Enemy Combatant
Wednesday, January 05, 2005
And Now For Something Completely Cosmic
I missed this story when it first came out, several months ago, but it deserves mention in today's context:
Frame Dragging Confirmed
(Oct 22, 2004) When developing his General Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein predicted that the Earth should drag space and time around with it as it rotates on its axis. NASA's Gravity Probe B spacecraft was launched earlier this year to help confirm this prediction, but an international team of researchers has beaten the spacecraft to a conclusion. By carefully tracking the position of the LAGEOS and LAGEOS 2 satellites - beachball-sized spheres covered in mirrors - they discovered that their orbit is being shifted by about two metres a year by this dragging effect by the Earth's gravity, almost exactly what was predicted [in 1918] by Einstein.
That's right -- "frame dragging" was predicted by Einstein 86 years ago. Something he figured out in his head -- and that (clearly worded and explained in detail during a three-day seminar on astrophysics) wouldn't have been understood by 99.9% of the world's people in his day, and maybe could be understood by a handful more of the populace today.
In comparison, BushCo's prediction that we would find WMDs in Iraq -- of about 2-3 years' vintage -- looks to be a thoroughly discredited conclusion, even now.
Of course, the "forward-leaning" people in Einstein's day, and in Einstein's neighborhood, would have put him to death -- for being a Jew.
Thank goodness the world has changed, eh? Nowadays, he'd just be thoroughly discredited, ignored in the mainstream press, and ridiculed by lesser scientists on Fox News -- for being a leftist kook!
