Hebrew University of Jerusalem | via PhysOrg, SpaceRef | 2015 Mar 16
One hundred years after Albert Einstein formulated the general theory of relativity, an international team has proposed another experimental proof. In a paper published today in Nature Physics, researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Open University of Israel, Sapienza University of Rome, and University of Montpellier in France, describe a proof for one of the theory's basic assumptions: the idea that all light particles, or photons, propagate at exactly the same speed.
The researchers analyzed data, obtained by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, of the arrival times of photons from a distant gamma-ray burst. The data showed that photons traveling for billions of years from the distant burst toward Earth all arrived within a fraction of a second of each other.
This finding indicates that the photons all moved at the same speed, even though different photons had different energies. This is one of the best measurements ever of the independence of the speed of light from the energy of the light particles.
Beyond confirming the general theory of relativity, the observation rules out one of the interesting ideas concerning the unification of general relativity and quantum theory. While these two theories are the pillars of physics today, they are still inconsistent, and there is an intrinsic contradiction between the two that is partially based on Heisenberg's uncertainty principle that is at the heart of quantum theory. ...
A Planck-scale limit on spacetime fuzziness and stochastic Lorentz invariance violation - Vlasios Vasileiou et al
- Nature Physics (online 16 Mar 2015) DOI: 10.1038/nphys3270
Detectability of Planck-Scale-Induced Blurring with Gamma-Ray Bursts - Eric Steinbring
- Astrophysical Journal 802(1) 38 (2015 Mar 20) DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/802/1/38
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1502.03745 > 15 Jan 2015
