Yesterday I ran into a senior physicist here at Stanford. When I asked him about the Gravity B probe, he shook his head, replying that he was a “dissident.”

The experiment, he explained, could produce only two results, neither of which would advance science a jot. The first result? “It’ll give us the measurements we’re expecting. In that case it won’t tell us anything about general relativity that we don’t already know.” The second? “It won’t give us the results we’re expecting. But we’ve had so many confirmations of relativity since this experiment was proposed 40 years ago that everyone will believe the experiment itself was at fault.”

Was Gravity B a good use of something like $800 million of taxpayers’ money?

“If you’d known when the experiment was proposed that it would take 40 years to get it launched, and that in the meantime we’d have gotten so many confirmations of relativity, you’d have had to say, ‘Don’t do it.’”