← All parts of this equation

Equation 140 · Part 4 · The Clock That Comes Back Wrong by Exactly Its Mass

superscript

ΔE/c2\Delta E/c^2
superscript

What this part means

A raised number can be a power. When it is a label or bound, it selects a case or the upper limit of a sum; the formula’s structure distinguishes these uses.

Its job in the formula

A raised mark can be a power or an index. Its position and the surrounding notation determine which.

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,…

Read this part in the article →

Learn the underlying idea

An exponent tells how a base is used in multiplication. In x³, x is the base and 3 is the exponent: x³ = x × x × x.

Open the illustrated exponents: repeated multiplication and powers guide →

The article lists its research sources here.