rounding error in calculation or measurement uncertainty could easily account for that.
i feel kindof bad for doing this, as something of a scientist myself, but i read internet science articles like this with a HUGE amount of skepticsim. there is some rediculous stuff that gets thrown around the internet. like one about cold fusion in essentially a mayonase jar. :rolleyes: legitimate experiments and results will be published in journals.
that said, if this is true, yeah it's kindof interesting. although i don't know a whole lot of quantum mechanics and no general relativity at all. it does rather seem that this effect is still negligible, even at 10^18 times the original prediction.
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if real this could provide a mechanism for artificial gravity.
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Right, because generating enough gravitometric force to equal one gravity will be easy.
// end sarcasm
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But think of the applications!
I don't know about you, but I want to walk on my ceiling whenever it pleases me. :P
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Floors were invented for a reason, dammit!
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There's no real description of the test setup or measurement techniques. I'm going to abstain from further comments before I see this in some peer reviewed publication.
However, some key questions that come into my mind:
-How does the effect change when scaled up or down? Inverse square of distance? Something different? It's already known that general relativity doesn't exactly produce 1:1 results matching reality when the scale gets so small that quantum phenomena start to dominate, and possibly also when you're dealing with galactic and intergalactic scales of distances. Dark matter assumption relies almost completely on the assumption that general relativity produces reliable predictions at large scales at which the anomalies are observed in stars orbiting galaxies.
-Any relation to Pioneer anomaly (which, if interpreted as accurate, would actually be the first test to prove numerical inaccuracy in predictions given by General Relativity)?
-Does the spinning increase the disk's inertial mass? Is this change (kinetic mass) significantly larger or smaller than the allegedly observed change in gravitational mass?
No matter what the outcome of this will be, it's always exciting to see some new research stir up the established scientific facts. Personally I damn well hope that this'll lead to better understanding of gravity and who knows, maybe even gravitic technology? After all, some of the declarations based on General Relativity are rather depressing, like the complete disallowance of superluminal speeds...
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I'd take this more seriously if it didn't have a moronic title. Seriously, they couldn't have made up a worse title if they tried. :rolleyes:
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Right, because generating enough gravitometric force to equal one gravity will be easy.
// end sarcasm
Who said it would be neccesary?
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is a surprising one hundred million trillion times larger than Einstein's General Relativity predicts.
If GTR itself was wrong hadn't that been noticed already, in all the observations they've made in the field of astrophysics?
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piff,
wont be possible without a flux capacitor :D
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Mister fusion will be here in five years or less!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeLorean_time_machine#Mr._Fusion
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I was kind of skeptical of this too... but isn't softpedia err.. a little bit above that? I don't see why they would "let's make like a tabloid and spread this nonsense around"... of course, I don't know, maybe they do do that, but it wouldn't be good for one's name. *shrugs* well it's interesting anyway.
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No matter what the outcome of this will be, it's always exciting to see some new research stir up the established scientific facts.
"Big Science" doesn't do new and exciting. They want what will push they're agenda. Facts be damned.
No matter what this means it will be toss aside and ignored.
Cynical much? Yeah, screwballs've never given me a reason not to be.
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No matter what the outcome of this will be, it's always exciting to see some new research stir up the established scientific facts.
"Big Science" doesn't do new and exciting. They want what will push they're agenda. Facts be damned.
Your argument is invalid and shows a remarkable lack of understanding on the methods of science. This kind of thing is more in the playing field of organizations that rely on dogmatic, unchangeable foundation on ideological basis. Science doesn't have such basis, only observations of nature to base hypotheses and craft theories on.
EDIT: Also, it's not "they're", it's "their". "They're" is a shortened form of "they are", which doesn't even make sense in the context and I can't see how a native english speaker can consistently make this error, while their spelling and grammar otherwise seems to be correct.
No matter what this means it will be toss aside and ignored.
Hardly. It will be documented and peer reviewed, and if it's a genuine discovery - and those do happen as experimental equipment increases our ability to observe the universe and reduces error bars - it will be published and if it's at odds with concurrent theories' predictions, then it will prompt people to start looking at either the theories, or some hidden variables in the experiment.
That's why documentation of experiments to the last detail is so important; so they can be replicated by people to confirm the results.
