Einstein Was Right

According to Einstein's relativity, if you move relative to another observer and come back to their starting point, you'll age less than whatever remains stationary. Einstein also tells us that the curvature of space itself, depending on the strength of gravitation at your location, also affects how fast or slow your clock runs.

By flying planes both with and against Earth's rotation, and returning them all to the same starting point, we tested Einstein as never before. 

Here's what we learned.

In 1905, our conception of the Universe changed forever when Einstein put forth his special theory of relativity. Prior to Einstein, scientists were able to describe every “point” in the Universe with the use of just four coordinates: three spatial positions for each of the three dimensions, plus a time to indicate which moment any particular event occurred. 

All of this changed when Einstein had the fundamental realization that every single observer in the Universe, dependent on their motion and location, each had a unique perspective on where and when every event in the Universe would have occurred.

Whenever one observer moves through the Universe relative to another, the observer-in-motion will experience time dilation: where their clocks run slower relative to the observer-at-rest. 

Based on this, Einstein suggested that we could make use of two clocks to put this to the test: one at the equator, which speeds around the Earth at approximately 1670 km/hr (1038 mph), and one at the Earth’s poles, which is at rest as the Earth rotates about its axis.  READ MORE...

Creating Matrer

E = MC2 MAY BE the most quotidian equation in physics. Everyone’s heard of it and it’s been proven time and again. Did you convert mass into energy? Go tell it to the stars, whose light is generated from mass lost during nuclear fusion.

But there is another way to imagine this fundamental equation.

“You can actually look at this process from both sides,” Daniel Brandenburg, a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, tells Inverse.

“In our case, we wanted to take light and convert it into matter.”

That it turns out is a lot less mundane.

On his 143rd birthday, Inverse celebrates the world’s most iconic physicist — and interrogates the myth of his genius. Welcome to Einstein Week.

Brandenburg is a member of the STAR collaboration, a group of more than 700 scientists from 15 countries who use BNL’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC (pronounced “Rick”), to smash gold nuclei together at 99.995 percent the speed-of-light.

For this experiment, the researchers were more interested in the near misses than the hits. Ultra-high-energy photons encircle the gold nuclei like an aura, and auras collide as nuclei zoom past one another. When photons (particles of light; massless, pure energy) collide, they generate an electron and a positron, its antimatter counterpart — both particles that have a mass. This is known as the Breit-Wheeler Process.

“The part that makes the Breit-Wheeler process so hard to achieve is getting photons that have enough energy,” explains Brandenburg. “We’ve crossed this threshold where we can convert the photons into a real electron-positron pair. And that’s where we really can achieve what Einstein talked about, where we take the energy from the photons.”

THE EINSTEIN CONNECTION
E = mc2 is an outgrowth of Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity, which says that an object’s speed affects how it experiences space and time relative to other objects. (His theory of general relativity adds gravity into the mix.) About two decades after Einstein’s seminal 1905 paper on the matter, two theoretical physicists, Gregory Breit and John Wheeler took his by then famous and accepted equation and deduced the requirements for turning light into matter.  READ MORE...