Telescope Sees Star Dance Around Supermassive Black Hole, Proves Einstein Right
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That‘s also a wrong simplification. It wasn’t an attack at all. When science reaches new limits and an old theory is confirmed valid even there, what‘s left is even less possibilities for some new theory to make a different prediction. Any new theory must be compatible with the old one in all these already checked places.
Just like Einstein's theories are compatible with Newton's at much-lower-than-light speeds.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunctio...
It‘s not about “replacing”: in all the areas where it is already confirmed it doesn’t ever need to be replaced. Wherever Newton’s formulas are good enough they are still used and are going to be used in future. It’s just about extending the limits. And in this case, again, Einstein’s formula are shown to be good enough.
1) it was not "an attack" at all but an experiment that confirmed the theory's validity in the limits of the Universe previously unreachable to humans.
2) The "replacement" didn't happen before with Newton's formulas: under the limits under which it was known that Newton's formulas worked before Einstein's it is still known that Newton's formulas work. The basic formulas still being taught about special relativity are actually Lorentz transformations, decades older than Einstein's work and still actively used under the limits where they still work etc. There isn't any "refutation" there it's about having most of the Universe explainable by the formulas we use. The new discoveries aren't "replacements" but "filling the blanks" which remain, and one more area is now confirmed not to be a blank at all.
lol what?!? who says that?!?
That doesn't make it invalid, because the "experience" part really really matters.
But it means its validity is limited to "for all practical purposes" - which is perfectly good enough as a baseline, and certainly more useful than "It's just my opinion and I'm right about everything because I say so" or even "Because my god says so" or "I'm going to lose money if this turns out to be true, so I'm going to spend some money up front on a PR campaign to persuade people it isn't."
https://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.ht...
Dark ages are built on anti-science sentiment but we have all the means to counter and disseminate science results these days, provided that discourses are made simpler enough (without being shallow) to inform the general public... we need more and better scientific communicators, then, that’s also why the small content project I am recently pushing over here too.
Anti-intellectualism, anti-science, etc. will always attract some people to some degree. Within those constraints there's a world of difference.
Care to dissuade me of this, because it seems like you’ve simultaneously concurred with the statement you’ve called misguiding and unproductive.
Edit: if I'm still coming off vague, a sibling to my original comment says what I wanted to say more succinctly.
Dr. Clifford Will's Was Einstein Right? is a now-dated book about the various experiments over time, which is very handy if you want a summary of just how many attacks have been weathered. I don't doubt that it could use a second volume by now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_theory_of_rel...
Having said that, I think the concern here is exaggerated.
Theories have:
- an expected domain of applicability
and might have:
- applications (either in the sense of experimental physics, or even applications in the sense of theoretical physics)
So a more important question is, do we have evidence against a theory in its domain of applicability in a magnitude that invalidates some use cases?
It's perfectly ok if you find evidence against a theory outside of its domain of applicability (i.e. I don't care if it's wrong in situations I didn't expect it to be right) or if that evidence causes errors so small as to make no difference for my applications.
I believe you're repeating the idea that "_theories_ aren't proven correct, you can only ever fail to falsify them", which is true. But you're applying the idea to predictions, which makes it false because predictions absolutely can be proven correct. In my opinion you come across as confused about these ideas.
If this had not been consistent with the prediction, the precession of Mercury still was, so then one needs to sort out what that means. Was one of the experiments flawed? What's the statistical certainty of each, etc.
I don't see how a prediction can be proven true anymore than a theory can.
"So you're saying that science doesn't know anything, and therefore quantum vibrations homeopathy Reiki is just as real as General Relativity." Or something. My point is, the anti-science crowd will use anything it can, including lies, to "prove" that it's right and you're wrong.
The people who are so emotionally damaged they can't stand the idea that the universe might require effort on their part to understand will always find ways to misunderstand things. Trying to communicate with them is futile.
Truly fundamental misunderstandings are hard to correct.
> One hundred years later we have now detected the same effect in the motion of a star orbiting the compact radio source Sagittarius A* at the centre of the Milky Way. This observational breakthrough strengthens the evidence that Sagittarius A* must be a supermassive black hole of 4 million times the mass of the Sun
I love that scientists are so careful about stating that something is absolute fact when they can't be 100% sure. The public's idea of things is definitely that Sagittarius A* is a supermassive black hole, but that compact radio source could be something else, so they're careful to note that.
My plan is to start with General Relativity and Einstein's equations, maybe some journal articles about black holes. Do you have any suggestions?
I'm impressed that the reader learned the math on his own. And, uh, what's my excuse?
Black hole sucks light.
I hope I live long enough to see then use the moon for lensing or put radio/telescopes on the far side.
To be clear, while general relativity predicted the existence of black holes, Einstein initially thought that they wouldn't be able to form in reality. [1]