The Lense-Thirring Effect, Measured

"An experiment using two orbiting satellites has proved that as the Earth turns it drags space and time around itself, like a spinning top in treacle."

“Einstein Is Proved Right Again"

Not bad for a former patent clerk.

Via Google News.

Posted by on 10/22 at 03:17 AM

  1. Louis Essen: The famous paper published in 1905 does not appear to have attracted any attention until Eddington returned from an expedition to study the eclipse in 1919, and with great publicity announced to a meeting of the Astronomical Society in London that the results had proved Einstein’s theory. What he thought he had confirmed was Einstein’s value for the bending of light round the sun. Scientists were prepared to go to a lot of trouble to obtain experimental evidence for the theory as they realised that this was necessary and yet Eddington is supposed to have said that the theory was so satisfactory that if the experimental results did not confirm it then they must be wrong. A criticism of the results made later pointed out that in order to obtain the result he wanted, some of the observations which did not fit were ignored. Also someone has pointed out, with some evidence, that Einstein himself had predicted two results differing by 2 to 1 for the deflection. Finally the deflection of the sun’s rays has nothing to do with the special theory and the clock paradox and yet in some mysterious way it was claimed to confirm it. Still searching for experimental support an experiment was made in the US some years ago. Four atomic clocks were carried by plane in opposite directions round the world. The discrepancies between the results for different clocks were many times greater than the effect being sought, and yet by ignoring the results they did not like and performing some undescribed statistical analysis the authors claimed to have confirmed Einstein’s theory and specifically the clock paradox. There was a spectacular television programme about it in which a well-known actor was installed in a simulated space shuttle and told that he would come back younger than if he had stayed on earth. Being an intelligent man he appeared to regard it as a lot of nonsense as I hope the viewers did.

    Posted by  on  10/25  at  11:43 AM

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