A student in my freshman seminar class at Harvard University innocently asked me this week whether gravitational time dilation, as predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, is relevant to our daily life. This felt like a baseball raised for a home run by a friendly pitcher. I explained that without correcting for time dilation, Uber drivers would never reach their destination. Their GPS (Global Positioning System) navigation would guide them to the wrong location. Of course, gravitational redshift was also observed by astronomers from stars and the vicinity of black holes.
Other facets of modern physics are even more apparent in our daily life. In particular, electromagnetism and quantum mechanics provide the foundation for widely used technologies, such as computers, cell phones and the internet. The basic principles of known physics were tested to exquisite precision, given their many practical uses.
Physicists and astronomers (including myself) are so eager to discover new physics, that they are willing to dedicate decades of their careers to the design of the Large Hadron Collider or the James Webb Space Telescope at a cost of $10 billion each. Nevertheless, these facilities are slow to uncover aspects of the physical reality that we may have missed.
It is therefore ironic to see how “new physics” is casually entertained on social media by people who use the technological fruits of scientific knowledge at their fingertips to argue that new physics is just around the corner.
To read more, click here.