La relatividad aún reina...

Einstein’s equations underpin a host of real-world applications such as the global positioning satellites that make precise navigation and split-second financial transactions possible around the planet. They also elucidate several otherwise-inexplicable phenomena, including Mercury’s oddball orbit, as well as predict new ones, such as gravitational waves—ripples in spacetime that were only directly observed a century after general relativity’s debut. In test after test, whether here on Earth or in observations of the distant universe, the theory has emerged unscathed—a success so stunningly unshakeable it draws a certain breed of scientists like moths to a flame—each seeking to reveal cracks in Einstein’s edifice that could lead to the next breakthrough in physics.

Collett, a research fellow at the University of Portsmouth in England, is among them. “General relativity is so fundamental to the assumptions we make in our interpretation of cosmological and astrophysical data sets that we’d better be sure it’s right,” he says. With that mind-set, in 2015 Collett partnered with nine colleagues to perform the most sensitive experiment yet to test whether Einstein’s famed theory holds up at the scale of an entire galaxy. Their results, published June 21 in Science, reiterate Einstein’s theory still reigns supreme.
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For now, says Tommaso Treu, an expert in gravitational lensing at the University of California, Los Angeles, who is unaffiliated with Collett’s study, any scientists struggling to overturn the unfinished revolution that Einstein began in 1915 must remember that dismissing a time-tested, century-old theory would be an extraordinary achievement requiring equally extraordinary evidence. “Everyone would love to prove Einstein wrong,” Treu says. “There is no better way to be famous.”

That sentiment rings true for Collett, who says he had hoped the results would diverge from expectations set by general relativity. To that end, he is already working on a follow-up experiment, one using a different gravitational lens slightly farther away from Earth to test general relativity all over again.

“Overturning the consensus is usually very, very difficult at first—but usually pays off greatly,” Treu says.

Copiado de Einstein’s Greatest Theory Validated on a Galactic Scale.