Speaker
Description
The weak equivalence principle is a basic assumption of physics. It has been tested multiple times throughout history, with the greatest improvement in accuracy being Loránd Eötvös’ measurements with a torsion balance at the beginning of the twentieth century. Decades later, however, a systematic error was found in his measurements, still unexplained today. In order to find an explanation, new efforts were made to replicate the measurement in the original way. During my work, I addressed the error estimation of Eötvös’ equations. For this, I went through the derivation, understanding nontrivial steps, and explored the neglected terms and approximations. While doing so, I realised that the final result can not only be calculated from the final approximating formula, but also from the more accurate intermediate formulas. Therefore, I compared the results obtained from these with those from the final equations. I performed the calculations for multiple measurements and used the standard deviation as the error. Although the results of different calculations were of the same order of magnitude, their values were different. This can be caused by the different assumptions of different methods.