The Good News For General Relativity Keeps On Coming

Not too long ago, I wrote about how alternate theories to general relativity have been having a tough time as of late. Well, things just got even tougher.

The equivalence principle was on trial for this experiment. One of the basic tenets of relativity is that two objects, no matter what their mass or what they're made of, they are affected by gravity in the same way. This has been tested many times on Earth (and famously, on the Moon), but never with really dense objects. Alternative theories to relativity assume that the equivalence principle breaks down at high density, since up to now, there's been room to work.

The test involved  a neutron star-white dwarf pair, and watching the orbit of the neutron star. If there were variations in its orbit, it would have been in violation of the equivalence principle, and the various alternate theories would have some ground to stand on. But there was no variation, and once again, general relativity was proven correct. And not only that, but this test improved the accuracy of the previous best gravity test by a factor of 10. Alternate gravity theories thus have a lot less room to work.

Beer of the Week

The beer: Saw Bones Ginger Table Beer

Brewed by: Flying Dog Brewery, Frederick, Maryland.

Description (from the website): "During the height of the Civil War, our hometown of Frederick was given the nickname “One Vast Hospital.” With Maryland smack dab in the middle of the Union and Confederacy, patients often outnumbered residents. To this day, if you stand on a quiet street after sunset, you can still hear them singing “Hard Tack Come Again No More.” Despite pioneering a good bit of modern medicine, doctors were dubbed “saw bones.” While the literal sometimes occurred for those on the wrong end of a musket, Saw Bones were also revered for hand-made elixirs in which the cure-all nature of both ginger and lemon were common. To pay homage to the hard-working people on Mercy Street, we enlisted the National Museum of Civil War Medicine to bring you a new Saw Bones in the form of a Belgian-style table beer with ginger and lemon. Crisp and clean on the palette with bold citrus, spice and malt character, it’s just what the doctor ordered."

Would I buy it again?: Definitely. For one thing, it supports a very neat local museum (the National Museum of Civil War Medicine). Also, it's pretty good. A very nice summer beer. And it's rare too, you can't even get this at the Flying Dog brewery itself, you can either get it at the museum, or at a nearby bar. That's it.