relativity test experiment I came up with

[kunkmiester]

Granted the original idea popped into my head over a decade ago while still in high school, but I had a thought recently about another way to do it.

The original idea was put a macro particle into an accelerator. Get enough speed for relativity to come into play, and see if there's a change in half life from time dilation. There are several challenges with such an idea, I never studied enough physics to bother with it anyway.

The new idea I figure would be easier in some ways. Use muons instead of a macro particle. The target would be timed so that if relativity delays the decay of the muon, it'll hit the target. Not enough relativity, the muon decays too soon and you don't get a muon impact at the target. Probably easier to get a straight line path too, to get rid of worries about the curved path affecting your reference frame.

[hanelyp]

A similar experiment has already been done, looking at how many muons created by cosmic ray collisions in the upper atmosphere reach detectors on the ground.

[GIThruster]

Interesting idea. Thee are three troubles that concern me here. First, I don't know just how heavy a particle most accelerators can handle. Could be something with a short enough half life to measure would be a problem here. Second thing is particles don't actually have half lives per se, so much as the material in bulk. Each individual atom (ionized for service) has only a statistical probability of decay around a specific time, so what you'd need to do is perform this experiment many thousands or hundreds of thousands of times to get a statistically valid result. That's a lot of work for a theory that has already been validated many times. Third trouble is, that even if you choose a material with a shorter half-life, the percent of that life you would change with many trips around an accelerator might not be within measurement. If you need to run the particles for a year to get statistical resolution, and you need to run many thousands of heavy particles, that could be a serious problem.

Still, a very interesting idea.