Re: Is There A Physicist in the House?
George Murphy (gmurphy@raex.com)
Mon, 27 Dec 1999 08:40:08 -0500
Guy Blanchet wrote:
>
> I wish to solicit the help of a person knowledgeable in the field of
> experimental Relativity namely on the phenomena of the variation of mass
> with respect to velocity as measured by an observer “at rest”. I am
> looking for good solid experimental data especially at the high end of
> the v/c spectrum i.e between 0.6 and 0.99.
>
> The reason for this is that, although Relativity conforms to actual
> experimental results up to about 0.6 v/c, I suspect that after this
> point, experimental results slowly begins to break away and reach a
> value 12% higher than theory prediction at v/c = 0.9. This would of
> course be enough of an error to cause concern.
>
> What is the source of my suspicion? Well, I believe I am well into what
> one would call a Christian view of fundamental physics, which looks very
> much like ordinary physics in that it has postulates, models and
> mathematical expressions of these models. The important difference
> however is that a biblical notion of the Creator God is at the centre of
> the theory which speaks of the absolute as well as the relative. A good
> understanding of the character of God was paramount to the development
> of the theory. One of the four demos included in the explanation of the
> theory is an expression derived for the mass vs. velocity variation.
>
> My paper is not finished and therefore I cannot send anything yet. In
> the meantime, it would greatly help if one of you could share credible
> information on the subject in question. This should ideally be in the
> form of a well documented experiment available in either French or
> English. Thank you for your help.
1) First a matter of terminology: Relativity theorists today generally don't
use the older terminology "variation of mass", M = m/(1 - v^2/c^2)^1/2 but speak
relativistic expressions for momentum and energy, p = Mv and E = Mc^2, where M is
defined as above. The older language is not wrong but for several reasons is clumsy for
further theoretical work.
2) One piece of older experimental work relevant to your question is R.A.R.
Tricker in Proceedings of the Royal Society A 109, 384 (1935). He used beta rays with
speeds up to .8c and found close agreement with the relativistic formulae.
3) Nowadays particle accelerators are designed with the assumption that the
relativistic relations between mass, velocity, energy, & momentum are correct, & these
machines would not work if those relations were wrong. The Tevatron at Fermilab, e.g.,
can accelerate protons to energies of 900 GeV (as in the experiments which found the top
quark - see, e.g., Chris Quigg, "Top-ology", Physics Today, May 1997). This energy is
(roughly) 1000 times the proton's rest energy, which means that v/c differs from unity
by only 5 x 10^-7. Thus the relativistic expressions seem to work up to such speeds.
4) There are absolutes in special relativity. The speed of light is the most
obvious, but electric charge and entropy are other examples.
Shalom,
George
George L. Murphy
gmurphy@raex.com
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/