This book provides an up-to-date account of the precise experiments that can be performed in a terrestrial laboratory and are used to explore the nature of universal gravitation. The experiments required are at the limits of sensitivity of mechanical measurements. The problems of experiment design are discussed, and critical accounts given of the principal experiments testing the inverse square law and the principle of equivalence, and measuring the constant of gravitation. An analysis of the effects of noise and other disturbances is also provided, further highlighting the care that is...

Within two weeks after starting his senior year of high school in the 1950s, Gary Blanchard finds himself kicked out of one school and attending another-the school where his cousin, Ralph, mysteriously died six months before. Ralph's death was labeled an accident, but when Gary talks to people about it, he gets suspicious. Did Ralph fall from the auditorium balcony, or was he pushed? Had he found a diamond necklace, talked about by cousins newly arrived from England, that was supposedly stolen from Dutch royalty by a common ancestor and lost for generations? What about the principal with an...

This intriguing book examines the questions of how the ways in which we observe the world determine theories of physics and how we can get reliable results that enable us to make secure predictions. The first chapters deal with the theories of quantum mechanics and relativity and are followed by a discussion of chaotic dynamics. The uncertainty of observations and probabilistic agruments in physics are then treated. Finally, it is argued that the success of prediction is reason for believing in the existence of a world independent of ourselves.