If you keep up with the science notes in your favorite newspaper or magazine, you may already have heard about how some of our space probes aren’t moving through space exactly as predicted.
The Economist has a nice summary of the whole story here: Wanted: Einstein Jr, with the sub-title "Something seems wrong with the laws of physics. Spacecraft are not behaving in the way that they should."
Now, I liked this article because it points out how science gets done. It opens with the discovery, a century and a half ago, that Mercury’s orbit shifts faster than it should, according to Newton’s work on gravity. Not faster by an order of magnitude, but by a fraction of a degree–small enough that it took 70 years of miscues and fiddling before Einstein’s work on gravity revealed the real reason for the discrepency: huge masses cause space to actually curve.
It took a long time because scientists just couldn’t imagine that there could possibly be any other force at work on Mercury and the Sun. I’m sure that much of the delay had to do with the fact that the discrepency was so small: 19th century scientists (like scientists of any time) would surely have insisted on making sure those results were accurate and not caused by some error in measurement.
This story is exciting because it gives us a hint that there just may be something very big yet to be discovered in the way the universe works–and it also is exciting because it points out just how scientists make science. It’s not all about sitting under an apple tree and thinking, or standing in front of a chalkboard and scribbling equations. Strides in science often come out of the most mundane type of observation. Looking through a telescope or microscope or binoculars, counting and measuring, and comparing–day after day, year after year.
I just hope it won’t take another 70 years before someone (maybe you?) will figure it all out.