Friday, November 21, 2008

103 Years Later Einstein Is Proven Right


It has been a busy week as we prepare everything for "black friday" and the onslaught of customers. I have arranged all of the art prints so they will be easier to flip through, and for me to access any multiples that I might have for very popular prints. Don't let the economy scare you, sales are already ramping up this week, and it looks like it will be a sprint to Christmas.
Anyway, this is the first moment I have had to get anything posted for a few days, and I read this interesting story concerning Einstein's e=mc2 equation being verified after 103 years, and thought this was a good way to start Friday!!

The Yahoo News story begins: It's taken more than a century, but Einstein's celebrated formula e=mc2 has finally been corroborated, thanks to a heroic computational effort by French, German and Hungarian physicists. A brainpower consortium led by Laurent Lellouch of France's Centre for Theoretical Physics, using some of the world's mightiest supercomputers, have set down the calculations for estimating the mass of protons and neutrons, the particles at the nucleus of atoms.

According to the conventional model of particle physics, protons and neutrons comprise smaller particles known as quarks, which in turn are bound by gluons. The odd thing is this: the mass of gluons is zero and the mass of quarks is only five percent. Where, therefore, is the missing 95 percent? The answer, according to the study published in the US journal Science on Thursday, comes from the energy from the movements and interactions of quarks and gluons. In other words, energy and mass are equivalent, as Einstein proposed in his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905. The e=mc2 formula shows that mass can be converted into energy, and energy can be converted into mass.
link to the full story

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