NASA Gravity B confirms Einstein's 1916 General Relativity

WHAT’S NEW   Robert L. Park   Friday, 6 May 2011   Washington, DC

1.  GRAVITY PROBE B: EXPERIMENT CONFIRMS THAT SCIENCE IS OPEN.
It took 52 years and $750 Million, but the Stanford-based analysis group
and NASA announced on Wednesday that the data from GP-B does indeed confirm
two key predictions of Albert Einstein's 1916 general theory of
relativity:  the geodetic effect of space-time warping around a massive
object, which we perceive as gravity, and the frame-dragging effect caused
by mass-energy currents, called gravitomagnetism in beautiful analogy with
Maxwellian electromagnetism.   The findings were published online in
Physical Review Letters.  Of what value is it?  Above all it confirms that
science is open.  The success and credibility of science are anchored in
the willingness of scientists to expose ideas and results to independent
testing and replication. Had they gotten a different result, textbooks
covering the subject would be rewritten.  More than 100 PhD candidates
worked on some aspect of the gravity probe B experiment.  They are of the
measure of its value to society.I have not read the report in detail too busy traveling etc.
I assume it means that all alternative predictions gave the wrong numbers for the given estimated errors.
Too bad because I would like there to be evidence for torsion fields.

As Feynman says a beautiful theory is murdered by an ugly fact.
In this case a beautiful theory is confirmed by a beautiful fact.

On May 6, 2011, at 11:29 AM, Paul Zielinski wrote:

OK, sloppy journalism. I'll settle for that.

On 5/6/2011 2:28 AM, JACK SARFATTI wrote:
Very simply it means that the numerical predictions of GR are confirmed in this experiment.
What's your problem?
(deleted)

On May 6, 2011, at 1:41 AM, Paul Zielinski wrote:

"Right" compared to what? Newtonian theory? Scalar-tensor theories? MOND? What?

What does it even mean to say in this context that Einstein's theory of gravity is "proven" to have been
"right"?

That's just sloppy journalism. It really means that this test did not Popper falsify 1916 GR.

That it has been definitively established that the gravitational field is literally reducible to curved
geometry, where the amount of curvature is governed in relation to the distribution of matter to 100%
accuracy by the E-H field equations?

At most the first result simply confirms the *comparative* accuracy of Einstein's 1916 geometric model
+ field equations, in relation to the currently available alternatives; while the second lends empirical
support to the theoretically predicted phenomenon of frame-dragging.

It seems to me that only a deeper theory of the gravitational vacuum will be capable of actually explaining
such effects, and the empirical success of the 1916 geometric model, in *physical* terms.

Au contraire. I am in Paris.

Einstein's theory is a local gauge theory of the T4 group - very simple.

The issue is whether we need to locally gauge bigger universal spacetime groups, i.e. full 10-parameter Poincare group (Einstein-Cartan) or the 15 parameter conformal group.