PARIS (AFP) – It's taken more than a century, but Einstein's celebrated formula e=mc2 has finally been corroborated, thanks to a heroic
computational effort by French, German and Hungarian physicists.
news.yahoo.com...
Here is another example that science can't rest until it finds a confirmation of an abstract idea that sets down certain relationships, even if it
takes a non-physical corroboration, such as employing the brute computational power and the knowledge of how things work under the hood.
The issue concerning the famous, short equation was this:
According to the conventional model of particle physics, protons and neutrons comprise smaller particles known as quarks, which in turn are bound
by gluons.
The odd thing is this: the mass of gluons is zero and the mass of quarks is only five percent. Where, therefore, is the missing 95 percent?
In Einstein's time, there were no gluons and quarks to stain the impeccable formula with, but later questions were asked. Was Albert Einstein right
and wrong at the same time?
After 103 years, due to the ever-increasing computational power, it turned out that Albert Einstein was right and right at the same time.
The answer, according to the study published in the US journal Science on Thursday, comes from the energy from the movements and interactions of
quarks and gluons. In other words, energy and mass are equivalent, as Einstein proposed in his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905.
We can only hope that the guys know what they are talking about . . .
There is a simple model that generalizes the issue: In 1905, the formula that relates energy to mass and speed of light looked like this:
E = mc^2
After the discovery of other particles that make protons, it turned out that quarks and gluons cannot account by themselves for the mass of protons --
there had to be something that accounted for the difference. The interactive energy of quarks and gluons was the prime suspect, but there had to be
some evidence of that happening. The inquiry added a question mark to the original equation. What if Einstein's equation couldn't account for
everything going on in the world of subatomic particles?
?_______E = mc^2
It turned out that it wasn't not that easy to take on Albert Einstein's wisdom, even with the help of an army of computers.
Any message for the challengers, Herr Professor?
_________E
Aaah, let me see . . . (SCIENC)E?
No?