Jan 07 2009
A Loss For Words
Damn, science is exciting! While this finding may not rock your world, it sent a small tremor through mine.
Possible Abnormality In Fundamental Building Block Of Einstein’s Theory Of Relativity
Are you sitting down? Good. Put your mug of coffee back on your desktop. Now take a deep breath.
IU distinguished physics professor Alan Kostelecky and graduate student Jay Tasson take on the long-held notion of the exact symmetry promulgated in Einstein’s 1905 theory and show in a paper to be published in Physical Review Letters that there may be unexpected violations of Lorentz invariance that can be detected in specialized experiments.
Wow.
If the findings help reveal the first evidence of Lorentz violations, it would prove relativity is not exact. Space-time would not look the same in all directions and there would be measurable relativity violations, however minuscule.
No way!
Hard to detect, each background field offers its own universal standard for determining whether or not an object is moving, or in which direction it is going. If a field interacts with certain particles, then the behavior of those particles changes and can reveal the relativity violations caused by the field. Gravity distorts the fields, and this produces particle behaviors that can reveal otherwise hidden violations.
I’m speechless. And it’s only partly because the physics involved is over my head. So far as I understand it, the Lorentz equations are the math Einstein used to describe how space and time can dilate and contract, allowing the speed of light to be invariant. With Einstein’s breakthrough came the understanding that space and time are relative measures and that there is no preferred reference frame. There is no master clock, no single reference frame by which to best (or even better) put events into context. With this new finding it seems that under some conditions relativity breaks down, that a reference frame more fundamental than the others can be determined.
So much for the notion that contemporary scientists are merely dotting the “I”s and crossing the “T”s on what we already know. True, I’m unlikely to encounter a violation of relativity while forking salad into my mouth during lunch, but in a small way this is a very big finding.
