Einstein Proved Right - Again!

(CBS)  This article was written by Discover'sAndrew Moseman.

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The theory of general relativity: It works. OK, it's not exactly Earth-shattering news that Albert Einstein's century-old idea works in real life. That's been shown over and over. But what had been difficult for researchers to do until now was verify the theory on truly massive scales beyond the solar system, that of whole galaxies and clusters of galaxies. This week in Nature, Reinabelle Reyes and colleagues report that they did it, and that Einstein was proven correct once more.

While the find is a nice coup for Reyes' team, its importance goes beyond just reaffirming the great scientists of yesteryear with yet another "Einstein was right" story. The existence of dark matter and dark energy is based on the assumption that Einstein's gravity is affecting galaxies billions of light-years from Earth in the same way that it affects objects in our solar system.

However, if the study had shown that general relativity needed a slight adjustment at vast distances (like the nudge Einstein himself provided to Newton's physics), that could have altered prevailing ideas about dark matter and energy. This research indicates those pesky ideas may be here to stay.

Reyes' approach combined the study of galaxies' gravitational lensing (how much they bend the light from surrounding galaxies), their velocities, and how and where they formed clusters. All of these measurements combined created a system to test theories of gravity independent of particular parameters theories.. What they found closely matched what you'd predict under general relativity. They tested two alternative gravitational theories, too. One, called tensor-vector-scalar (TeVeS), gave results beyond the study's margin of error. Another, called f(R), didn't work as well as general relativity. But it fell within the margin of error, so the scientists say it will take more research to disprove it.

Meanwhile, as the spirit of general relativity is reaffirmed in the pages of Nature, the pages upon which Einstein formulated the theory are going on display in Jerusalem. Elsa, his wife, gave the pages to Hebrew University, and they are currently part of 50th anniversary festivities at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Each of the 46 pages, labored over between November 1915 and their publication in May 1916, has its own case, each lighted dimly in a room that has been darkened to protect the paper. There on Page 1 is the now familiar title in German: "The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity."

However, if you need more Einstein and can't make the trip to Israel, check out his mustachioed mug on the cover of the April DISCOVER issue, on newsstands this week.

By Andrew Moseman
Reprinted with permission from Discover

[babooph]

Not all cocaine users seem to be failures...

[rwsmith29456]

How many clusters are actual clusters as opposed to those that APPEAR to be clusters due to lensing?? And man, I'm tired of people bringing up the dogma thing every time a scientific announcement is made.

[wxwizard1]

Dark Matter & Dark Energy are invented objects of weak minded scientists who can't solve the real reason why galaxies spin the way they do (dark matter) and why galaxies seem to be accelerating apart (dark energy).

One major issue with the concept of dark matter and dark energy is THEY BOTH CAN'T BE RIGHT. Dark matter is 'supposed' to be EXTRA mass within galaxies that mathematically make Einstein's Relativity work correctly to explain the spin of galaxies. In a nutshell dark matter is 'suppose' to add more gravity to galaxies. On the other hand dark energy is 'suppose' to some kind of mysterious force is pushing the all matter in the universe apart.

It's all hogwash and the kind of weak minded science that Einstein would have railed against.

The truth is not in dark matter, dark energy or any other kind 'ether'. The truth lies in properly researching, testing, exploring and advancing the physics and mathematics that Einstein initiated.

[hzeunert]

Mr. Einstein failed to realize that the radius of an expanding or contracting universe is radial and stands perpendicular to relative time which is embedded in space-time (see also Figure #2 of the "Unified Mind Theory, a Model of Creation in 5 dimensions", www.silk.net/personal/hzeunert/me19.html. Big bang is not a point in time which spits out all matter there is today in the universe, together with the ever evasive anti-matter, in next to no time, a rather unlikely event, but is a focal point of incoming and outgoing energy. Recessional velocity is not uniform throughout the universe, but is a function of location. Looking at our own Galaxy, on one end we have dark matter (hydrogen atoms) being collected in a state of high expansion but below v = c (the speed of light in a 4-D environment), on the other end we have matter returning back to Radiation (at V = -c) which surrounds the focal point in a 3-dimensional fashion (no matter, therefore no time). We have a continuous recycling of matter. We together with our sun and his location within our galaxy may be at v = 0, meaning we are on top of Creation and enjoy maximum universal expansion, a long stretch in time where the universe is still, or "flat" with a minimum of disaster while slowly is turning around. But we share this state only with those planetary systems we find on the surface of the disk we get if we take a crosscut through our Galaxy, with our sun as the local reference. These are our neighbours in space and in time.

[formrusmcsgt]

This type of advance is precisely what makes science superior to dogma....proof.

One's fact, and proveable fact at that, the other fiction.