Work
He performed a long series of very sensitive gravity shielding experiments from 1918 to 1922, which have never been reproduced. Majorana's experiments determined that mercury or lead around a suspended lead sphere acted as a screen and slightly decreased the Earth's gravitational pull. No attempts have been made to reproduce his results using the same experimental techniques. Other researchers have concluded from other data that if gravitational absorption does exist it must be at least five orders of magnitude smaller than Majorana's experiments suggest.
Critical of Albert Einstein's relativity theory, he tried to disprove Einstein’s postulate on the constancy of the speed of light, but he failed and therefore his experiments confirmed Einstein's postulate. Majorana also confirmed Isaac Newton’s law of universal gravitation to high precision.
His later work at Bologna was influenced by correspondence with his nephew Ettore Majorana (1906–1938), a great physicist in his own right.
Read more about this topic: Quirino Majorana
Famous quotes containing the word work:
“Many women who used to be full-time mothers are discovering that outside work gives them friends, challenges, variety, money, independence; it makes them feel better about themselves, and therefore lets them be better parents.”
—Wendy Coppedge Sanford. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, introduction (1978)
““Which is more important to you, your field or your children?” the department head asked. She replied, “That’s like asking me if I could walk better if you amputated my right leg or my left leg.””
—Anonymous Parent. As quoted in Women and the Work Family Dilemma, by Deborah J. Swiss and Judith P. Walker, ch. 2 (1993)
“Many a reformer perishes in his removal of rubbish,—and that makes the offensiveness of the class. They are partial; they are not equal to the work they pretend. They lose their way; in the assault on the kingdom of darkness, they expend all their energy on some accidental evil, and lose their sanity and power of benefit.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)