The experiment which was thought up by thee University scientists, Leonard Schiff, William Fairbank and Robert Cannon, took about 52 years from it’s conception to it recent competition, and proves Einstein was right about general relativity.
It took decades of trial and error to create the perfect spears needed for the experiment, get them into orbit, get un-distorted data and perform all the calculation refinements. The team from Stanford University faced all sorts of problems with budgets, almost being shutdown by NASA, failed launches and distorted data being sent back. The only thing that kept the operation going was a donation from Capitol One founder Richard Fairbanks, the son of one of the original physicist who came up with the experiment.
The experiment involved blasting a perfect sphere into orbit which contained a set of spinning crystal gyroscopes, along with other sensor equipment. The Guinness world record winning perfectly round gyroscopes were there to measure the teeny tiny effects of relativity on the sphere. The gyroscopes kept the sphere aligned with a guide star. According to Einstein’s theory the gyroscopes would tilt and wobble very slightly due to the vortex of space-time created by earth.
After all that effort and intense calculating done by hundreds of young US scientists, including some high school students the answer is un-surprisingly enough, Einstein was right. The gyroscopes experienced a tiny wobble as predicted by Einstein, space-time is real and we can all rest easy at night now knowing that gravity is just the weight of an object on the space-time plane which causes it to curve and create a relative gravitational environment based on it’s size and spin or simply put, the universe still makes a little sense.
Related Stuffs:
- Source: PCMag
- Article: NASA pushes back endeavor launch.
Here’s a documentary called Einstein How I See The World. Don’t you just love the free internets?
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