Hey Einstein!

I've been reading The Fabric of the Cosmos, by Brian Greene, an excellent overview of the advances made in modern theoretical physics over the past 50 years. All of which actually started earlier, when Einstein proved that gravity travels at the speed of light by warping the spacetime continuum, debunking Newton. (Both of whom had autism, interestingly.)

And thus my amazement at a story in today's BBC News about a long-delayed gravity probe to be deployed by NASA with the caption: "Einstein's theories about space have not been proved." Now, if that's not bad enough -- experiments decades ago proved Einstein right by measuring warping of light by the sun during solar eclipses -- but the story ran right next to a sidebar that listed other BBC articles about Einstein. And the most recent one, titled "Einstein Proved Right on Gravity," reports that "The speed of gravity has been measured for the first time, revealing that it does indeed travel at the speed of light. It means that Einstein's General Theory of Relativity has passed yet another test with flying colours."

This is far worse than an inability to master fact checking, it's plain idiotic. A writer at least has to have a basic understanding of the subject in order to write an intelligent story. The lesson must be never to accept scientific stories in the general media. But since we get political, international and business news from these same, highly respected but plainly disfunctional journalistic yo-yos, perish the thought how they are probably screwing that up blood well too.

 Posted by glenn | TrackBack