News

Einstein rules. The most famous equation of it's kind, E=mc² has survived its toughest test to date.

Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity, first introduced in 1905, has been proven more than a century later to be 55 times more accurate than ever before determined, according to a group of MIT physicists and colleagues from the National Institute for Standards and Technology.

The group found that the formula predicting that energy and mass are equivalent, a building block to understanding the physical world, is correct to one part in a million. In the equation E stands for energy, m for mass, and c for the speed of light.

But why were the scientist's testing the theory?

"In spite of widespread acceptance of this equation as gospel, we should remember that it is a theory," said David Pritchard, a professor of physics at MIT, who along with the team reported his findings in the Dec. 22 issue of Nature. "It can be trusted only to the extent that it is tested with experiments."

"If this equation were found to be even slightly incorrect, the impact would be enormous — given the degree [it] is woven into the theoretical fabric of modern physics and every applications of such global positioning systems," he states in the article.

GPS is the most common use of the theory in modern life. The systems operate by linking a series of several satellites to instruments in planes and cars. They rely on nanosecond accuracy and in order to do so, utilize the theory of relativity to convey accurate readings.

In the MIT/NIST test, the physicists measured the change in mass associated with the energy released by a nucleus when it captures a neutron. The NIST team recorded the energy of the particles of light emitted by the nucleus with a special spectrometer.

The difference in mass before and after capturing the neutron was determined at MIT by measuring a nucleus using the cyclotron orbit frequencies of two single molecules trapped in a strong magnetic field for several weeks.

According to the report, their findings are as accurate as measuring "the distance from New York to Los Angeles within the width of a human hair."

However, despite surviving its most difficult test to date, Prof. Pritchard said it doesn't prove Einstein's theory to be absolutely correct.

"Future physicists will undoubtedly subject it to even more precise tests because more accurate checks imply that our theory of the world is in fact more and more complete."