Gravity Probe B results seem strange, every moon and planet are proper gyroscopes (better than Gravity Probe B ones since they are not suspended by any electric field) ever rotating around their axis and orbiting around a much more massive object in the space but never was presented any evidence about the "geodetic" and "frame dragging" effects on them!!!
I'm thinking in the antique constructions of thousands of years made to be aligned with the Sun and the moon. There would be thousands of years of shift in the axis orientation of Earth and they would not be aligned anymore at present days...
For those who are unfamiliar with Gravity Probe B here is a useful link: http://einstein.stanford.edu/ For the past three years a satellite has circled the Earth, collecting data to determine whether two predictions of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity are correct. Today, at the American Physical Society (APS) meeting in Jacksonville, Fla., Professor Francis Everitt, a Stanford University physicist and principal investigator of the Gravity Probe B (GP-B) Relativity Mission, a collaboration of Stanford, NASA and Lockheed Martin, will provide the first public peek at data that will reveal whether Einstein’s theory has been confirmed by the most sophisticated orbiting laboratory ever created.
There are too many assumptions here... First that the monuments all lined up with the sun exactly as you think they do when they were built. Second that the thousands of years of shift would be noticable at all. The effects that GPB is testing are so small that you could never notice them from ground observations.
Thanks for the link. I did not read all except for the adjacent summary of some of the subsystems/ problems (white background column on left) There it told of the division of the guide star light onto four detectors. (Two for vertical and two for horizontal were "nulled" against each other to keep aligned with the guide star.) I know little about these detectors, but strongly worry that their sensitivity many change very slightly over year long periods (or if they are frequently re-calibrated, that the processes of placing the "same" light on both may be imperfect) If this is the case, could that be why that the predictions of Einstein for the warping/ twisting of space are not being confirmed? I have never heard of a level of sensitivity stability in a light detector that must be required being achieved long tem; especially in view of the fact that they (and the transistors in the differential comparator circuit measuring the null) are subject to cosmic rays. Does anyone know how they are sure this year's null between the output of the detector pairs still implies that the total flux on the detectors are still equal?
The result isn't null. Gravity Probe-B has confirmed the geodetic precession to a higher degree of accuracy than ever before. The primary intent of GP-B was to measure the frame-dragging precession. The results here are currently inconclusive as the measurement error is too large. Efforts are ongoing analysis to reduce the error; results are expected to be posted in December. A link to the poster on Gravity Probe-B errors: http://einstein.stanford.edu/content/aps_posters/ExperimentError.pdf
If replying to me, please reread my post. The null I spoke about is in the guide star alinement system, not the results.
I have now realized that the effects are NEGLIHIBLE. Looking at the equation presented in the second picture of the Standford's page: http://einstein.stanford.edu/highlights/hl.htmlthe distance from Earth to the Sun is so huge that both effects (the geodetic and the frame dragging) are too small to be detected.
