Here's the wikipedia page on it: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_Probe_B" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_Probe_B</a><p>One point about it is that the probe had a lot of noise, so much noise that it swamped the signal. It was only by developing computer models of the source of the noise, and then subtracting it from the signal that the result was found.<p>But I find such "adjustments" distasteful. I mean everyone expects a certain answer, and voilà you get that answer. Is there a bug in your code? Or course not - you got the expected answer didn't you?<p>(See the section called "NASA review" in the wikipedia article.)<p>Anyway, now that they learned so much about such probes they should launch another one and get much cleaner data.
<i>For Dr. Everitt, who joined the Gravity Probe experiment in 1962 as a young postdoctoral fellow and has worked on nothing else since, the announcement on Wednesday capped a career-long journey.</i><p>There's something so profound about that.<p>To think of how many jobs I've held in my comparatively short life, how many minor career changes I've had here and there, how many massive shifts in interest and passion I've had over the years, and to hold these up beside someone who has <i>been wholly dedicated to the same singular goal since before I was even born</i>--that's just mind-boggling.<p>And it was selfless! This one singular goal to which he's dedicated himself, every one of the fifty years of work that went into it, ultimately ended up becoming--at least when boiled down to a headline--a footnote to someone else's greatness.<p><i>Five decades.</i> I can't even begin to fathom what sort of drive and passion and commitment that must require.<p>Bravo.
According to the article below, everything measured by the probe has long since been measured in other ways with greater precision. Based on that, I'd have to say, this probe didn't really prove anything...<p><a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20444-beleaguered-mission-measures-swirling-spacetime-at-last.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news" rel="nofollow">http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20444-beleaguered-miss...</a>
[ugh] NYT headline writers again.<p>Falsifiable scientific experiment -- the gold standard for physics -- cannot prove that something is <i>right</i>. It can only fail to demonstrate that something is <i>wrong</i>.