Physics Misbehaving

An intriguing article from The Economist:

Something seems wrong with the laws of physics. Spacecraft are not behaving in the way that they should.

In 1990 mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, which operates America's unmanned interplanetary space probes, noticed something odd happen to a Jupiter-bound craft, called Galileo. As it was flung around the Earth in what is known as a slingshot manoeuvre (designed to speed it on its way to the outer solar system), Galileo picked up more velocity than expected. Not much. Four millimetres a second, to be precise. But well within the range that can reliably be detected.

Once might be happenstance. But this strange extra acceleration was seen subsequently with two other craft. That, as Goldfinger would have put it, looks like enemy action. So a team from JPL has got together to analyse all of the slingshot manoeuvres that have been carried out over the years, to see if they really do involve a small but systematic extra boost. The answer is that they do.

What's up with that?

Mike Treder

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics blog

Comments

[Tom Craver]

This is good news - any experimentally verifiable hole in physics means we may be about to figure out something new about the universe!

[Michael Deering]

I think it is obvious that the universe is rounding off certain results of calculations to save processor cycles.