http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected...ecfgravb28.xml
"Did Einstein get all his sums right?.....Last week, an American probe
began an 18-month mission to put Einstein's prediction to the test, 90
years after he unveiled his ideas in Berlin. Gravity Probe B was
blasted into space from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on
a Boeing Delta 2 rocket and will orbit the Earth for more than a year.
The $700 million joint mission between Nasa and Stanford University,
conceived in 1958, uses four of the most perfect spheres ever created
inside the world's largest Thermos flask to detect minute distortions
in the fabric of the universe.....Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer
Royal, said: "The project's a technical triumph, and a triumph of the
persistence and lobbying power of Stanford University. But its
gestation has been grotesquely prolonged, and the cost overruns have
been equally gross. I recall hearing a talk about the project from
Francis Everitt (principal investigator) when I was still a student -
and it was already well advanced. "Back in the 1960s the evidence for
Einstein's theory was meagre - just two tests, with 10 per cent
precision. But relativity is now confirmed by several tests, with
precision of one part in 10,000. It's still, in principle, good to
have new and different tests. But the level of confidence in
Einstein's theory is now so high that an announcement of the expected
result will 'fork no lightening'. "Moreover, if there's an unexpected
result, I suspect most people will suspect an error in this very
challenging experiment rather than immediately abandon Einstein:
There's now so much evidence corroborating Einstein, that a high
burden of proof is required before he'll be usurped by any rival
theory. "So the most exciting - if un-alluring - outcome of Gravity
Probe B would be a request by Stanford University for another huge sum
of money to repeat it."

http://education.guardian.co.uk/high...245044,00.html
"No cash rescue for physics funding crisis. The Science and Technology
Facilities Council (STFC) will not receive any funding to plug the
£80m shortfall in its budget over the next three years, research
council chiefs have confirmed....The Science and Technology Facilities
Council (STFC), is the key public funding body for physics in the
UK.....Leading physicists have expressed outrage at the STFC's
decision to cut the number of university grants by 25% as a
consequence of its deficit, saying the loss in funding could cause
some university physics departments to close."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqhlQfXUk7w
Silly Walks Applicant: "Well sir, I have a silly walk and I'd like to
obtain a Government grant to help me develop it....I think that with
Government backing I could make it very silly." Silly Walks Director:
"Mr Pudey, the very real problem is one of money. I'm afraid that the
Ministry of Silly Walks is no longer getting the kind of support it
needs. You see there's Defence, Social Security, Health, Housing,
Education, Silly Walks ... they're all supposed to get the same. But
last year, the Government spent less on the Ministry of Silly Walks
than it did on National Defence! Now we get 348,000,000 a year, which
is supposed to be spent on all our available products."

http://education.guardian.co.uk/egwe...271596,00.html
"A ray of hope. "How do you solve a problem like physics?" is a
question that has confounded the government and funding councils for
considerably longer than finding the musical heroine Maria. A string
of university science department closures, culminating in the axing of
Reading University's physics department in 2006, led to fevered
warnings from the Institute of Physics about the threat to the
subject. As departments went to the wall, both the government and the
funding council had their knuckles rapped by the Commons science
select committee for failing to act. The higher education minister,
Bill Rammell, was forced to insist there was no "science crisis" and
that the government had no right to meddle in any case. Sir Howard
Newby, then chief executive of the Higher Education Funding Council
for England, even went as far as to say: "We intervene in this process
with some caution and even at some peril." Today, the funding council
is intervening enthusiastically in the physics market - under its new
motto "Hefce sustains science" - with a £12.5m initiative to link up
six university physics departments in the south-east of England.
"[Reading] was the final straw as far as Hefce was concerned," says
Professor Malcolm Coe, head of physics at Southampton University.
"There had been a steady flow of 10 or 12 departments closing down. It
was time to try to stabilise the situation and figure out what the
problem was and how to address it."

Pentcho Valev

If I were in the UK government's shoes, I would never have funded
extremely silly walks of this kind:

http://www.firstscience.com/site/art...blackholes.asp
Lord Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society: "Good science
fiction should respect the fundamental constraints of physical law. In
that sprit, it is worth mentioning that an observer could, in
principle, observe the far future in what, subjectively, seemed quiet
a short time. According to Einstein, the speed of a clock depends on
where you are and how you're moving. If your subjective clock ran very
slowly compared to the cosmic clock, you could travel "fast forward"
into the future. This would happen if you were moving at a velocity
close to the speed of light. Furthermore, strong gravity would distort
time; clocks on a neutron star would run 20 or 30 percent slower. Near
a black hole, the distortions would be even greater. If you were to
fall into one, your future would be finite; you would be ripped apart
- spaghettified - by ever more violent gravitational forces. However,
a more prudent astronaut who managed to get into the closest possible
orbit around a rapidly spinning hole without falling into it would
also have interesting experiences, space-time is so distorted there
that his clock would run arbitrarily slow and he could, therefore, in
a subjectively short period, view an immensely long future timespan in
the external universe."

