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:
“Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the work of the world.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I do not want to be covetous, but I think I speak the minds of many a wife and mother when I say I would willingly work as hard as possible all day and all night, if I might be sure of a small profit, but have worked hard for twenty-five years and have never known what it was to receive a financial compensation and to have what was really my own.”
—Emma Watrous, U.S. inventor. As quoted in Feminine Ingenuity, ch. 8, by Anne L. MacDonald (1992)
“You do not become a “dissident” just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)