I'm looking forward to the absolutely riveting discussion that will take place on this submission. Remember Noirin Shirley naming the Hadoop committer who fucked up at ApacheCon? Here's how this conversation goes and I remember because I was involved in one during that fallout:

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She should name names.

Why?

Good to shame the asshole and get it overwith.

And what good does accusing someone of something like this with an entirely one-sided account in public do for anyone?

It lets other women know he's a scumbag! Why are you fighting this? You must be a chauvinist.

No I just think everyone should be spared from trial by Twitter because character assassination is kind of a big deal and there is always the chance that facts are being misrepresented by either side. We do not have the full story but it will not matter because one story has already been presented and conclusions drawn. Any comeback the accused has is already lost.

You're a pig and the problem with men in IT.

It has nothing to do with gender or sexual assault and everything instead to do with having a chance to defend yourself.

It has EVERYTHING to with gender and sexual assault.

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Seriously, save yourself the involvement in this thread. We all know it happens but anything objective you have to say about the accusation or the person making the accusation will be drowned out by misandry. Do not read anything below my post. It is a complete and utter waste of time.

Personally I think shit like this should not be blogged at all but whatever. I am not ready to fight this battle again.

While I understand your thinking, what you're suggesting is not the correct methodology. General Relativity makes a specific, quantitative prediction for an effect. The prediction is not trivial, in the sense that the most reasonable alternative theory -- Newtonian dynamics -- predicts there should be no effect at all. (This is the null hypothesis if you will.)

The GP-B experiment measured this effect and found agreement with the GR prediction. This does not prove that GR is correct; rather, it is a piece of evidence that implies GR is more likely to be a correct description of gravity than what we previously believed [1]. Because the prediction was quantitative, it is unlikely that the result is caused by something else, which makes the evidence in favor of GR that much stronger.

Now, control groups are often used in life sciences fields. For example when you test a drug, you have a control group that takes placebo. It's not my field but as far as I understand this is done for two reasons. First, there is no quantitative prediction regarding how effective the drug should be, because drugs are not understood so precisely. So the prediction you're testing is much weaker; it's just a boolean. Second, there is a known effect -- the placebo effect -- that can affect results. In other words your null hypothesis is that there may be some effect. These things mean that, without a control group, the evidence in favor of a drug's effectiveness is not very strong.

[1] That is not to say that we believed GR was wrong, but we can never be 100% sure, and every piece of positive evidence strengthens the case.