Seven years ago the same Martin Rees found it more profitable to
inform the world that the source of all those extremely silly walks -
Einstein's theory of relativity, in particular "Einstein's belief that
the speed of light must always be the same" - should be revised:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/519406/posts September 9
2001
"A GROUP of astronomers and cosmologists has warned that the laws
thought to govern the universe, including Albert Einsteins theory of
relativity, must be rewritten. The group, which includes Professor
Stephen Hawking and Sir Martin Rees, the astronomer royal, say such
laws may only work for our universe but not in others that are now
also thought to exist.....AMONG THE IDEAS FACING REVISION IS EINSTEINS
BELIEF THAT THE SPEED OF LIGHT MUST ALWAYS BE THE SAME - 186,000 miles
a second in a vacuum.....Rees, Hawking and others are so concerned at
the impact of such ideas that they recently organised a private
conference in Cambridge for more than 30 leading cosmologists."

For some time Martin Rees has been silent about Einstein's relativity.
He knows times have changed: you cannot anymore extract money from
worshipping this theory, you cannot extract money from revising it
either. The world simply does not care about it. But you can extract
money from informing the world about climate changes, and many
Einsteinians are going in that direction. Martin Rees is just one of
them.

Pentcho Valev

--
This message is brought to you by Androcles
http://www.androcles01.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/

"Pentcho Valev" wrote in message
...
| If I were in the UK government's shoes, I would never have funded
| extremely silly walks of this kind:
|
| http://www.firstscience.com/site/art...blackholes.asp
| Lord Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society: "Good science
| fiction should respect the fundamental constraints of physical law. In
| that sprit, it is worth mentioning that an observer could, in
| principle, observe the far future in what, subjectively, seemed quiet
| a short time. According to Einstein, the speed of a clock depends on
| where you are and how you're moving. If your subjective clock ran very
| slowly compared to the cosmic clock, you could travel "fast forward"
| into the future. This would happen if you were moving at a velocity
| close to the speed of light. Furthermore, strong gravity would distort
| time; clocks on a neutron star would run 20 or 30 percent slower. Near
| a black hole, the distortions would be even greater. If you were to
| fall into one, your future would be finite; you would be ripped apart
| - spaghettified - by ever more violent gravitational forces. However,
| a more prudent astronaut who managed to get into the closest possible
| orbit around a rapidly spinning hole without falling into it would
| also have interesting experiences, space-time is so distorted there
| that his clock would run arbitrarily slow and he could, therefore, in
| a subjectively short period, view an immensely long future timespan in
| the external universe."
|
| Seven years ago the same Martin Rees found it more profitable to
| inform the world that the source of all those extremely silly walks -
| Einstein's theory of relativity, in particular "Einstein's belief that
| the speed of light must always be the same" - should be revised:
|
| http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/519406/posts September 9
| 2001
| "A GROUP of astronomers and cosmologists has warned that the laws
| thought to govern the universe, including Albert Einsteins theory of
| relativity, must be rewritten. The group, which includes Professor
| Stephen Hawking and Sir Martin Rees, the astronomer royal, say such
| laws may only work for our universe but not in others that are now
| also thought to exist.....AMONG THE IDEAS FACING REVISION IS EINSTEINS
| BELIEF THAT THE SPEED OF LIGHT MUST ALWAYS BE THE SAME - 186,000 miles
| a second in a vacuum.....Rees, Hawking and others are so concerned at
| the impact of such ideas that they recently organised a private
| conference in Cambridge for more than 30 leading cosmologists."
|
| For some time Martin Rees has been silent about Einstein's relativity.
| He knows times have changed: you cannot anymore extract money from
| worshipping this theory, you cannot extract money from revising it
| either. The world simply does not care about it. But you can extract
| money from informing the world about climate changes, and many
| Einsteinians are going in that direction. Martin Rees is just one of
| them.
|
| Pentcho Valev
|

Predicting the future has been the dream of charlatans since
the first shaman was tossed a bone from the hunt he was too
scared to attend.