Posts Tagged ‘RELATIVITY’
Rewriting the textbooks: When science gets it wrong
THE business of gaining understanding of the world about us rarely follows a simple path from A to B. False starts, dead ends and U-turns are part of the journey. Science’s ability to accept those setbacks with aplomb – to say “we got it wrong”, to modify and abandon cherished notions and find new ideas and explanations that better fit the emerging facts – is what gives it incomparable power to make sense of our surroundings.
It also means we must be constantly on our toes. While revolutionary new ideas such as evolution by natural selection, or quantum physics, are once-in-a-generation occurrences, the sands of science are continually shifting in less dramatic ways. In the following, we focus on nine recent examples – a tweak of a definition here, a breaking or weakening of a once cast-iron concept there – that together form a snapshot of that process in action….. Read the rest of this entry »
52 Years and $750 Million Prove Einstein Was Right
In a tour de force of technology and just plain stubbornness spanning half a century and costing more than $750 million, a team of experimenters from Stanford University reported on Wednesday that a set of orbiting gyroscopes had detected a slight sag and an even slighter twist in space-time. The finding confirms some of the weirdest of the many strange predictions — like black holes and the expanding universe — of Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity, general relativity…..Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/05/science/space/05gravity.html?_r=1&ref=space