Einstein's General Relativity Theory Passes Yet Another Massive Test
An Anonymous Coward writes:
In 1916, Albert Einstein dared to declare that Isaac Newton was wrong. No, he said, gravity is not a mysterious force emanating from Earth.
[...] And while the genius mathematician referred to this perplexing notion as his theory of general relativity, a title that stuck, his peers called it "totally impractical and absurd," a title that didn't. Against all odds, Einstein's mind-numbing idea has yet to falter. Its premises remain true on both the smallest of scales and the incomprehensibly large. Experts have attempted to poke holes in them again, and again and again, but general relativity always prevails.
And on Wednesday, thanks to an ambitious satellite experiment, scientists announced that, yet again, general relativity has proven itself to be a fundamental truth of our universe. The team conducted what it calls the "most precise test" of one of general relativity's key aspects, named the weak-equivalence principle, with a mission dubbed Microscope.
[...] The weak-equivalence principle is a weird one.
It pretty much says all objects in a gravitational field must fall in the same way when no other force is acting on them -- I'm talking external interference like wind, a person kicking the object, another object bumping into it, you get the idea.
[...] The Microscope project sent a satellite into Earth's orbit that contained two objects: a platinum alloy and titanium alloy. "The selection was based on technology considerations," Rodrigues said, such as whether the materials were easy and feasible to make in a lab.
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