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Equation 140 · Part 3 · The Clock That Comes Back Wrong by Exactly Its Mass

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ΔE/c2\Delta E/c^2
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What this part means

Capital delta attached to a quantity marks a difference between two values of that quantity; the article’s sign convention determines the order.

Its job in the formula

Capital delta attached to a quantity marks a difference between two values of that quantity; the article’s sign convention determines the order.

The passage around this formula

What remains genuinely open, and OBSERVED nowhere yet, is whether the composite-mass instance of this estimator survives contact with a real interferometer once every recoil, laser, and path term the field already knows how to compute is included in full. The thirty-year dispute between Müller, Peters, and Chu on one side and Wolf, Blanchet, Bordé, Reynaud, Salomon, and Cohen-Tannoudji and Sinha and Samuel on the other was not a disagreement about mathematics; both sides agreed on the interferometer phase formula. It was a disagreement about which piece of a correct formula is allowed to be called a measurement of mass. Roura’s and Di Pumpo and collaborators’ answer — a narrow, differential,…

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Learn the underlying idea

Addition combines quantities; subtraction measures the signed difference between them. Parentheses show what is combined before the rest of the expression is evaluated.

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The article lists its research sources here.