I no longer remember the context, but the Gravity Probe B experiment came up in discussion around the department last week, and nobody could really remember what the status of it was. It came up again during the “Physics: What We Don’t Understand” panel Saturday morning, where Geoff Landis was able to supply a few details from inside NASA. It came up again during a later panel on the year in physics and astronomy, and again, Geoff was able to supply some details.<\/p>\n
I’m not sure what the deal is, but there’s evidently something in the air at the moment making people think about Gravity Probe B, because there’s a very nice article in the New York Times<\/cite><\/a> about the history of the experiment, and the scramble to find funding to finish the experiment. The original money ran out a while back, but Francis Everitt, who has been involved with the project from the beginning, has managed to get a bit more than $4 million from an American financier and a Saudi prince, to keep things going.<\/p>\n It’s an interesting read. I’m not sure how scientifically valuable the final results will end up being (as Landis said at the panel Saturday, one of the maddening things about space-based experiments is that in the time it takes to get something launched, technology often advances to the point that ground-based tests will surpass the original goals, and I think something similar has befallen one of the GPB experiments), but Everitt’s dedication is impressive. For his sake, I hope they get something good in the end.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I no longer remember the context, but the Gravity Probe B experiment came up in discussion around the department last week, and nobody could really remember what the status of it was. It came up again during the “Physics: What We Don’t Understand” panel Saturday morning, where Geoff Landis was able to supply a few… Continue reading Gravity Probe B Is in the Air<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,19,22,33,7,11,71],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy","category-experiment","category-funding","category-in_the_news","category-physics","category-science","category-space","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3417\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}