(nasa) warped, dragged, scooped

according to a new paper in Nature, two guys with (air quotes) laaaaser beeeeams have measured a heretofore experimentally unconfirmed relativistic effect predicted by two austrian physicists early last century. of course, there are skeptics... most notably, the people involved with the recently launched gravity probe b, a project near and dear to my heart because it's woven into the fabric of my youth. ok that might be an exaggeration, but GPB has sustained many students and faculty in my department at stanford for decades. it was a part of our culture, even if we weren't directly involved with it. we invented mock quals questions about GPB controls systems. we all knew that was where the funding was. it seemed as though GPB had always been there and always would. hundreds of really smart people worked on it and hundreds of millions of dollars were spent building the complicated spacecraft. and then these two guys come along and for next to nothing (according to Nature) shoot laser range finders from the ground and measure the same thing. of course the GPB people are going to be skeptical. who wants to spend nearly a billion dollars and two decades building a spacecraft just to be scooped by laser beams? well, i say the more measurements the merrier. maybe the laser measurements aren't as accurate as they're claiming them to be. we'll see.