Laws of Physics May Need an Overhaul

String theorist shakes up 300 years of science

(NEWSER) - Anyone who's ever seen a ball drop knows it's obvious that gravity exists—right? Not so fast, says a prominent string theorist who has called into question 300 years of science with a new paper arguing that gravity is merely an illusion. Dutch physicist Erik Verlinde says gravity is not a basic force itself, but rather a sort of "cosmic frill," as the New York Times puts it, which emerges from some deeper force the way stock markets emerge from the decisions of individual investors. More»

(NEWSER) - On August 25, 1609—400 years ago today—Galileo Galilei introduced Venice to the telescope, and the discoveries it enabled were every bit as revolutionary as Darwinism, writes Peter Walker of the Guardian. With his telescope, a brown stick weaker than today's store-bought models, Galileo detected moon-like phases of Venus, proving that planets revolve around the sun and not Earth. That brought Galileo scientific immortality, but not before he suffered years of persecution. More»

Heretic remains a touchy subject in Catholic Church

(NEWSER) - Galileo Galilei is riling the Catholic church yet again, the Wall Street Journal reports, as an anonymous donor has offered to pay to erect a statue in the Vatican of Catholicism’s most famous heretic. But though the church has come around on science, Galileo remains a touchy subject. He’s “like a Mexican soap opera,” said one Vatican official. “It never ends.” More»

Conservatives tie astronomer's ideas to moral decline

(NEWSER) - Not only did Roman Catholics arrest Galileo for saying the Earth revolves around the sun—a handful of them still insist he was wrong. It's a small movement, but a few conservative Roman Catholics are turning to Church teachings and a dozen Bible verses as proof of a geocentric universe, the Chicago Tribune reports. Heliocentrism, which puts the sun at the center of the solar system, "becomes dangerous if it is being propped up as the true system when, in fact, it is a false system," said Robert Sungenis, leader of the movement. More»

NASA's Gravity Probe B vindicates predictions about warping of space, time

(NEWSER) - Einstein was right: Observations from NASA’s Gravity Probe B have confirmed that the Earth really does warp time and space around it. The probe contained four perfectly engineered gyroscopes, and took incredibly precise measurements of their spin axes, expecting the curve of space-time around the Earth to cause predictable deviations. It did, though the changes were incredibly minute, on the order of just a few thousand milliarcseconds—a milliarcsecond being the width of a human hair seen at a distance of 10 miles, the BBC explains. More»