Although considered incomplete because of its lack of sound physical backdrop, this “second quantization” and its subsequent experimental verification can be rightly seen as evidence for the rightness of SR.įeynman took it further and completed the quantum electrodynamics (QED), which has been the most rigorously tested theory ever.
It combined SR and quantum mechanics in an elegant framework and predicted the existence of positrons, which bore out later on. On the theory side, in the thirties, Dirac derived a framework to describe electrons. In fact, almost all of modern physics (physics of the 20th century) is built on it. So the whole Standard Model of particle physics is built on SR. Such an excess is the signature of the parent particle at that mass.Īlmost every one of the particles in the particle data book that we know and love is detected using some variant of this method. You do this for many thousands of times and make a distribution (a “histogram”) and detect any statistically significant excess at any mass. In accordance with SR, the invariant mass is the rest mass of the parent particle. The way it works is this: in order to discover a heavy particle, you first detect its daughter particles (decay products, that is), measure their energies and momenta, add them up (as “4-vectors”), and compute the invariant mass of the system as the modulus of the aggregate energy-momentum vector. In experimental high energy physics, for instance, we compute the rest mass of a particle as its identifying statistical signature. But it is the integration of SR into the rest of modern physics that makes it all but impossible to write it off as a failed theory. Despite my personal reservations about it, the body of proof for the validity of SR is really enormous and the theory has stood the test of time - at least so far. The special theory of relativity is an extremely well-tested theory. I will list my misgivings vis-a-vis SR and present my case against it as the last post in this series, but in this one, I would like to explore why it is so difficult to toss SR out the window.
In fact, I believe that there are compelling reasons to consider SR inaccurate, if not actually wrong, although the physics community would have none of that.
Nothing would satisfy my anarchical mind more than to see the Special Theory of Relativity (SR) come tumbling down.