Trouble with Einstein

[ArabiaTerra]

If you want something with a little more credibility (I first read about it in New Scientist), try this:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heim_theory

[KOYAANISQATSI]

I think it's safe to say that gravity on earth acts pretty much as Newton showed.

 

I've no problem with Newton, he said what it did, not what it's source was.

 

While Newton was able to formulate his law of gravity in his monumental work, he was deeply uncomfortable with the notion of "action at a distance" which his equations implied. He never, in his words, "assigned the cause of this power". In all other cases, he used the phenomenon of motion to explain the origin of various forces acting on bodies, but in the case of gravity, he was unable to experimentally identify the motion that produces the force of gravity. Moreover, he refused to even offer a hypothesis as to the cause of this force on grounds that to do so was contrary to sound science. He lamented that "philosophers have hitherto attempted the search of nature in vain" for the source of the gravitational force, as he was convinced "by many reasons" that there were "causes hitherto unknown" that were fundamental to all the "phenomena of nature". These fundamental phenomena are still under investigation and, though hypotheses abound, the definitive answer is yet to be found. In Newton's 1713 General Scholium in the second edition of Principia: I have not yet been able to discover the cause of these properties of gravity from phenomena and I feign no hypotheses... It is enough that gravity does really exist and acts according to the laws I have explained, and that it abundantly serves to account for all the motions of celestial bodies. That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one another, is to me so great an absurdity that, I believe, no man who has in philosophic matters a competent faculty of thinking could ever fall into it.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_universal_gravitation

[Carlos]

I've no problem with Newton, he said what it did, not what it's source was.

 

Pretty similar to Einstein then

 

Einstein started with an assumption that gravitational mass and inertial mass were always equal, and derived GR from there, with it's warping of space by mass model for gravitational forces, but what mass is, why anything has a mass, why there is inertia.....not covered under Einstein's GR.

[KOYAANISQATSI]

It just seems that these days some theorys are far wilder than anything Le Sage put forward.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070822164415.htm

[Ross]

Sometimes I worry that Gravity might stop working.

 

 

 

Bad times

[Twerto]

by then the human race will be living in colonies light years away from here

[Carlos]

The economics work out that colonising the galaxy is almost inevitable - to collonise the whole galaxy, you only have to pay for the first wave of spaceships, after they settle, they produce the second wave for "free" and so on.... it's like the ultimate pyramid scheme. Cue Fermi paradox......

 

disclaimer:- building the first wave might not be easy

[crofter]

"A related worry is that overly vigorous particle-punishing tomfoolery at the LHC could produce "magnetic monopoles", which are dicey freaks of nature. Monopoles could trigger a runaway reaction not unlike the quark-strangelet scenario, in which everything gets changed into something else. This could lead to a turn-up for the books, in which the Moon remained made of moon but the Earth was abruptly converted into cheese."

 

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/28/lhc_cern_hawaiian_botanist_lawsuit/

[Atomic]

Please clearly identify your sources for quotes. It is not enough to merely insert a link to a website. Not everyone who values the virus-safety of their computer is going to click on every link you post. A couple of lines of reference within your post will easily indicate the validity of your source.

 

Any published scientific research papers have to go through stringent peer-review whereby pedantic studious boffins relentlessly analyse claims based on previously stringently analysed, published and proven research.

 

Any numpty can publish an opinion on the web. If you want to seriously pursue study of physics at this level I feel it is common sense to start with a solid proven foundation of what has been already established.

 

Now I don't mean hoover up anything you are told. But the peer-review method of publishing scientific research papers and PhDs is a process of building on what is already known, by strict empirical and logical analysis, not by mass-media indoctrination, but by 'real' scientists (for want of a better name) really pursuing the truth in pure science, for science's sake, not for a political or 'general consesus'' agenda.

[KOYAANISQATSI]

Pioneer 10 and 11 launched in 1972 and 1973. Today each is several billion miles away, heading in opposite directions out of the solar system.

