From the horse's mouth
Quote:
Originally Posted by korjik
While it is an interesting article, do not read too much into it. It dosent say when and where these probes were accelerated, it dosent say how well the acceleration vectors correlate with either the probe position or probe velocity vectors.
snip...
The reason I brought this up is that it can make a big difference. If the 13mm/s is only seen when receeding from the Earth, then the tiny comparative change may be a higher order geoid term in Earth's gravitational field. If it is seen when NEAR is approaching Earth, if Earth is farther from the sun than NEAR when approaching, then the acceleration vector seems to be opposite to the Pioneer anomaly. We just cant tell with this article.
On the oither hand, this is pretty interesting. They should try to make sure they have extremely accurate position data for all probes from now on.
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Well, for interest, this is being published in the current issue of Physical Review Letters. You have to buy the article or have a subscription, but here's a link to the abstract. I would imagine this paper has more detail than the popular science press releases that have been discussed so far. I have a PRL subscription and will take a look at it.
BTW, I love this because it puts the spoke in Jerry's usual contention that mainstream science somehow "suppresses" this sort of thing. PRL is as mainstream as it gets, arguably the premier physics journal in the world. Just goes to show that when results seem to disagree with theory, even at a tiny level, scientists show interest.
Of course Jerry will probably say that we're finally "waking up" to this and that the revolution that will overthrow everything from Archimedes to Weinberg and Hawking is imminent. Total garbage of course. Also note that the abstract mentions a quantitative prediction for another probe pass. Take note Jerry, that's how science is done.
P.S. Ketterle still has his Nobel.
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"I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind." - William Thompson, 1st Baron Lord Kelvin
"If it was so, it might be, and if it were so, it would be, but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!" - Tweedledee
This isn't right. This isn't even wrong. - Wolfgang Pauli
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