Physical confirm that Einstein was right, time goes slower … – La Vanguardia

Madrid. (Europa Press) .- German physicists have verified a prediction of special theory of relativity Einstein with unprecedented accuracy. Experiments in a particle accelerator in Germany confirmed that time moves slower for moving clock that for a fixed one. Work is the most rigorous test of this effect but “time dilation” which Einstein predicted.

A consequence of this effect is that a person traveling on a high-speed rocket would age more slowly people on Earth. Few scientists doubt that Einstein was right. But mathematics describing the effect of time dilation are “fundamental to all physical theories,” says Thomas Udem, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, who was not involved in the research. “It is very important to check as accurately as possible.”

The article was published in Physical Review Letters . It is the culmination of 15 years of work by an international group of collaborators including Nobel Theodor Hänsch, director of the Max Planck Institute of Optical prize. To test the effect of time dilation, physicists need to compare two clocks. – One that is stationary and moving

To do this, the researchers used the experimental storage ring where they are stored and studied High speed particles at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany. Scientists made the clock in motion by accelerating the lithium ions to a third of the speed of light. Measured after a series of transitions in the lithium as electrons jumped between different energy levels. The frequency of transitions served as the “ticking” of the clock. Transitions in Lithium ions were not moving served stationary clock.

The researchers measured the effect of time dilation more accurately than any previous study, including one published in 2007 by the same group of research. “It’s almost five times better than our old result, and 50 to 100 times better than any other method used by others to measure relativistic time dilation,” says co-author Gerald Gwinner, a physicist at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada.

Understanding time dilation also has practical implications. The Global Positioning System (GPS) is timed essentially in orbit and the GPS software has to account for tiny shifts of time in the analysis of the navigation information. The European Space Agency (ESA) plans to test time dilation in space when starting atomic clock Ensemble in Space (ACES), an experiment to be sent to the International Space Station in 2016, reports Nature .