 

The discrepancy caused by the anomaly amounts to about 248,500 miles (400,000 kilometers), or roughly the distance between Earth and the Moon. That's how much farther the probes should have traveled in their 34 years, if our understanding of gravity is correct.

 

Scientists are quick to suggest the Pioneer anomaly, as they call it, is probably caused by the space probes themselves, perhaps emitting heat or gas. But the possibilities have been tested and modeled and penciled out, and so far they don't add up.

 

Which leaves open staggering possibilities that would force wholesale reprinting of all physics books.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mystery_monday_041018.html

 

Scientists have actually calculated that Dark Matter is, in actuality, Chuck Norris. He recently flew to the west coast, and this threw off the Pioneer 10 probe by 400,000 miles.

 

Scientists have also not yet revealed the real reason behind the ban on human cloning. The real reason human cloning is outlawed is because scientists fear Chuck Norris being cloned. They theorize that two simultaneous Chuck Norris roundhouse kicks could possibly destroy the universe....

[Carlos]

"Now, Kjell Tangen, a physicist at the firm DNV in Hovik, Norway, says tweaking the law of gravity in a variety of ways cannot explain the anomaly – while also getting the orbits of the outer planets right. After modifying gravity in ways that would match the Pioneer anomaly, he inevitably got wrong answers for the motion of Uranus and Pluto."

 

http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn12070-exotic-cause-of-pioneer-anomaly-in-doubt.html

[KOYAANISQATSI]

Drag due to dust grains, or heat from the nuclear generators on board the probes being emitted in one direction more than in others probably causes the anomaly, says Tangen. But Myles Standish of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, says that the orbits of the outer planets are not known precisely enough to support Tangen's conclusion.

 

http://space.newscientist.com/article/mg19426105.400-modified-gravity-cannot-explain-pioneer-mystery.html

[Carlos]

Yup, basically there are a whole range of unknowns because of the difficulty in making measurements accurately enough.

I have read one theory that was able to explain how it was only an apparent slowing of the probes purely in terms of a mis-alignment of the transmission dish..... there is something that is not explained, and one explanation could be errors in our physics theories..... but there are others too...... when we find out, either we will have new physics to work on, or a better understanding of the practical effects of those we already knew about - a win either way.

[KOYAANISQATSI]

It's an exciting time for gravity.

 

http://planetary.org/news/2008/0228_Researchers_Investigate_New_Cosmic.html

 

Place your bets

 

The data from NEAR was most striking of all, providing the engineers with the clearest example of the anomaly. In addition to the Doppler measurements, the spacecraft's velocity change was conformed by independent "ranging" data, which measure the time it takes for a signal from Earth to be transmitted back from the spacecraft.

All this led Anderson and his colleagues to conclude that the flyby anomaly was not a fluke related to the unique conditions of the Galileo spacecraft and its trajectory, but a consistent effect influencing the speed of spacecrafts flying by our planet. Suggestions that it was caused by General Relativity's "frame dragging" (known as the "Lense-Thirring effect") led nowhere, when Anderson's calculations showed that the actual velocity change was too large to be explained by this phenomenon. But if the flyby anomaly was real, as data suggested, and if General Relativity had nothing to do with it, then what? What is the cause of the flyby anomaly?

[KOYAANISQATSI]

“With our new result we are leapfrogging the competition,†said Blas Cabrera of Stanford University, co-spokesperson of the CDMS experiment, for which the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory hosts the project management. “We have achieved the world’s most stringent limits on how often dark matter particles interact with ordinary matter and how heavy they are, in particular in the theoretically favored mass range of more than 40 times the proton mass. Our experiment is now sensitive enough to hear WIMPs even if they ring the ‘bells’ of our crystal germanium detector only twice a year. So far, we have heard nothing.â€

 

http://www.physorg.com/news123163052.html

 

For whom the bells dont toll