From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu May 09 2002 - 01:28:51 MDT
Science News Week
8-May-02
By Mike Martin and copyright 2002, United Press International :
< "My colleagues and I have successfully experimentally demonstrated that
the force of gravitation between two test bodies varies with their
orientation in space, relative to a system of distant stars," Mikhail
Gershteyn, a visiting scientist at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion
Center, told United Press International from Cambridge.
[...]
If G varies under any circumstances, scientists would have to rewrite
virtually every
physical law and a long-accepted feature of the Universe -- isotropy, or
the condition
that a body's physical properties are independent of its orientation in
space.
"Gershteyn and his coworkers lay an extraordinary and very interesting
claim which -- if
proven true -- would change our view of the universe," Lev Tsimring, a
research
physicist with the Institute for Nonlinear Science at the University of
California San
Diego, told UPI. "In a well-controlled experiment, the authors proposed to
measure the
gravitational force between two bodies with respect to the orientation of the
experimental setup to distant stars," Tsimring explained. The experiment,
he said, would
seek to detect gravitational anisotropy -- the condition that the
attractive force between
bodies would vary with respect to their spatial orientation, not their
separating distance.
"The latest paper by the authors -- in collaboration with an
experimentalist who is a
well-respected specialist in precisely that kind of measurement -- provides
strong
evidence in favor of the validity of the author's original claim," Tsimring
said.
Gravitation and Cosmology editor Kirill Bronnikov agreed.
"The evident merit of the paper by Mikhail Gershteyn et. al. is the
information of a
possible new effect, discovered experimentally -- the effect of anisotropy
related to
Newton's constant G," Bronnikov, told UPI from Moscow, Russia. "So far the
possibility
of such an effect has only been discussed theoretically."
"The authors of this paper make some extraordinary claims in a legitimate
journal,"
George Spagna, chairperson of the physics department at Randolph-Macon
College, told
UPI from Ashland, Va. "But they do not provide enough of their data or
theoretical
justification. They must provide much more information to be convincing." >
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