Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tjradcliffe 3950 days ago
It's a mediocre article. It glosses a bunch of history adequately and then points out a completely different anomaly. By "completely different" I mean "has all the signatures of an instrumental or analysis artefact." It's intermittent (huge red flag) and while the article doesn't say so (additional red flag) close to the threshold of observation.

There are completely mundane explanations (upper atmosphere models slightly wrong, unaccounted-for EM effects) so while there may be a fundamental cause (gravity is doing something exciting) the odds are that it's a boring effect, just like the superluminal neutrino observations.
2 comments
lern_too_spel 3950 days ago
Perhaps you should write a textbook like the author has. http://www.amazon.com/Astrophysics-Through-Computation-Mathe...

I didn't find the writing misleading at all. It didn't overstate the likelihood that there is actually new physics to be found in these anomalies and gave a specific example where an anomaly was explained by known physics that was merely unaccounted for.

link
ajkjk 3950 days ago
The article definitely did not state or suggest that it wasn't a boring effect. It was just enumerating surprises due to gravitational theories' mismatching reality.

Discovering that the Pioneer probes were off due to the moment of their thermal radiation was not 'new physics', but it was still interesting, in that it was missed in the initial attempt at modeling. And that's fine. It's still interesting and made for good reading.

Anyway, I liked it. I don't think it was mediocre at all.

link