Nov 25 2008
Is Nothing Sacred?
Saint Einstein recently escaped being impaled by those gall-darn scientists. Test, test, test, doubt and question, that’s all they seem to do. And not even the work of the most high icon of science itself is exempt.
In Einstein’s Relativity Survives Neutrino Test I read,
The test of Lorentz invariance, conducted by MINOS Experiment scientists and reported in the Oct. 10 issue of Physical Review Letters, started with a stream of muon neutrinos produced at Fermilab particle accelerator, near Chicago, and ended with a neutrino detector 750 meters away and 103 meters below ground. As the Earth does its daily rotation, the neutrino beam rotates too.
“If there’s a field out there that can cause violations of Lorentz invariance, we should be able to see its effects as the beam rotates in space,” said Indiana University Bloomington astrophysicist Stuart Mufson, a project leader. “But we did not. Einsteinian relativity lives to see another day.”
In case you didn’t know, Einstein didn’t name his theories “special relativity” and “general relativity.” And really, the “relativity” was the tails side of the coin he focused on, at least initially. One could argue that his work was primarily about the invariance of the speed of light. And that work built upon Lorentz’s invariance equation. The mind-boggling implication that everyone now emphasizes is that the units we use to measure speed — spatial and temporal — are thus relative.
