Albert Einstein’s theories remain un-debunked:
Astronomers said Wednesday that a race halfway across the universe had ended in a virtual tie. And so the champion is still Albert Einstein — for now.
The race was between gamma rays of differing energies and wavelengths spit in a burst from an exploding star when the universe was half its present age. After a journey of 7.3 billion light-years, they all arrived within nine-tenths of a second of one another in a detector on NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope, at 8:22 p.m., Eastern time, on May 9.
Astronomers said the gamma-ray race was one of the most stringent tests yet of a bedrock principle of modern physics: Einstein’s proclamation in his 1905 theory of relativity that the speed of light is constant and independent of its color, or energy; its direction; or how you yourself are moving.
“I take it as a confirmation that Einstein is still right,” Peter F. Michelson of Stanford, principal investigator for Fermi’s Large Area Telescope and one of 206 authors of a paper published online Wednesday in the journal Nature, said in an interview.
There is no evidence so far that the energy or wavelength of light affects its speed through space. That is important because of what it could say about the structure of space-time. Some theorists have suggested that space on very small scales has a granular structure that would speed some light waves faster than others — in short, that relativity could break down on the smallest scales.
Dr. Michelson and others emphasize that while the new Fermi results do not yet eliminate the prospect, further observations with more gamma-ray bursts could eventually verify or refute the hypothesis. That would have a major effect on physicists’ efforts to unify the Einsteinian gravity that governs outer space with the weird quantum laws that govern the inner space of the atom.
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the last word belongs to Einstein, Robert P. Kirshner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics wrote in an e-mail message paraphrasing a 1919 headline in The New York Times about observations that confirmed Einstein’s general relativity. “But the Nature story,” Dr. Kirshner wrote, “is ‘Einstein found right again. Heavens not askew! Savants not agog!’ ”
Here’s the headline from 1919 that was referred to:
