Author Topic: Softpedia News - The First Test That Proves General Theory of Relativity Wrong  (Read 4244 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline Liberator

  • Poe's Law In Action
  • 210
Re: Softpedia News - The First Test That Proves General Theory of Relativity Wrong
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.
So as through a glass, and darkly
The age long strife I see
Where I fought in many guises,
Many names, but always me.

There are only 10 types of people in the world , those that understand binary and those that don't.

 

Offline Herra Tohtori

  • The Academic
  • 211
  • Bad command or file name
Re: Softpedia News - The First Test That Proves General Theory of Relativity Wrong
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.

Quote
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.

Quote
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
« Last Edit: February 28, 2010, 05:22:23 am by Herra Tohtori »
There are three things that last forever: Abort, Retry, Fail - and the greatest of these is Fail.

 

Offline karajorma

  • King Louie - Jungle VIP
  • Administrator
  • 214
    • Karajorma's Freespace FAQ
Re: Softpedia News - The First Test That Proves General Theory of Relativity Wrong
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?
Karajorma's Freespace FAQ. It's almost like asking me yourself.

[ Diaspora ] - [ Seeds Of Rebellion ] - [ Mind Games ]

 

Offline Goober5000

  • HLP Loremaster
  • 214
    • Goober5000 Productions
Re: Softpedia News - The First Test That Proves General Theory of Relativity Wrong
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, but I'm wondering if the Flyby anomaly would be more directly related.  They both involve spinny things. :nod:

 

Offline Mongoose

  • Rikki-Tikki-Tavi
  • Global Moderator
  • 212
  • This brain for rent.
    • Steam
    • Something
Re: Softpedia News - The First Test That Proves General Theory of Relativity Wrong
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)

 

Offline Turambar

  • Determined to inflict his entire social circle on us
  • 210
  • You can't spell Manslaughter without laughter
Re: Softpedia News - The First Test That Proves General Theory of Relativity Wrong
Spin up the FTL!
10:55:48   TurambarBlade: i've been selecting my generals based on how much i like their hats
10:55:55   HerraTohtori: me too!
10:56:01   HerraTohtori: :D

 

Offline Klaustrophobia

  • 210
  • the REAL Nuke of HLP
    • North Carolina Tigers
Re: Softpedia News - The First Test That Proves General Theory of Relativity Wrong


(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:
I like to stare at the sun.

  

Offline Galemp

  • Actual father of Samus
  • 212
  • Ask me about GORT!
    • Steam
    • User page on the FreeSpace Wiki
Re: Softpedia News - The First Test That Proves General Theory of Relativity Wrong
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.
"Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he's supposed to be doing at that moment." -- Robert Benchley

Members I've personally met: RedStreblo, Goober5000, Sandwich, Splinter, Su-tehp, Hippo, CP5670, Terran Emperor, Karajorma, Dekker, McCall, Admiral Wolf, mxlm, RedSniper, Stealth, Black Wolf...