Note to the editors of Wall Street Journal who forgot to fact check a physicist’s lies:
Sean Carroll wrote referring to General Relativity:
Because of gravity, clocks tick a bit more slowly near the surface of the Earth than they do in outer space. (This esoteric fact is of crucial importance to the functioning of the Global Positioning System, which compares local time with that of orbiting satellites.)
Dear editors: Mr. Carroll knows no more about the “functioning of the Global Positioning System” then you and I. He has not seen any of the operational source code used in GPS and he is not privy to any government or private proprietary source code proving that the functioning of GPS is dependent on General Relativity.
Mr. Carroll is an academic physicist and he is posturing as if he knows it all but in fact he is just repeating a physics fable. Next time make sure you fact check any claims Mr. Carroll makes which does not fall within his narrow specialty which is teaching introductory physics.
The originator of the physics fable that without General Relativity GPS will fail is a physicist called Neil Ashby. He made this claim referring to his work for the government and his claims cannot be verified and never were because they were classified. There are credible engineers (not dogmatic physicists selling a physics theory) who worked on the development of the GPS who claim that General Relativity has nothing to do with GPS. You can find all this online or read the comments here.
Mr. Carroll has no credibility as a scientist because he is repeating fables and hearsay and he will never admit that he is spreading falsehoods by abusing his academic authority. I suggest that you add a disclaimer to this article saying that the opinions Mr. Carroll presents here are his own opinions as a writer and layman regarding anything that falls outside his narrow specialty.
I challenge Mr. Carroll to come clean and publish here the GPS source code that he has seen (not some theoretical propaganda from a general relativity textbook) that contains General Relativistic corrections which are not just the nth term in an expansion that was branded as a relativistic term by some physicist.
In a 1955 paper Winterberg proposed a test of General Relativity using accurate atomic clocks placed in orbit in artificial satellites.[16][17] At that time atomic clocks were not yet of the required accuracy and artificial satellites did not exist. Werner Heisenberg wrote a letter to Winterberg in 1957 in which he said the idea sounded “very interesting”. This idea was later experimentally verified by Hafele and Keating in 1971 by flying atomic clocks on commercial jets. The theoretical approach was the same as that used by Winterberg.
[Non-relevant sentence edited.]
This post is not about tests of General Relativity. Read this article to learn about the charade physicists call “testing General Relativity”: http://densytics.com/2008/10/27/mercurys-perihelion-and-einsteins-general-relativity/
This post is about the physics fable perpetuated by physicists that GPS would fail without General Relativistic corrections. If you have evidence (such as actual operational GPS code) let me know. See, comments on this post about GPS and General Relativity. http://densytics.com/2010/10/11/if-newton-were-to-come-back-to-earth/