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:
“Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.”
—Elie Wiesel (b. 1928)
“America lives in the heart of every man everywhere who wishes to find a region where he will be free to work out his destiny as he chooses.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“I knew that my vocation was found. I had received the call, and having done so, I was sure my work would be assigned me. Of some things we feel quite certain. Inside there is a click, a kind of bell that strikes, when the hands of our destiny meet at the meridian hour.”
—Amelia E. Barr (1831–1919)