>
> Einsteiniana wastes so much money that sometimes even the bosses get
> embarrassed:
>
>
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2004/0...
> "Did Einstein get all his sums right?.....Last week, an American probe
> began an 18-month mission to put Einstein's prediction to the test, 90
> years after he unveiled his ideas in Berlin. Gravity Probe B was
> blasted into space from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on
> a Boeing Delta 2 rocket and will orbit the Earth for more than a year.
> The $700 million joint mission between Nasa and Stanford University,
> conceived in 1958, uses four of the most perfect spheres ever created
> inside the world's largest Thermos flask to detect minute distortions
> in the fabric of the universe.....Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer
> Royal, said: "The project's a technical triumph, and a triumph of the
> persistence and lobbying power of Stanford University. But its
> gestation has been grotesquely prolonged, and the cost overruns have
> been equally gross. I recall hearing a talk about the project from
> Francis Everitt (principal investigator) when I was still a student -
> and it was already well advanced. "Back in the 1960s the evidence for
> Einstein's theory was meagre - just two tests, with 10 per cent
> precision. But relativity is now confirmed by several tests, with
> precision of one part in 10,000. It's still, in principle, good to
> have new and different tests. But the level of confidence in
> Einstein's theory is now so high that an announcement of the expected
> result will 'fork no lightening'. "Moreover, if there's an unexpected
> result, I suspect most people will suspect an error in this very
> challenging experiment rather than immediately abandon Einstein:
> There's now so much evidence corroborating Einstein, that a high
> burden of proof is required before he'll be usurped by any rival
> theory. "So the most exciting - if un-alluring - outcome of Gravity
> Probe B would be a request by Stanford University for another huge sum
> of money to repeat it."
>
> Pentcho Valev
> pva...@
yahoo.com
