The philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways; the point is
to change it"
Marx
The article below examines unanticipated challenges to old perceptions,
and laws. Expanding knowledge of object's gravity in expanding space-time
is changing as human scientific instruments go farther faster, and slower
(fast/slow dialectics, where laws are at one confirmed and negated, i.e.
altered comprehension matching the new data) changing our perceptions. It
wont be easy, and looking back at history in Europe it may even be
dangerous (Bruno, Galileo) in that new perspectives challenge
institutions whose authority is based on conventional sociopolitical
dogma regarding the universe, and man's place in it.
"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e.
the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same
time its ruling intellectual force."
www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01b.htm#b3
The mechanical materialism of Newton and Descartes -- and even William
Paley's "Watch Analogy" -- corresponded to the mechanical world of the
manufacturing and industrializing capitalist's world-view, just as
Malthus, Spencer and Darwin's competition, invention, "struggle for
existence", corresponded to competition, invention and negation of
competitors in British market capitalist society.
"It is remarkable how Darwin rediscovers, among the beasts and plants,
the society of England with its division of labor, competition, opening
up of new markets, ‘inventions’ and Malthusian ‘struggle for existence’.
It is Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes and is reminiscent of Hegel’s
Phenomenology, in which civil society figures as an ‘intellectual animal
kingdom’, whereas, in Darwin, the animal kingdom figures as civil
society."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1862/letters/62_06_18.htm
Frances Bacon was right: "Neither the naked hand nor the understanding
left to itself can effect much.
It is by instruments and helps that the work is done, which are as much
wanted for the understanding as for the hand."
http://www.constitution.org/bacon/nov_org.txt
Contemplation cannot go any further than the object, or objective world
being contemplated. This is true even of the imagination -- e.g. the
'beast' in the Book of Revelation having 'seven heads, ten horns and ten
crowns' (one on each horn) is a monster imagined by placing together
things that already exist, separately but merged into a single monstrous
life form, object. -- Similarly Paley's watch analogy presupposed the
existence of human technology, the cumulative result of technological
developments and innovations of preceding generations, thus the watch.
What Bacon suggested, or rather what is implicit in his suggestion, is
that the invention and improvements of scientific instruments collecting
data, analyzing the data for the formulation of hypothesis, and then
other instruments to test the hypothesis, all methods and technologies
made available to the scientific community to collect, analyze and test
for themselves, has the tendency to maximize detached objectivity, thus
minimize if not overcome the subjective prejudices inherent in individual
contemplation. I think that the article below shows that Bacon was right.
On the other hand, as in the United States progress in the biological
sciences is hindered, where institutionalized social prejudices e.g. the
power of Churches, threatened by advances in biology and
paleoanthropology, use that power to attack these sciences as "only
theories" i.e. subjective opinions of Charles Darwin. The more physics
advance discovering new things, and insights into the natural workings of
the universe, subsequently making god an "unnecessary hypothesis", the
religious reactionaries will invade this scientific discipline as well.
"The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the
dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships
grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the
ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance." Thus: "the existence
of revolutionary ideas in a particular period presupposes the existence
of a revolutionary class"
www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01b.htm#b3
The advances in science follows the advances in technology, and provides
ideational weapons that are only taken up by the philosophical
representatives of the revolutionary class, in its polemical conflicts
with the ideologists of the powers that be. It was so when Bruno and
Galileo represented the materialist advances of philosophy and science in
the interests of the then rising bourgeoisie, and today the advances in
science are defended by the philosophical materialists representing the
interests of the proletariat, as only a revolutionary worker dominated
society with an interest in freedom has an objective, material interest
in destroying the existing ruling class, thus to negate the limits
imposed on science and technology (stem-cell research, cloning,&C).
Lil Joe
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http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-sci-pioneer21dec21,1,957815.story
COLUMN ONE
Gravity May Lose Its Pull
When conventional physics couldn't explain why space probes were acting
strangely, one JPL scientist was determined to find the answer.
By John Johnson
Times Staff Writer
December 21, 2004
It was in 1980 that John Anderson first wondered if something funny was
going on with gravity.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory physicist was looking over data from two
Pioneer spacecraft that had been speeding through the solar system for
nearly a decade.
Only something was off base. The craft weren't where they were supposed
to be.
Rather than traveling at a constant velocity of more than 25,000 mph
toward the edge of the solar system, Pioneers 10 and 11 were inexplicably
slowing down. Even factoring in the gravitational pull of the sun and its
other planets couldn't explain what he was seeing.
How could that be?
At first, Anderson figured there must be a simple explanation. Maybe
there was a malfunction on board the spacecraft. Maybe his calculations
were wrong.
Shy, bookish and soft-spoken, Anderson was not the type to call a news
conference to announce that two U.S. spacecraft appeared to be disobeying
the physical laws of the universe.
"I assumed something was going on that I didn't understand," said
Anderson, now 70. "So I just kept at it."
For years.
It was a lonely, often comfortless pursuit. Some critics pounded away at
him for daring to question the conventional wisdom about the force that
keeps our feet on the ground and the stars on their appointed rounds.
Others questioned his math.
