Einstein’s Relativity Survives Neutrino Test

October 17th, 2008

One of the best things about scientific theeory is that no matter how old the theory is, or how often it is put to the test, there is usually someone out there that wants to try and disprove it. It is a healthy ambition to want to always test a theory so that you are able to either create a newer theory that adds to the previous one, totally debunk the theory in question, or add to the evidence that the original theory is even more stable.

Physicists decided to try and disprove “Lorentz invariance” — Einstein’s prediction that matter and massless particles will behave the same no matter how they’re turned or how fast they go. Their tests won’t get the job done from muon neutrinos, says a consortium of scientists. Time fot them to check out some Brazil vacation packages and go back to the drawing board.

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.”