🚀 go-pugleaf

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/08/25/gravity-wave-hunters-find-nothing%E2%80%94and-make-a-big-discovery/
"Physicists in Washington State and Louisiana recently spent two years
hunting for the mysterious gravitational waves first predicted by
Einstein, but detected nothing: zilch, zero, nada, nary a ripple. But
that "null result" is itself of great value, researchers say, because
it tells them where to look for the waves next."

So "physicists in Washington State and Louisiana" are going to waste
some more money but in the end Sir Martin Rees, capo di tutti capi in
Einsteiniana, will put an end to their campaign:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2004/04/28/ecfgravb28.xml
"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."

Of course, waste of money and destruction of human rationality never
stop in Einsteiniana; some old forgotten "challenge" will be
revitalized once the gravity wave campaign is over, for instance:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090105150837.htm
"Physicists at Indiana University have developed a promising new way
to identify a possible abnormality in a fundamental building block of
Einstein's theory of relativity known as "Lorentz invariance." If
confirmed, the abnormality would disprove the basic tenet that the
laws of physics remain the same for any two objects traveling at a
constant speed or rotated relative to one another."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com