Two decades later, Anderson's work on what is now called the Pioneer
Anomaly may finally be paying off.
In October, a European Space Agency panel recommended a space mission to
determine whether Anderson had found something that could rewrite physics
textbooks. Some cosmologists even speculate the Pioneer Anomaly might
help unravel some of the thorniest problems in theoretical physics, such
as the existence of "dark matter" or mysterious extra-dimensional forces
predicted by string theory.
For public consumption at least, Anderson and his close-knit group of
researchers will not permit themselves the luxury of such grandiose
speculation.
"I'm trying to stay away from" that kind of talk, said Slava G. Turyshev,
a former Russian scientist who has been working on the anomaly for the
last decade. "Even though I'm being dragged into it."
However it turns out, the episode offers a rare glimpse into the
scientific process at its rawest, most inspirational and gut-wrenching.
Whether Anderson will be remembered as the man who changed history or the
guy who spent decades chasing an illusion, all that's clear at this point
is that he will be remembered.
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For the record, gravity is one of the most closely studied forces in the
universe.
Sir Isaac Newton first measured it in the 17th century. Every object in
the universe attracts every other object, Newton determined, with a force
proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to
the square of the distance between them. That means the bigger things
are, and the closer they are, the greater their gravitational pull.
In 1915, a former Swiss patent clerk named Albert Einstein refined the
theory, arguing that gravity occurs when planets or stars warp the fabric
of space around them, much like a bowling ball on a trampoline warps the
surface of the trampoline. Instead of a sucking force, Einstein's general
theory of relativity said small objects fall toward larger ones like a
marble rolling down the slope of the trampoline to the bowling ball.
Einstein's theory has been successfully tested again and again. Without
it, complex space missions such as Pioneer 10 and 11 would have ended in
disaster, either by missing their targets — in this case fly-bys of
Jupiter — or by crashing.
Anderson was already an experienced space hand when the Pioneers were
launched in 1972 and 1973. Having worked on the Mariner missions in the
1960s, he was chosen to be principal investigator for gravity research on
both Pioneer missions.
It would prove to be a surprisingly long ride. The TRW-built Pioneers
performed so well that after the initial two-year mission ended, NASA
decided to send them on a new mission to explore the solar system's outer
planets.
They were the first spacecraft to travel through the asteroid belt, which
some scientists at the time thought could be as dangerous as a field of
icebergs. Pioneer 10 was first to pass the orbit of Pluto. For many
years, until overtaken by the speedier Voyager 1, the Pioneers were the
farthest venturing man-made objects in space.
By 1980, the vehicles were still zipping through space in fine shape —
when Anderson stumbled upon the unexpected.
"I started plotting this anomalous acceleration toward the sun," Anderson
said. In space science-speak, that meant the spacecraft were improbably
slowing down.
To be sure, the anomaly was small, just 8 X 10--8 centimeters/second2.
That amounted to about 8,000 miles a year, a tiny fraction of the 219
million miles the spacecraft covered annually. The anomaly is about 10
billion times weaker than the Earth's gravity.
But over time, even inches and meters add up.
Today, after three decades, the difference is about 248,000 miles, the
distance from Earth to the moon.
Anderson, ever the cautious scientist, didn't tell anyone what he was
seeing for a decade. Early on, the probes were still so close to the sun
that he reasoned radiation and solar wind — streams of ionized gas
spewing forth through the solar system — could be affecting them.
The other possibility was a spacecraft "systematic" — an onboard
mechanical problem. Prime suspects were gas leaks, along with releases of
energy by the plutonium-powered radioisotope thermoelectric generators
that provided electric power to the instruments.
None of these candidates seemed capable of producing errors as large as
Anderson was charting.
There was one piece of evidence that seemed to support the idea that the
anomaly could be real: It was almost exactly the same on both spacecraft.
On the other hand, both Pioneers were built by the same company to
identical specifications, so why shouldn't the same problem show up on
both?
As years passed, and the Pioneer probes moved away from the sun's
influence, the anomaly didn't disappear — or change even one iota.
Anderson was stumped. Unable to get the problem out of his head, he began
spending his own time burrowing deeper into the numbers streaming back
from space.
He was still scratching his head when physicist Michael Martin Nieto at
the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico called up one day in
1994 looking for material for an upcoming speech about new developments
in physics. Anything interesting going on?
"Well, I've got this thing with Pioneer," Anderson said.
"I almost fell off my chair," Nieto said.
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That's when, for good or ill, the Pioneer Anomaly went public. As word
spread in the scientific world, critics appeared. This can't be right,
they said. You've got a software error. You're not interpreting the data
correctly. And there were the usual off-center conspiracy enthusiasts who
were convinced that the researchers had found proof of aliens, God, or
both.
Anderson assured the naysayers he was on their side. He wasn't trying to
throw stones at Einstein and Newton. The most likely answer, he agreed,
was that a spacecraft systematic was causing the problem. The only thing
was, in a decade of trying, he hadn't found it.
Anderson's work attracted another group, led by Turyshev, a young,
hyperactive former Soviet scientist.
