Gamma Ray Anomaly Could Test String Theory

exploder writes "String theory is notorious for its lack of testable predictions. But if the MAGIC gamma-ray telescope team's interpretation is correct, then a delay in the arrival of higher-energy gamma rays could point to a breakdown of relativity theory. A type of 'quantum lensing effect' is postulated to cause the delay, which is approximately four minutes over a half-billion year journey." Ars's writeup is a little more fleshed-out than the Scientific American blog posting.

Comments

Re:Occam's Razor

[DynaSoar]

> OTOH: 100 or so years after the Principa was published a (French?) woman of noble
> birth corrected Newton's kinetic energy equation by emprical means (ie: dropped
> steel balls into clay and mesured the craters).

You're thinking of Emilie du Chatelet, paramour of Voltaire. I don't know how noble, but her family lived in a 30 room apartment overlooking Tuileries gardens in Paris. Certainly rich by birth, and married to a rich French military officer who conveniently left on a polar expedition.

And you're not quite correct about what she did; it was much better than that. The dropped ball and clay experiment was done by Willem 'sGravesande in the Netherlands, but he didn't have the theoretical background to understand what he had -- the craters got deeper with the square of the height (== energy). Liebniz had previously specified that energy should increase with the square of velocity, but that was somewhere between intuition, anti-Newtonian leanings (Newton got credit for calculus rather than he; Newton was pushing for mass times velocity, no square) and fortuitous guesswork. He didn't have the practical sense to develop a means to test it (or perhaps thought that beneath him). What du Chatelet did was put the two together and show the precise relationship between energy, mass and velocity that was supported by the data: E = mv^2.

Smiling Uncle Albert had it half written for him. What he plugged in was c for the Latin celeritas (rapidity), which he showed to have a limit of the speed of light, and that the E and m then equated completely and were thus interchangeable through it. Had she had the verification of Roemer's measurement of the speed of light to work with (said verification was just a few years old and not widely accepted yet) and had more time to work on it (she died from an infection after giving birth) she might have made progress towards that herself.

If she had done so, Poincare probably would have grasped the significance of his "theory of relativity" (Uncle A. never used that term until well after it became popularized, but Poincare used it explicitly in his own) and formulated the famous equation himself. He was, after all, right on the verge of it, and refused to talk about Ol' Al forever more because he failed to get all the way there first. It riled him no end, until the end of his days. Had he been younger and the age earlier, he might have challenged the young Bavarian Jew to a duel. A duel such as Francois-Marie Arouet threatened against a certain French nobleman, which resulted in his expulsion from France to England, where he learned of Newton and his work, which he brought back to France, along with his nom de plume, Voltaire. Or the duel (fencing match, actually) in which Jacques de Brun, the head of the King's bodyguards, was bested by a 16 year old girl named Emilie de Breteuil, as such was her family's name when they lived above Paris's Tuileries gardens.

If this was Connections, and I were James Burke, I'd be making a lot more money than what I'm getting for having written this. I am, however, every bit as pretty as Burke on camera, which is to say not at all.