Conveners
Session 8: The gravity experiment of Roland Eötvös
- Péter Ván (Wigner RCP)
In the Fall of 1955, Bob Dicke, returned to Princeton from his Sabbatical at Harvard and brought with him the thought that the experimental basis of general relativity was thin and that much more was needed including a modern high precision version of the Eötvös experiment. To this end, he established a program of carrying out high-precision gravitational experiments at Princeton. The bulk of...
Loránd Eötvös began his first gravity experiments using the Coulomb/Cavendish balance. This balance can measure the degree of deviation of the equipotential surface from the spherical shape. Eötvös had the great idea to place one of the masses at the ends of the torsion beam to a lower level by hanging it from a wire and thus making the instrument sensitive to the horizontal gradient of the...
Roland (Loránd) Eötvös and his colleagues Dezső Pekár and Jenő Fekete made measurements (the EPF measurement) between 1906 and 1908 for validating the equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass. Ephraim Fischbach and his
colleagues reanalyzed the results of the EPF measurement in 1986 and discovered a correlation between the small violations and some atomic parameter. Experimental...
The GEE Lab at Washington University in St. Louis has been operating a prototype long-period torsion balance in a search for violations of Einstein's Equivalence Principle (EEP). We have continuously monitored the angular orientation of the torsion balance for over 115 days, resulting in a rich set of data. From this, we have extracted signals on the differential acceleration of two test...
