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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fuindordm" data-source="post: 2683791" data-attributes="member: 5435">Note that the bending of light by gravity is also predicted by Newtonian gravitational theory.  Einstein's prediction was that the degree of deflection would be exactly double the about predicted by Newton, and he was right!  This was a pretty difficult measurement to make at the time, but a lot of his contemporaries thought his theory was unnecessarily complicated.A phenomenon used extensively today to verify the existence of dark matter and map its distribution in the universe. Here's a dramatic example, where the images of very distant galaxies are stretched out into long arcs by the gravity of the galaxy cluster in the foreground.<a href="http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap011007.html" target="_blank">http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap011007.html</a>This site is written by a crank.  Their writing style is very distinctive.  Lots of people are interested in the answers to the grand questions, and borrow the trappings of physics and mathematics without bothering to learn enough of the subject to be able to analyze their own ideas with any rigor.  Instead, they assert the truth of their statements as self-evident or mystical revelation, and throw in a bit of math to make it seem as if they have done the work.When I started my first postdoc, I received an unsolicited paper from a crank who had a new theory on the origins of the universe, something about a fundamental wave spawning other waves of ever-increasing complexity.  None of it was comprehensible, but the paper attracted my attention because of the last line of his abstract:"...and in addition, we rationalize pi."Intrigued, I turned to the appendix.  He started off by taking pi=22/7, wrote out the decimal version to something like twenty places, then did some arithmetic to prove that the result was a rational number.It was good for a laugh, at least. Ben</blockquote>

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