Uncle Al presented a brief talk on the parity Eotvos experiment at the Denver American Physical Society meeting, Saturday 01 May,

http://www.aps.org/meet/APR04/about.cfm
2004 American Physical Society National Meeting, Denver.

http://www.aps.org/meet/APR04/baps/abs/S690006.html
The abstract
http://www.aps.org/meet/APR04/baps/tocD.html#SD9.006
The program
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/qz.pdf
The formal proposal (data not most recent)
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/eotvos.pdf
A huge pile of stuff with a few hundred clickable footnotes. The Devil lays in the details. Live with the unfinished part about Green's function. It's pinned tight with recently calculated data.

20 minutes after said talk's conclusion, the parity Eotvos experiment was entered into collaboration with a respected academic research group. We now sort out the details, quid pro quo.

WE ARE GOING TO DO IT. So far, so good.
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The balls will be fashioned from high grade single crystal cultured quartz, optically left-handed vs. right-handed. Fused silica is amorphous.

"Radiation-hardened" quartz is swept at 500 C by applied high voltage along the crystallographic c-axis. Impurity cations are replaced by protons and the crystal structure anneals out dislocations. When the ion current asymptotes flat, the slab is slowly cooled and the deposited planar electrodes are etched or ground off.

Sweeping quartz substantially lessens internal ionization when a burst of radiation passes. Oscillator crystals then maintain lock instead of burping out and recovering a few milliseconds later. We are not fabricating oscillators.

Removing dislocations is a good thing, blowing in protons for heavier atoms is not. We will talk with vendors. The small size of the balls, a centimeter diameter or so, won't include much structural fuzz in A- or B-grade quartz anyway. Naural quartz is typically C-grade and contaminated with aluminum.

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It's a delicate time. Before anybody does anything, all parties must reach a consensus and sign some paper.

We ARE going to look!

My analysis unknowingly paralleled their efforts. Asking whether objects of opposite chirality (parity is better - chirality along all coordinate axes) fall identically is not an exotic thought. How do you pin a calculable, defendable number on handedness?

It's a difficult project. A thesis would have to embrace Petitjean's mathematics, crystallography, and extraordinarily difficult C++ programming. No physics yet! Anybody who wished to calculate to larger ball radii or smaller CHI intervals than we did will need teraflops supercomputer time and 128-bit precision. Aspects of the parallel software's execution definitely need rewrite if that is to e pursued.

The parity Eotvos experiment in alpha-quartz itself is idiot simple, and not overmuch expensive as these things go. They may do it out of discretionary funds. If it works, the rigorous explorations will be easily and heavily funded afterward.

For the audience... One can build an apparently perfect theory of gravitation vs. observation in two very different, wholly incompatible ways:

Postulate that all local test masses fall identically (Equivalence Principle). That immediately gets you General Relativity (Einstein; metric gravitation and spacetime curvature).

Ignore the Equivalence Princple and proceed. That gets you Weitzenböck; affine gravitation and spacetime torsion.

If you find two local bodies that fall differently in vacuum (acceleration or direction), General Relativity is wrong at the postulate level even if it is otherwise perfect in all its predictions (which it is. Gravity Probe B will work to spec). 400+ years of looking, since Galileo wondered about it and did tests with pendulums, show that everything falls identically to within one part in two trillion, difference/average. We have never looked at oppositely handed masses.

Left- versus right-handed quartz is calculated to be an extremal parity case. See if centimeter diameter spheres of each fall identically. Aside from the $million apparatus that does the work, that is the whole of it. The full experiment requires three months of continuous running to build statistical validity. If the universe is modestly cooperative with the parity Eotvos experiment, a defendable signal will be accumulated in the first 24 hours.

May we live in exciting times.

--
Uncle Al
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/qz.pdf
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/eotvos.htm
(Do something naughty to physics)