Hypercharge force may affect gravity

Press, 4 February 1986, Page 13

Hypercharge force may affect gravity

NZPA-AP New York A new analysis of a classic 60-year-old physics experiment has produced surprising evidence of a previously unknown fundamental force that tends to counteract gravity weakly over short distances.

The peculiar force would allow a feather to fall to the ground faster than a lead brick, in the absence of wind resistance.

Four hundred years ago, Galileo disproved the notion that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones. Legend has it that he dropped two objects of different weights from the top

of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, in Italy. Both fell at the same rate.

The newly discovered force would slow the fall of the heavier object by a very small amount.

The existence of the new force, called the hypercharge force, was proposed in “Physical Review Letters,” a prestigious physics journal, by Ephraim Fischbach, of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and his colleagues — Daniel Sudarsky, Aaron Szafer and Carrick Talmadge from Purdue, and Sam Aronson from Brook-

haven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York. The researchers analysed the results of the so-called Eotvos experiment, a famous experiment in physics. In 1922, Roland von Eotvos and colleagues in Budapest, Hungary, claimed to have confirmed Galileo’s results in a classic experiment in which measurements of objects of different weights showed that gravity acted equally on all of them. Eotvos had blamed small errors in his measurements on the limitations of his equipment. Dr Fischbach and his colleagues looked at those small errors and concluded that they were not errors but were instead discrepancies that the scientists now attribute to the hypercharge force. Four forces are now known in the universe: gravity, electromagnetism and two sub-atomic forces called the strong force and the weak force. The hypercharge force would be the fifth. Dr Fischbach noted that he is not the first to find evidence of such a force. Frank Stacey, of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, has during the last few years reported finding discrepancies in gravitational measurements. Dr Fischbach now explains those discrepancies as evidence of hypercharge force. “I myself think the evidence from all of the experiments is pretty convincing,” Dr Fischbach said. “But I agree that many, many experiments have to be done to check details and many theoretical analyses have to be done to support this.”

Some physicists who had not yet seen Dr Fischbach’s paper were sceptical about the result but Robert Dicke, of Princeton University, recognised as one of the world’s leading authorities on gravitation, said he found the report fairly convincing.