Exporting the influence of Einstein's relativity theory is no longer just a domain of science that learns rockets or outer space alone. The experiments conducted on the table in a laboratory in Colorado have illustrated the strange timing of the strangeness that is usually examined by space travel and jet planes.
By using the super precise atomic clock, scientists have witnessed the widening of time i.e. the odd acceleration or slowdown of time portrayed by Einstein's relativity theory. The experiments were published on September 24 in Science.
"Modern technology is so surprised that you can see these exotic influences in your living room," said Clifford Will's physicist from the University of Washington in St. Louis. The experiments did not reveal new physics science, Will's word, but "that makes it beautiful and cool enough is that they have done it on the table."
The widening of time appears in two situations. In the first case, time seems to move slower when you are closer to a giant object like Earth. Therefore, for example, someone who floats in an air balloon is actually faster than someone who stands below.
Time also moves faster for a person at a relative break time with someone moving. Einstein dramatized this second strangeness with the twin paradox of a 25-year-old twin travelling with a rocket plane approaching the speed of light after a few months back to Earth would find that his twin brothers were middle-aged.
Previous experiments with rockets and airplanes have shown strange aspects of general and special relativity. The allegation that the time went slower when closer to the Earth was even tested on a scale of multilevel physics building at Harvard.
Now advances in laser technology and the field of quantum information science have allowed researchers to demonstrate Enstein theories on a more general or ordinary scale.
The researchers used a two-hour optical atom placed on steel tables in adjacent laboratories at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (INST) in Boulder, Colorado. Each hour has an aluminum atom filled with electricity, or ion, which vibrates between two energy levels over a million billion times per second. An optical cable that was 75 m long connected the hours allowing the research team to compare the accuracy of the instruments.
In the first test, physicist James Chin-Wen Chou and his colleagues in INST use hydraulic dongcrust to raise one of the tables as high as 33 cm. Quite definitively, the lower hours run slower than the one raised at 90 billion in ratios of 79 years. In the second attempt, the team applied the electric field at an hour that made the aluminum ions move forward and backward. As predicted, moving hours run slower than a stationary hour or a break.
"That is an awesome precision," says physicist Daniel Kleppner of MIT. Of course scientists are very conscious of this relativistic influence, he said. The hours on the GPS equipment are also influenced by relativity, and appropriate adjustments are made to keep the tools functioning properly.
The experiments have more implications for the precision of the instrument than on relativity, Chou said. But the experiments were the tandamata that the relativity was always near. "People tend to ignore relativisitic influences, but relativistic influences are everywhere," he says. "Every day people are activities like climbing stairs. It's interesting to think: do routine aviators become younger (because they have a lot of moves) or sooner older (Karna spend a lot of time in the air)? "
