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Government support of relativity research problems
: I'm reverting your change. Experimentalists win the Nobel Prize all the time. A prize was given to someone else for work Dicke was doing. In fact, experimentalists probably win the prize more than theorists. The deletion of that sentence is for liberal purposes, and we don't allow that here.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 15:50, 30 April 2007 (EDT)
: I'm reverting your change. Experimentalists win the Nobel Prize all the time. A prize was given to someone else for work Dicke was doing. In fact, experimentalists probably win the prize more than theorists. The deletion of that sentence is for liberal purposes, and we don't allow that here.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 15:50, 30 April 2007 (EDT)
== Government support of relativity research problems ==
The section on government support of relativity research needs a big re-write, but it needs to be clear what is intended first. There are several specific complaints which seem to have been jumbled together:
#LIGO was a failure, and the money could have been spent elsewhere.
#Too much money is spent on string theory and similar theories.
#The government does not support research into (unspecified) alternate theories.
#This is just liberal crybabying. Not all experiments work, and you can't know ahead of time which ones will. Most such complaints about too much money being spent on some experimental program are based on the idea of government as sugar-daddy, and whining when sugar-daddy likes someone else best.
#This complaint is more legitimate, as there are serious claims that string theory is not a scientific theory. However, this complaint doesn't belong in this article, because string theory is not relativity; it's an attempt to reconcile general relativity with quantum mechanics. String theory would replace general relativity, if a coherent theory were formulated, and then tested.
#This complaint seems ridiculous, as the government has funded plenty of tests to verify general relativity; any experimenter who wants to test an alternate theory can devise a test which would produce one result if GR is correct, and another if the alternate theory is true, and ask for funding for a test to verify GR.
On the other hand, perhaps the section could be deleted altogether. [[User:Ultramontanist|Ultramontanist]] 02:02, 23 June 2007 (EDT)