A finesse of General Relativity?

[UncleAl]

Einstein posulated that all local bodies fall identically in vacuum - the Equivalence Principle (EP). Spacetime curvature immediately arises, General Relativity follows. Weitzenboek ignored the EP, got spacetime torsion and wildy different maths, and exactly the same predictions. Both are without detectable flaws. Only one theory can be correct. Does everything fall identically?

All chemical compositions fall identically to one part in ten trillion difference/average. The "all" can be derived from symmetries contained in physics through Noether's theorem. The measurements are done with an Eotvos balance. How can objects - say dimensionally identical solid spheres - be different other than by their chemical compositions?

Do left and right hands fall identically? How does one measure the amount of handedness? Silica, all of it pure SiO<u>2</u>, occurs in an amazing variety of atomic lattice structures. Common quartz is either left-handed or right-handed because it contains helices (screws) of atoms. Fused silica is amorphous. Does left-handed quartz fall identically to right-handed quartz? Do they each fall identically to fused silica?

It is a good question! We can ask it tersely and technically (Adobe pdf document), or we can fill a big Web page with the discussion. If oppositely handed objects do not fall identically then Einstein was wrong and Weitzenboek is better.

The three experiments in quartz and fused silica are being run in Wuhan, China. All the results will be obtained by the summer of 2005. Will Einstein get... screwed by a left-handed compliment?

[Tormod]

Hey there pal! Long time no see!

Interesting post. Looks like some of us will have to actually read something here....

[Bo]

violation of the equivalence principle would indeed be very interesting.
Most information i can find states that a violation could be used to explain the solar neutrino problem (http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9810510)
here: http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0112060 is given a review of various sollutions to the SNP. it shows (see the tables in the end; the eq. princ. is discussed on page 7 and further) that the violation of the eq. princ. is not an exceptional candidate;

i cant find much information on Weitzenboe(c?)K ; and your links dont seem to work...

Bo

[UncleAl]

I hate BillGates. Let's try it again, this time copy and paste and correct for the sour links in the original post,

"all" Table of coupling of physics' symmetries to observable properties through Noether's theorem.
technically Adobe pdf of the technical proposal. Very short on explanation.
discussion Very large footnoted exposition of the technical issues. Use the clickable outline at the top.

Violating the Equivalence Principle with handedness formally violates Lorentz invariance, the isotropy of space and conservation of angular momentum, and also throws quantum mechanics into a tizzy. This sort of investigation has become very sexy in other venues, re Kostelecky and here and here.

Equivalence Princple challenges based on chemical composition have been 400 years of elegant nulls (failure): table, pdf review, pdf summary, including lunar laser ranging studies and the Nordvedt effect, pdf paper, arXiv preprint.

The singular "gotcha" of the parity Eotvos experiment is that neither a net output nor a null have any effect upon prior observations. 100% of all physics observations dating back to Galileo simply have no comment on handedness (parity, actually) effects in gravitation. It could happen! We'll know for an observed fact in about nine months.

Convincing an academic physics group that chemistry might know something they didn't - and that they should look to cover their behinds - was not easy. An American group is still "thinking about it" after two years of discussions. The original four skinny graphs in the pdf required nearly 800 hours in an AMD Opteron-848 supercomputer cluster, time donated by AMD. The dense graphs for quartz have so far consumed nearly 10,000 Intel Xeon server farm CPU-hrs in slack time donated by Canada, Switzerland, the UK, and the US. Another 2500 hrs' results should arrive on Monday - about 1.2 mm extension on the thick graph. Log-log plots get ugly toward the right. Each additional point at large radius now eats 2 CPU-hours. We believe there are demonstrably no surprise swerves hidden in the graphs.

It has been four years of tremendous fun, whatever the outcome. An early offshoot of the exercise found a small error in the mathematician's published work ("that devilish molecule!"), blew out nomenclature assignment software in IUPAC and CAS, and caused NIST to rewrite its commercial stereochemistry assignment software. Chiralane was our first hint that maybe the math had real world relevance. Then, we escalated!