[X] My Assistant

[remcook]

http://www.planetary.org/news/2005/pioneer_anomaly_faq.html

The planetary society may be checking it out...

The Planetary Society has committed to raise the funds to preserve the priceless Pioneer data from destruction.


After years of analysis, but without a final conclusion, NASA, astonishingly, gave up trying to solve the "Pioneer Anomaly" and provided no funds to analyze the data. The Pioneer data exists on a few hundred ancient 7- and 9-track magnetic tapes, which can only be read on "antique" outdated computers. The agency is going to scrap, literally demolish, the only computers able to access and process that data in the next few months!

[dvandorn]

Hmmm... well, the effect must be very, very minor (at least in the local solar-system neighborhood), or else the planets wouldn't orbit in such a way as to generally validate the inverse-square law of gravitation.

It *does* occur to me that the inverse-square law relates to the "classic" three physical dimensions, and cosmologists are always saying that as many as 19 physical dimensions *must* exist. As far as we can tell (since we cannot directly measure anything outside of the three dimensions that are apparent to us), gravitation doesn't propogate along any of these other physical dimensions. Perhaps this is an indication that it *does* and the effect we are seeing is actually a relation between some other physical dimension(s) and the three we can perceive? This would mean that the inverse-square law could be maintained; we're just applying that law to a dimension that is not obviously connected to the three we can see.

I think it's time to start contemplating how these extra dimensions that cosmologists believe must exist inter-relate with the Universe as we observe it. Rather than assuming that these dimensions simply collapsed and vanished as energy levels decreased shortly after the Big Bang, maybe they still exist and interact with such things as gravitation... However, I think it's too early to say that this effect happens near massive bodies, and it's definitely too early to start making mass itself a variable factor, relative to its distance from other masses.

-the other Doug