Asymmetrical Information

Perhaps there is some bit of gravity associated with the rotation of the sun and the rotation of the rest of the solar system. The rotational energy adds mass to both the sun and the whole solar system, and that would cause a slight extra tug of gravity.

I would think that the rocket scientists have already put that into their gravity accounts, but perhaps the trajectories of the satellites have put them in some relativistic frame of reference which enhances the rotational energy of the solar system.

Any physics person have any idea about this?

So the law of gravity, which has become the very symbol of a scientific principle we know with absolute certainty, isn't what we understood it to be after all?

This is a stern reminder that this so-called enlightened generation ought not to be declaring certain scientific theories as irrefutable, no longer in dispute, etc.

I am thinking of hard core Darwinists.

You know who you are.

Jeff,

Just remember that any new rule must incorporate the 100% accurate predictions of the current law. There are boundary conditions that can reveal texture where we thought there was none, but that does not mean that old laws were wrong - they were incomplete for all conditions. The world you experience is very, very accurately described by Newtonian mechanics and Newtonian gravity. Special and General relativity, and quantum mechanics, no matter what their forms were to take, had to look like Newtonian mechanics within that range.

This sort of distinction matters greatly when some people choose to grab any justification they can find to reintroduce mysticism.

This story is made out to be much more than it actually is. The main difficulty lies in the excessive confidence of the finders of the "anomaly" in certain parameters that they think are known to incredible margins of error but which in all likelihood are not known that well. For example, if the paint on the two spacecraft bleached to a degree that we had not predicted it could easily account for the discrepancy. Considering that we cannot analyze the spacecraft to determine this parameter nor do we have any other samples of paint that had been exposed to the same environment as the Pioneer probes have been. Or it could be outgassing from the Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (such devices produce Helium via alpha emission from the decay of Pu-238, which does outgas to a degree). Or it could be a number of other things. The existince of the anomaly as something other than perfectly banal relies on the assumption that we can pin all these factors down to an incredibly precise degree, and we really can't be that confident.

The overwhelming likelihood is that this "anomaly" is due to an as yet uncharacterized systematic error. It may warrant additional investigation, but it's far, far, far too soon to think of this as in any way a result we can rely on.

The overwhelming "systematic" error is essentially at the heart of what continues to puzzle theoretical physiscysts: gravity is not only much more elastic than we believe, but also far more superluminous than you could even imagine...

These spacecraft are ploughing through miles and miles of vacuum (which is what space is full of), I am not amazed that they are going slower than expected. Consider that when light travels a great distance, it must hoof it (because no mode of transportation is faster) and it gets tired. (The wavelength increases because of energy expended.) Thus we see that the further a celestial object is from earth, the more redshifted it's light. The same expenditure probably applies to spacecraft to some extent. We would have the answer if Einstein was still around, he just did not live long enough to get the data he needed.

Jim, the "tired light" theory of cosmological redshift has been debunked quite thoroughly, it does not fit the observational evidence, period. Nor would it explain this "anomaly".

I thought the "red shift" had to do with the exapnsion of the universe? The farther away something is, the faster it's moving away from us, or the faster we're moving away from it.

If this anomoly were real, why wouldn't it have appeared in the motion of the planets or the comets?

jim, as robin has mentioned, there ain't no thing as "tired light"

red shift is due to the relative position of 2 sources when each photon (or other wave/particle) is generated... when you are at rest compared to another object, you see the real frequency... when yo are moving toward each other, they seem to be coming faster, when moving away, they're seems to be more time in beteween each packet (for all other objects, the apparent speed also changes, but this is light, which always has one speed in any given medium)

arguing against darwinism, using the willingness of scientists to refine their theories and admit fallibility, betrays an ignorance of science, the scientific method, and logic. whatever your non-darwinian explanation for variations in morphology or the creation of the world, it seems relatively certain that it is non falsifiable and relies on faith to be revealed. this does not necessarily make it wrong, but it can neither be proved or disproved. one should admit, however, that there are a very large number of other non-verifiable theories for all these events that require faith to be accepted.

and yeah, most systems have massive systematic error, if one gets into really fine precision. this is what happens when scientists try to get overly precise results from equipment designed and built by engineers who were working to a different set of tolerances. hell you can just get OS errors due to number handling in a wide, wide, wide variety of places if one isn't explicit in the precision required and very careful.
never mind the transistor failures caused by long term exposure to high rad environments...

nasa can't explain why the mars rover gets cleaned nightly (and unlike in california, I'm pretty sure it isn't getting detailed cheap by a posse of illegal mexican immigrants) so I'd be very careful on their assements of gravity with a non-gravity focused probe

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