Cynical much? Yeah, screwballs've never given me a reason not to be.
In case you never knew, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century physicists pretty much considered their branch of science "done" with classical physics offering explanation to practically all situations that had been observed; they assumed that there would mainly be some fine tuning of some equations and that's it.
But there were anomalies observed; mainly issues with light and gravity, and eventually as the observational accuracy increased, fine tuning of classical physics couldn't account to these anomalies.
Enter Max Planck who laid the basis for quantum mechanics with his works on black-body radiation, and Albert Einstein who first advanced quantum mechanics in his work regarding photoelectric phenomenon (and notably got a Nobel prize of physics for that work rather than his later works) and later introduced special and general theories of relativity, which changed the perception of the universe on macroscopic scale from galilean coordinate system and newtonian mechanics to something where space, time, matter and energy are all interacting with each other rather than being separate from each other.
If that's not new and exciting I don't know what is. In fact if your claim were to be accurate, we would never have proceeded to the level where classical physics were at that point. We would have still been using Catholic Church's official true physics; they couldn't stop the march of science, why do you assume that science itself somehow would do that?
Of course there are scientists who want to be right rather than discover the best explanations, or have "agendas" to use your wording, but the scientific community by and large would be pretty hard to persuade to hide new research results.
So, what you're suggesting is a form of conspiracy theory, and is prone to same weaknesses that plague all conspiracy theories; mainly that there would be too many people to "silence" one way or another - bribery, threats or elimination. It would not stay hidden forever, as resources of the people or organizations who would want to keep information hidden to advance their "agendas" always have limited resources.
You can't stop the signal. :p
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Not to mention that there are much more recent examples than that. Lamarckism for instance was basically considered nonsense for a long time because it completely contradicted our understanding of genetics and evolution. But as soon as experiments showed that there was a mechanism by which something similar to it could happen it was accepted.
So if Liberator's ludicrous belief had any validity why would any group of scientists add a "but...." to Darwinian evolution?
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Although Liberator's cynicism is a bit over the top, scientists are only human. Many of them will cling to an idea long after it has been shown that another theory fits better. It took decades for plate tectonics to be accepted in the scientific mainstream, for example.
Back on topic, I would certainly be interested to hear more about this experiment. HT mentioned the Pioneer anomaly (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_anomaly), but I'm wondering if the Flyby anomaly (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flyby_anomaly) would be more directly related. They both involve spinny things. :nod:
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I really hate sensationalistic article titles like this, but the actual result is intriguing. It wouldn't surprise me at all if certain elements of general relativity didn't hold up across all scales and conditions; while I haven't studied the theory directly myself, I do know that gravity is currently very poorly-defined on the quantum and near-quantum scale. It could very well be that this result provides a starting point for further efforts to increase that understanding, or it could be that it can be attributed to some sort of instrumentation issue or other anomaly. Either way, its results won't affect the usefulness of general relativity as a whole, as its predictions have already been experimentally verified time and time again on a number of scales; for example, it needs to be taken into account for GPS to function accurately. It could just be that general relativity's scope will become more constrained over time, just as the limited case of special relativity is still useful for discussing objects in an inertial frame of reference and negligible gravity, and the even more limited case of Newtonian mechanics is more than sufficient for everyday low-speed motion.
(Nice to see that other lab setups look as thrown-together as the one I worked in back in school, too. :p)
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Spin up the FTL!
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(Nice to see that other lab setups look as thrown-together as the one I worked in back in school, too. :p)
you ought to see our lab then. :eek2:
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I'd take this more seriously if it didn't have a moronic title. Seriously, they couldn't have made up a worse title if they tried. :rolleyes:
Agreed. There's nothing in here--at all-that that proves Relativity 'wrong,' it's simply a refinement that has implications toward building a unified field theory. It's like saying Relativity Theory proved Classical Mechanics 'wrong;' all those Newtonian experiments and equations aren't suddenly invalid, they've just been refined and applied to a different frame of reference.
Like Herra said, that sort of non-scientific mode of thinking is much more akin to dogmatism found in faith-based belief systems. It's likely this article's headline will see more press in the Young Earth Creationist crowd than the actual experiment will in published journals.