‘Impressive’: Tibetan Plateau telescope tests light’s speed – and Einstein’s theory of special relativity
- Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory helps team test Einstein’s theory, finding no evidence that particles’ speed changes depending on energy
- Lhaaso, commissioned in 2021, operates as most sensitive ultra-high-energy gamma ray detector in the world
The speed of light appeared to remain constant during the most powerful cosmic explosion ever observed, based on the world’s most sensitive high-energy light detector, according to Chinese scientists who tested Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Their study, which was posted to the preprint platform arXiv this month but is not yet peer-reviewed, provides the latest evidence that the universe is a symmetrical place – also known as Lorentz symmetry, a pillar of Einstein’s theory of special relativity – leaving scientists empty-handed in their search for violations of this symmetry.
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Nicolas Yunes, a theoretical physicist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the US, said Lorentz violation was a phenomenon predicted by researchers who sought to develop a quantum gravity theory to unify general relativity and quantum mechanics.
“If detected, such a violation would be a groundbreaking discovery, which would shake the very foundations of physics,” Yunes said. “To date, no such violation has been observed.”
The results by the Lhaaso team placed “the strongest constraints” on such violations, and implied that a linear-type Lorentz violation was “probably truly not present in nature”, Yunes said.
In Einstein’s relativity theory, Lorentz symmetry stipulates that observers see the same laws of physics from any given direction or frame of reference, as long as the observed object is moving at a constant speed.