Turyshev, whose words tend to spill out faster than his tongue can keep
up, fell in love with space by watching rockets — launched from the
super-secret Soviet site at Baikonur, Kazakhstan — soar over his home in
southern Siberia. Held in awe by colleagues for his expertise in
relativity and other cosmological imaginings, he was the first Soviet
scientist to leave his country for a job with JPL.
Though never funded by NASA to work on the anomaly, Turyshev plunged into
the project as a volunteer, eventually becoming the Pioneer Anomaly's
door-to-door salesman. Carting around his own slide show, he traveled
Europe seeking support for a space mission that could solve the riddle.
"This is a form of space archeology," he said, explaining his devotion to
the project.
The first sign that the world's space bureaucracy was starting to take
notice occurred in 1995, when NASA gave the research team a $247,000
grant to pay for an independent analysis of the Pioneer data. The
Aerospace Corp., headquartered in El Segundo, was chosen.
"They came back and said, 'Guys, you have something here,' " Turyshev
said.
In 2002, Anderson, Turyshev, Nieto and other team members published the
most detailed analysis of the Pioneer Anomaly. The dense, 54-page paper,
which appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Physical Review, considered
seemingly every conceivable space event: effects of solar radiation and
solar wind, the force of radio beams used to communicate with Earth, gas
leaks, helium leaks, and gravity from the Kuiper Belt, a region beyond
Neptune that contains Pluto and a number of small, planet-like objects.
They even looked at whether ocean tides might affect NASA's Goldstone
Deep Space Network facility, where Pioneer's radio transmissions were
received. Though Goldstone, in the Mojave Desert, was many miles from the
shore, it rested on California's geologic Pacific plate. So, the team
factored in the remote possibility that waves hitting the beaches were
ever-so-slightly jiggling instruments at Goldstone.
But nothing came close to explaining the anomaly.
"There are two possible explanations," Turyshev said. "The most plausible
is systematics."
The second possibility is new physics.
"If it's new physics, the implications are truly tremendous," he said.
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So what would be the implications?
One possibility is that invisible, so-called dark matter is holding the
spacecraft back. Some cosmologists believe that dark matter exists
because only 10% of the expected mass of the universe has been found. If
90% of the universe's mass and energy is invisible, maybe it could exert
gravitational pull on spacecraft.
Another possibility, even more fanciful, is that invisible dimensions of
space are tugging at the Pioneers. This idea has its origin in string
theory, an idea that suggests we are surrounded by far more than the
three dimensions we know about. Some versions of string theory suggest
there may be as many as 11 dimensions, most of which are curled up and
hidden from us.
As with dark matter, no hard evidence has been found proving the
existence of vibrating strings far tinier than the smallest known
particles.
A third possibility is that gravity has been hiding secrets that three
centuries of research have failed to uncover.
Anderson and his colleagues have known for some time that the only way to
prove the anomaly is to duplicate it with another spacecraft.
First, they considered other NASA missions that penetrated the outer
solar system, finally settling on the 1989 Galileo and 1990 Ulysses.
Although some data appeared to show the anomaly had affected the probes,
results were not conclusive enough for Turyshev and Anderson.
A natural candidate was the twin Voyager missions, launched in 1977. The
Voyagers' meanderings offered plenty of space far out of the reach of the
sun for the anomaly to show up, but their orienting technology was so
different that the data were useless.
The only solution was a new space mission. But NASA wasn't interested.
"We like planetary science," Anderson said. Landing on planets and
digging in the alien surface was the kind of hard science Americans
preferred.
High-flown theoretical physics involving relativity had a more ready
reception in Europe. So, slide show in hand, Turyshev hit the road.
This year alone, he has been to Europe four times. In October, the team
was excited to learn that the European Space Agency's Fundamental Physics
Advisory Group had recommended an ESA mission to study the anomaly. That
was the good news. The not-so-good news was that the launch wouldn't
happen before 2015, and the answer to the anomaly might not come back for
decades more.
It's unclear how many of the Pioneer team will be around to greet the new
data. But if the anomaly turns out to be real, the story will be as much,
if not more, about grinding persistence as the flash of insight that is
supposed to be the badge of genius.
"Some have told us the most impressive thing was that we wouldn't be
stopped," Nieto said. "We just keep going."
Asked why he stuck with it all these years, Turyshev said it was the
frustration of not being able to solve the problem.
Through all the years, Anderson has never permitted himself to hope he
might have found something that could change the way people think about
the cosmos. Or that his name would go down in history.
"I used to think the probability of making a fundamental discovery was
pretty remote," Anderson said. "Now, I kind of wonder about it."
Whatever the solution to the Pioneer Anomaly, it will be reached without
any more help from the Pioneers. NASA lost contact with Pioneer 11 in
November 1995. Pioneer 10 sent its last message home in January 2003.
Anderson can't help feeling a touch of sadness. "You do feel a loss."
The spacecraft are now ghostly twins speeding through interstellar space.
Pioneer 10 could reach the star Aldebaran in the constellation Taurus in
about 2 million years, scientists say. Unless, of course, some uncharted
force brings it to a halt, or twists its course toward some dark corner
of space.
If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at
latimes.com/archives.
Article licensing and reprint options
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Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times
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